Maria Deutscher
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Microsoft recruits Qualcomm to help it catch up in the voice assistant market
Voice assistants such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa are taking on an increasingly central role in the tech market. In a bid to catch up with the competition, Microsoft Corp. today announced several new alliances meant to widen the adoption of its rivaling Cortana bot. The company is counting on the partnerships to achieve that by ...
Salesforce acquires decentralized database maker Attic Labs
While most of the tech industry’s attention was focused on the Consumer Electronics Show Monday, a startup called Attic Labs Inc. quietly made a big announcement: It has been bought by Salesforce.com Inc. in the cloud giant’s first acquisition of the year. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, it’s reasonable to assume ...
Iconiq Capital co-leads $58M round into data governance provider Collibra
Collibra Corp.’s effort to streamline the way enterprises manage their vast troves of information has received a big boost from the venture capital community. The data governance provider today announced the completion of a $58 million investment, its fourth round so far, led by Battery Ventures and Iconiq Capital. The latter fund is notable for managing money on behalf of ...
Nvidia unveils new self-driving car tech, Uber partnership at CES
As the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show kicked off late Sunday, Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang (pictured) took the stage to announce a slew of updates from the chipmaker’s autonomous vehicle group. The main highlight was the introduction of two new software platforms designed to help automakers provide a richer user experience inside self-driving cars. ...
IBM and Comcast to back a new blockchain startup fund
IBM Corp. and Comcast Corp. may hail from two vastly different parts of the technology world, but they apparently share a common interest in blockchain software. Bloomberg reported today that the two companies will become the biggest backers of a new fund focused on early-stage blockchain startups. The investment firm, MState, is led by venture ...
With new developer tools, Amazon is bringing Alexa to wearables
Amazon.com Inc. this morning announced a new set of development tools aimed at paving the way for Alexa to be brought to yet another major product category: wearables. Called the Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit, the bundle is a lightweight alternative to the Device Software Development Kit that the online retailer introduced last year. Amazon said it can ...
Google’s new ‘Preemptible GPUs’ offer a cheaper way to run AI in the cloud
Google LLC is introducing what it says is a more affordable way for organizations to run artificial intelligence projects in the public cloud. The company today bolstered its infrastructure-as-a-service platform with the addition of Preemptible GPUs, which are on-demand graphics processing units for running machine learning workloads. Companies can choose between Nvidia Corp.’s K80 and ...
WordPress hosting provider WP Engine lands $250M round led by Silver Lake
Every day, 5 percent of Internet users visit at least one website powered by WP Engine Inc., a hosting provider that today announced that it has completed a $250 million funding round to capture an even bigger slice of the online landscape. The investment in the Austin-based company came from Silver Lake, the prominent private equity ...
Gartner: Samsung overtakes Intel as the world’s top semiconductor maker
Intel Corp.’s more than two-decade streak as the largest semiconductor maker in the world has ended, according to a preliminary market estimate by Gartner Inc. released today. The research firm reports that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. secured the top spot in 2017 by taking 14.6 percent of the market. That amounted to over $61 billion in ...
Report: Spotify quietly files paperwork for a direct public offering
Spotify Ltd. has taken a big step forward in its unusual, and potentially risky, journey to becoming a publicly traded company. That’s according to a new report today in Axios, which cited several sources as saying the music streaming giant had confidentially filed documents for a stock market debut last month. Companies that generate annual revenues of less ...