Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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Astro is an AI-powered email client with big dreams
If there’s one source of technological frustration at work, it’s email. Getting a job done often still relies on sending chains of messages back and forth to the extent that it would be nice to have an assistant to help deal with it all.That’s the idea behind Astro, a new app that applies artificial intelligence to email in an attempt to make life easier for its users. Its marquee feature is Astrobot, a chatbot powered by machine learning that’s designed to keep users abreast of what’s important in their inbox.For example, Astrobot will read through users’ emails and notify them when they’ve been asked important questions. It can also be used to unsubscribe from emails, clean out a user’s inbox and more. That functionality sits on top of a solid, modern email client, which entered public beta on Mac and iOS Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google touts its enterprise chops in cloud keynote
Enterprises: Google wants you. That's the message coming out of the first keynote address at the company’s Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The tech titan's cloud team really wants enterprises to know that it's serious about serving their needs.Diane Greene, the senior vice president of Google Cloud, showcased a suite of partnerships and customer announcements that provided concrete results for the enterprise-focused strategy that Greene kicked off when she joined Google in 2015.Google hasn't always focused on the enterprise. The announcements showcased on Wednesday show that the company's initiatives to make its G Suite productivity service and public cloud platform offerings have been resonating with customers it may not have reached in the past.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how Microsoft has rethought its approach to email
Two years ago, Microsoft made a massive shift in the way it approached the email market. In January 2015, the company launched Outlook for iOS and Android, free professional-grade email apps for two platforms that Microsoft previously underserved in that regard.Outlook for iOS and its Android sibling were special, because they supported Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud email, in addition to Microsoft’s Outlook.com, Office 365 and Exchange email offerings. While connecting to third party email providers isn't new for Outlook, offering one-click support for different email providers at launch sent a message that this wouldn't be locked to the Microsoft ecosystem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2017 hits general availability
Microsoft’s tools for developers hit another milestone Tuesday, when the company made Visual Studio 2017 generally available. As the name implies, this is the next major release of Microsoft’s integrated development environment. It’s aimed at providing tools for developers to create modern apps for the cloud, mobile platforms and more. The software gained a Xamarin Forms previewer that lets users view a mobile user interface for iOS and Android apps as they’re writing XAML, an XML-based markup language developed by Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s Slack competitor is coming March 14
Microsoft’s entry into the modern workplace chat app market will be generally available in a week. The company announced Tuesday it will be marking the occasion with a webcast to discuss what’s new since the service was announced last year.The Teams product is Microsoft’s answer to group chat apps like Slack and HipChat. The service provides Office 365 customers with shared workspaces they can use to discuss work with one another. It connects with Office 365 to let users collaborate on notes, documents, spreadsheets, and more while discussing work in the same place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce launches custom image recognition as Einstein goes GA
Salesforce is getting into the computer vision business with a new tool designed to let users easily train a custom image recognition system.Einstein Vision, as it’s known, allows users to upload sets of images and classify them in a series of categories. After that, the system will create a recognizer based on machine learning technology that will identify future images fed into it.While Salesforce customers will have to wait a couple weeks before Vision is generally available, the company announced Tuesday that other Einstein features based on machine learning techniques are live.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM-Salesforce deal will bring Watson data into applications
Watson and Einstein are teaming up, and IBM and Salesforce hope the pairing proves as smart as it sounds. The two companies are working together to bring information from IBM systems into Salesforce’s products through a series of integrations announced Monday.As part of the partnership, joint customers will be able to combine Watson's insights from their unstructured data with Einstein's insights about information stored with Salesforce. That comes alongside other integrations that bring weather and application data into Salesforce.Both Salesforce and IBM have massive customer bases that could be reached by this partnership. It's an interesting deal given IBM's historic strength in on-premises computing and Salesforce's cloud focus. Each tech titan has been focused on machine intelligence, so collaborating makes sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Okta acquires Stormpath to boost its identity services for developers
Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities.Stormpath offered developers a set of tools for managing user logins for their apps. Rather than building a login system from scratch, developers could call the Stormpath API and have the company take care of it for them. Frederic Kerrest, Okta’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, said that the acquisition should help his company build self-service capabilities for developers.While Okta is probably best known for its identity and access management products aimed at businesses’ internal use, the company also operates a developer platform aimed at helping app developers handle user identity. Kerrest said that the developer capabilities are a fast-growing part of Okta’s business, but that its functionality could use some help. That’s where this acquisition comes in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Okta acquires Stormpath to boost its identity services for developers
Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities.Stormpath offered developers a set of tools for managing user logins for their apps. Rather than building a login system from scratch, developers could call the Stormpath API and have the company take care of it for them. Frederic Kerrest, Okta’s co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, said that the acquisition should help his company build self-service capabilities for developers.While Okta is probably best known for its identity and access management products aimed at businesses’ internal use, the company also operates a developer platform aimed at helping app developers handle user identity. Kerrest said that the developer capabilities are a fast-growing part of Okta’s business, but that its functionality could use some help. That’s where this acquisition comes in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AWS says a typo caused the massive S3 failure this week
Everyone makes mistakes. But working at Amazon Web Services means an incorrectly entered input can lead to a massive outage that cripples popular websites and services. That's apparently what happened earlier this week, when the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in the provider's Northern Virginia region experienced an 11-hour system failure.Other Amazon services in the US-EAST-1 region that rely on S3, like Elastic Block Store, Lambda, and the new instance launch for the Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offering were all impacted by the outage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s budget Windows VR headsets roll out to developers soon
A lucky few developers will be able to get their hands on a low-cost Windows virtual reality headset starting this month. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset will start rolling out to a handpicked batch of software makers starting the end of March, with more coming later.This marks the first release of a Windows Mixed Reality headset, which Microsoft first previewed last year. The headsets are supposed to stand out from the crowd because of a lower price and their support for "inside-out" tracking that uses sensors on the device to determine a user's position, rather than relying on external trackers to gather that information. That's why Microsoft is calling them mixed reality headsets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Acer’s Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish
Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality headset Wednesday, and an early look at a prototype version of the hardware shows promise, along with room for improvement.The Acer Mixed Reality Development Edition headset will start rolling out to developers later this month, but Microsoft offered a demo of a pre-release prototype during the Game Developers Conference this week.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish
The first Windows Mixed Reality headsets will start shipping to developers later this month, as Microsoft works to distribute the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset to a handpicked group of software makers.Microsoft offered me an early look at one of its internal prototypes, which shared a number of similarities with Acer’s hardware in terms of design and overall feature set. It wasn’t identical to the final hardware, but was built to roughly illustrate some of the capabilities users should expect. Here are my first impressions.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Azure Stack’s third technical preview arrives
Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud system, is getting close to release. On Wednesday, the tech giant unveiled the third major public beta for customers that want to test it out.The new release brings a handful of additional capabilities for users to test, like support for Azure D-Series virtual machine sizes and deployment with ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) to support systems that don’t have constant connections to Azure. Technical Preview 3, as this release is known in Microsoft parlance, will get a handful of other features over the coming months, including support for Azure Functions and Active Directory multi-tenancy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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‘Meet’ Google’s new videoconferencing service for the enterprise
Google appears to have accidentally revealed its new group videoconferencing service for businesses on Tuesday, a week before a big user conference. The service, called Meet, appears to be its offering for businesses that want to do group meetings over the Internet. According to a saved iOS App Store listing captured by AppAnnie, it will support high-definition video meetings with up to 30 participants. That’s an upgrade over the company’s existing Hangouts instant messaging and video calling service, which only allows meetings of up to 10 people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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HTC’s Netflix-esque VR subscription costs $6.99 per month
HTC is giving users of its Vive virtual reality headset access to a Netflix-like subscription service. Everyone who currently owns a Vive will get a free trial for a month, and the service will cost US $6.99 a month thereafter.For that price, users will be able to pick out five virtual reality apps at the start of each month, including games and other interactive experiences. The service will be available in a "couple weeks," Rickard Steiber, the company’s senior vice president for virtual reality said during an interview at the Game Developers Conference Monday.One benefit to consumers is that the subscription will give users an affordable way to try out titles every month, without requiring them to commit to a full retail purchase. The company had 14,000 people say they were interested in such a subscription after HTC announced it at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, Steiber said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AI scheduling startup launches subscription for businesses
Setting up meetings can be a pain, since they often require folks to send emails back and forth figuring out a time before finally sending off a calendar invitation to block everyone’s schedule. A New York startup called x.ai wants to simplify that with a helpful bot, and they just launched a product aimed at serving businesses.The service provides users with access to x.ai’s assistant, which can go by Andrew or Amy Ingram, to automatically set up meetings with people inside a company and help schedule time with folks who work elsewhere. It’s an extension of the company’s existing service, which is built for individuals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s new AI aims to end abusive online comments using ‘Perspective’
The internet is a tough place to have a conversation. Abuse has driven celebrities and ordinary folks from social media platforms that are ill-equipped to deal with it, and some publishers have switched off comment sections.That’s why Google and Jigsaw (an early stage incubator at Google parent company Alphabet) are working on a project called Perspective. It uses artificial intelligence to try to identify toxic comments, with an aim of reducing them. The Perspective API released Thursday will provide developers with a score of how likely users are to perceive a comment as toxic. In turn, that score could be used to develop features like automatic post filtering or to provide users with feedback about what they're writing before they submit it for publication. Starting on Thursday, developers can request access to Perspective's API for use in projects they're working on, and Jigsaw will approve them on a rolling basis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Redfin CTO says machine learning needs human help
Machine learning can automate the handling of huge troves of data to help companies make and save money. However, they’re not without pitfalls, as the real estate tech company Redfin learned.As Redfin began building its own machine-learning capabilities, it ran into a problem: Employees weren't using them. Bridget Frey, the firm’s CTO, said in an interview that there was a key reason for that: At first, Redfin didn't leave room in these systems for the real estate agents who were supposed to use them to make modifications.For example, a Listings Matchmaker feature generated a list of personalized recommendations for homebuyers, based on their interests. In its initial iteration, agents weren’t able to add recommendations they thought would be useful.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Kubernetes is now generally available on Azure Container Service
Microsoft and Google don’t get along all that often, but they do agree on using Kubernetes for cloud container orchestration.Kubernetes is generally available for use with Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s managed cloud container hosting offering, as of Tuesday. ACS support for Kubernetes comes along with the service’s existing support for the Apache Mesos-based DC/OS and Docker Swarm.Containers provide an isolated, portable and consistent runtime for applications that’s particularly well-suited to deployment in a cloud environment. Orchestrators like Kubernetes help manage groups of containers. Many cloud providers like Microsoft offer services that help simplify the management of that whole system even further. ACS is one such service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here