Thursday September 19, 2024

Flexport’s epic plan to build a freight empire with its $110M raise

 “We’re actually out here trying to create value, not just give venture capital money away” says Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. “It’s counterintuitive. The more the business works, the more cash it needs.” That’s because Flexport doesn’t ship bits, it ships atoms. Lots of them. Flexport is a freight forwarding logistics network. If you produce a… […]

Spiro raises $3M to build CRM tools for businesses that don’t like CRM

 Spiro aims to sell CRM software to businesses that have been avoiding traditional CRM products. CEO Adam Honig told me that he and his co-founders originally set out to build artificial intelligence products that could assist with CRM. But then they started hearing from companies that weren’t using any CRM at all. So the team […]

Butterfly nabs $2.4M seed round to improve managers with targeted tips

 One of life’s puzzles that eludes me most is how a person could enjoy corporate trainings enough to spend their time designing and running them. Perhaps only with disdain for the status quo can a startup create something that people not only don’t hate, but find helpful. The idea for Butterfly originated from poor experiences […]

Facebook quietly launches Mac and PC Workplace Chat apps with screen share

 TechCrunch has discovered that Facebook has stealthily launched official desktop PC and Mac chat apps with screen sharing — two features users have been begging for. Right now, they’re only available for Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration software that competes with Slack and other business apps. But users would surely enjoy if the consumer Messenger app […]

Facebook quietly launches Mac and PC Workplace Chat apps with screen share

 TechCrunch has discovered that Facebook has stealthily launched official desktop PC and Mac chat apps with screen sharing — two features users have been begging for. Right now, they’re only available for Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration software that competes with Slack and other business apps. But users would surely enjoy if the consumer Messenger app […]

Google Compute Engine goes a little crazy with up to 96 CPU cores and 624 GB of memory

 If you’ve got a resource-hungry app, Google Compute Engine’s latest offering has you covered. It lets you dial up to 96 CPUs and an other-worldly 624 GB of memory. Remember Bill Gates asking who would ever need more than 64K of memory. He obviously didn’t see this coming. If you think that’s a lot, you […]

Splunk is latest company to take exception to Larry Ellison’s slams at Oracle OpenWorld

 Larry Ellison was at it again yesterday, making friends, influencing people and pissing off rivals. It was AWS in the keynote earlier in the week. Yesterday, it was Splunk, a seemingly innocuous logging software company, which somehow fell into Ellison’s marketing cross-hairs. The company took serious exception. Splunk is best known for logging all events […]

Rasa Core kicks up the context for chatbots

 Context is everything when dealing with dialog systems. We humans take for granted how complex even our simplest conversations are. That’s part of the reason why dialog systems can’t live up to their human counterparts. But with an interactive learning approach and some open source love, Berlin-based Rasa is hoping to help enterprises solve their […]

Who are you? Google Cloud releases custom identity roles Beta

 Figuring out who can access services across a platform as varied as Google Cloud can be a challenge for IT administrators. Google has done a lot of the work for you with a set of fairly granular pre-defined roles, but recognizing that canned roles won’t suit everyone’s needs, the company announced a Beta of custom […]

Elements, Stripe’s new check-out toolkit, aims to boost e-commerce sales completions

 Stripe, the payments startup is now valued at $9 billion, is today taking the wraps off its latest effort to help its customers — which now number in the hundreds of thousands, and include companies like Lyft, Salesforce, Facebook, Deliveroo, and the U.K. government — generate more transactions, and thus greater returns for Stripe itself. […]