Spotify has been working on building out its podcast business, and now offers a large catalog of shows (including our own Original Content, which you should definitely check out). Today, it’s debuting a new “multimedia format” that adds visual elements to podcasts (as well as audiobooks, news bites, and other audio, but for the sake […]
Ofer Schreiber is a partner at YL Ventures. More posts by this contributor: Iren Reznikov Contributor Iren Reznikov is an analyst for YL Ventures. More posts by this contributor: The Equifax breach, WannaCry, NotPetya, the NSA leak, and many more cyber incidents – 2017 was certainly a busy year for hackers, illustrating yet again just […]
Cortana gets no respect. Microsoft’s smart assistant is actually pretty solid, all things told, but it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. Maybe it’s a problem of marketing —the company was quick to point at Build in May that its smart assistant now has 141 million monthly users. […]
Microsoft-owned VoIP and messaging platform Skype has long been criticized for lacking end-to-end encryption. Which means Skype communications are not protected by a zero access architecture — and the company could be leaned on to provide authorities with your decrypted content data, for example. It’s also previously been shown accessing links sent via the platform. […]
Kohler, a name you may recognize from the faucet, or commercials about a faucet, is delivering a new line of smart bathroom and kitchen appliances called Kohler Konnect. Because why not? With the help of Alexa, these appliances can be given various voice commands to perform specific tasks. The line includes a shower, a bathtub, […]
In a world shifting to the cloud, Microsoft has carved out a place trying to help companies caught between two worlds — on-prem legacy solutions and the public and private cloud. To help further that hybrid mission, the company announced it was acquiring Avere Systems today for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft describes Avere as “a […]
African tech in 2017 was about the normalization of market events mostly absent even a decade ago. There were acquisitions, multiple investment rounds, lots of expansion, big strategic partnerships and some surprise failures. Africa is fast becoming home to a dynamic tech sector. Here’s a snapshot of the news that shaped that transition over the […]
Microsoft’s in a weird spot with Cortana. The company’s smart assistant is deployed on countless PCs, by way of Windows 10, but it’s constantly playing second fiddle to the likes of Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. That’s in no small part because that the company hasn’t done a great job moving beyond the desktop and […]
Several cloud vendors began responding to the chip kernel vulnerability that has the industry reeling today. Each Infrastructure as a Service vendor clearly has a stake here because each one is selling CPU cycles on their platforms. TechCrunch sent a request for comment to six major cloud vendors, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Rackspace and […]
Earlier this year, Microsoft shut down Photosynth, its service for stitching multiple images into panoramas and semi-3D models. When it launched in 2008, the service was extremely impressive, but it never quite caught on. Still, it had its fans — and now Microsoft is bringing it back in the form of a new feature in […]