Sunday December 22, 2024

Graphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activity

 While some of the largest chip manufacturers are looking to shift their focus onto the GPU for their biggest machine learnings, there’s a blooming ecosystem of new chip startups looking to rethink the way processing for AI works That includes a European-based startup called Graphcore, which said today that it has raised $50 million in […]

Salesforce to offer more customized AI with myEinstein

 It’s been just over a year since Salesforce introduced Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence technologies that are designed to underlie and enhance the Salesforce product set. Today, at Dreamforce, the company’s enormous customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco, it announced myEinstein, a package of tools it created to help developers and Salesforce… […]

Proofpoint acquires Cloudmark for $110M in cybersecurity consolidation play

 As malicious groups continue to become more sophisticated in their hacking techniques, cybersecurity efforts are attempting to expand in their reach, and that is leading to some consolidation in the field. Today, cybersecurity firm Proofpoint — which provides SaaS products to protect businesses’ email, social media and other services — announced that it would pay […]

Sourceress raises $3.5M to find candidates that managers want without realizing it

 When a company is looking for a candidate for an open role, the hiring manager is probably going to rattle off a bunch of qualifications that they’re looking for to a recruiter — and Kanjun Qiu says recruiters will probably just run with that when the manager’s requirements might not actually be so rigid. It’s […]

Dreamforce lacks the drama this year

 Dreamforce took place this week in San Francisco, that magical gathering of over more than 150,000 Salesforce faithful that happens every fall. While I didn’t attend in person this time, I was able to get the gist of what was going on through a combination of pre-briefs and live streams. Of course, nothing can pass […]

IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service

 IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months. A qubit is a single unit of quantum information. The company also […]

The OpenStack Foundation starts to look at projects beyond OpenStack

 Over the last few years, we’ve seen the launch of a number of open source foundations like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation and others. Most of these run under the Linux Foundation, but one of the largest open source foundation outside of that group’s orbit is the OpenStack Foundation, which — […]

Elastic acquires search startup Swiftype

 Swiftype isn’t just a startup that we write about — we also use the technology to provide site search on TechCrunch itself. Now it’s being acquired by Elastic, the company behind the open source technology Elasticsearch. It turns out the two companies are already connected, because Swiftype uses Elasticsearch for indexing and storing its search […]

Conversive helps businesses build the virtual equivalent of face-to-face conversations

 If you’ve ever interacted with a chatbot and felt like there was just something missing, the founders of a new startup called Conversive think they know the missing element — face-to-face interaction. And that, essentially, is what they’re trying to enable with their technology. Conversive customers can create a character (animated or recorded human) to […]

New tools could help prevent Amazon S3 data leaks

 If you do a search for Amazon S3 breaches due to customer error of leaving the data unencrypted, you’ll see a long list that includes a DoD contractor, Verizon (the owner of this publication) and Accenture, among the more high profile examples. Today, AWS announced a new set of five tools designed to protect customers […]