Mobile Technology Science / News

Say this for the French: They manage to keep their sense of humor in the face of a crisis. First, a massive butter shortage has swept the country this fall. Now, much of the country has woken up to find itself with limited internet, thanks to a power outage that has kneecapped the country’s largest […]

Salesforce Research unveiled a new technique today that’s supposed to speed up machine translation using AI by doing away with one of the historical limitations of those systems. Instead of translating word by word, the system will now generate whole sentences at once. The approach massively accelerates the process of machine translation compared to the […]

Amazon Web Services announced today that its latest high-performance cloud virtual machines are generally available for customers. That means businesses will be able to spin up C5 instances in the cloud that are built to handle applications requiring large amounts of compute capacity. For example, the new instances will be well-suited to applications like video […]

Google and Salesforce announced a massive strategic partnership today that’s aimed at driving value across their mutual customers. As part of the deal, Salesforce plans to use Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a preferred partner to power the tech titan’s international expansion. Google, for its part, will use Salesforce as its preferred CRM provider for […]

(Reuters) — Amazon is cutting prices of products from third-party sellers on its website, moving beyond its more typical method of discounts on items it sells directly. The “discount provided by Amazon” applies to products including board games and technological gadgets offered by other merchants as the holiday season approaches. The retailer has been trying […]

GUEST: We’re facing the end of the cloud. It’s a bold statement, I know, and maybe it even sounds a little mad. But bear with me. The conventional wisdom about running server applications, be it web apps or mobile app backends, is that the future is in the cloud. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are adding layers […]

EXCLUSIVE: One issue Instagram faces as it continues to try and expand its userbase is how to reach folks who are in parts of the world without great internet access. That’s why the Facebook-owned company has turned to a New York-based team of engineers to help streamline and optimize its app for better compatibility with network […]

One of the most important things I have learned while reporting on AI is that systems built on machine learning may be able to beat humans, or approximate their results, but they can often fail in ways that humans never would, and with unintended consequences. Consider the tale of a Redditor who asked earlier this week whether […]

Testim.io builds software that helps businesses automatically test their websites to ensure they remain functional, and today the startup announced that it has raised a $6.5 million round of series A funding to propel its growth. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which brought Testim’s total sum of money raised to $8 million. The company’s other […]

IBM unveiled a product today that’s designed to help enterprises use open source technologies to bring a cloud deployment model to their private datacenters. Appropriately called Cloud Private, the system is designed to help businesses orchestrate modern applications on their existing infrastructure using Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, a pair of popular open source tools. It’s […]

Microsoft today announced that the confusingly-named Microsoft 365 Business has hit general availability worldwide. Aimed at small and medium-sized businesses with up to 300 employees, the offering is priced at $20 per user, per month. In July, Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365, a new set of commercial offerings to package, and for its partners to sell, […]

Reaction Commerce, an open source ecommerce platform aimed at online retailers, has raised $8.5 million in a series A round of funding led by Google’s venture capital arm, GV, with participation from CrossCut Ventures, Double M Partners, Joanne Wilson, and Female Founders Fund. Founded out of Santa Monica initially as Ongo Works back in 2013, Reaction […]

(Reuters) — Silicon Valley business software startup Zenefits and its cofounder Parker Conrad have been fined nearly $1 million by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a settlement over charges that they misled investors. Zenefits will pay a $450,000 penalty and Conrad, who resigned as the company’s chief executive in early 2016, […]

Amazon Web Services is the first cloud to launch new compute instances that allow developers to build applications that tap into Nvidia’s new generation of Volta GPUs. These GPUs are designed to provide high-performance acceleration for applications like AI computation. Companies are increasingly turning to machine learning to help propel their businesses, but building new models often […]

Google and Cisco today announced a partnership to provide their shared customers with a consistent environment for running applications in a hybrid cloud configuration. Their resulting offering will include support for applying the same networking and security policies across on-premises and cloud environments, for example, so that customers will be able to create a largely […]

(Reuters) — Amazon launched a cash payment service in Mexico on Tuesday, aiming to expand its customer base in a country where shoppers are wary of credit card fraud and often earn their living in paper currency. The strategy could also help it to win market share from rival Wal-Mart de Mexico, known as Walmex, […]

Datorama revealed today that its customers have deployed more than 100,000 bots to analyze information about their marketing outcomes, as part of the AI Innovation Showcase at VB Summit 2017. When people think about marketing, they think of Don Draper on TV,” said Nate Sandford, a solution architect and evangelist for Datorama. But today, marketing […]

When Cisco started working on a unified analytics platform, the company was more concerned with finding the right people to do the work than with the data they were using, Cisco’s vice president of strategy, Rajat Mishra, said at the VB Summit in Berkeley, California today. “I wish I could tell you we had a […]

Walmart.com is bigger than you might think. The site has 60 million items for sale, Walmart CTO Jeremy King said at the VB Summit in Berkeley, California today. That’s up from 700,000 items when he joined Walmart in 2011, and it doesn’t include Jet.com, the e-commerce site Walmart acquired last year. Online sales have also […]