IBM has made another acquisition to beef up Watson, a week after it announced a raft of new features and milestones for its artificial intelligence effort: it has acquired a business called Expert Personal Shopper (XPS), a platform, and bot, that holds conversations with people online to help figure out what they need to buy, and to help them buy it. XPS had originally been built by Fluid,… Read More
Hipchat, the workplace collaboration platform from Atlassian that competes against the likes of Slack, Yammer and (soon?) Skype Teams, is today announcing a new service that — figuratively and literally — speaks to a new way of using not just Hipchat, but another popular tech product, the Amazon Echo. The company is announcing a new integration called VoiceMyBot, which lets you… Read More
LinkedIn — the professionally-oriented social networking platform that’s being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion — has made a big play to build what it refers to as “the economic graph”: A place that can combine your profile with its own analytics and data trove to chart the bigger picture between you, your career, and how these fit into your industry and… Read More
The recent rush of allegations against countries like Russia and China and their possible roles against cyber attacks on countries like the U.S. have prompted a big move from the UK: the government said today that it plans to invest £1.9 billion ($2.3 billion) over the next five years in a new cyber defense strategy, called the National Cyber Security Strategy, to prepare for and fight… Read More
Music streaming continues to grow as a proportion of our recorded music consumption, with 47% of all recorded music revenues coming from streamed services in the U.S. in the first half of 2016, according to the RIAA. And in the wake of that wave of usage, we’re seeing the emergence of new startups trying to enhance the listening experience across all of them. Among them is a new… Read More
Logistics may be the name of the game when it comes to e-commerce, but the IPO market can still prove to be a fickle place for even the biggest players. Today, China’s ZTO Express, the company that provides shipping and delivery services to Alibaba among others, scored both a hit and a miss in its first day of trading as a public company. First, the company raised $1.4 billion in its… Read More
Microsoft expects to close its $26.2 billion acquisition by the end of this year — pending some final regulatory approvals — and so in light of that, today LinkedIn posted a very basic earnings report for Q3. It’s also skipping the customary analyst call and is no longer providing financial guidance for the coming quarter. Still, the company reported growth in its key… Read More
