Enterprise

As large enterprises grapple with how to incorporate AI into their platforms and processes, they have encountered a problem: Generative AI needs to have memory and its training data must be constantly updated for it to have any practical use. This area is now called ‘Live AI’ and a number of startups are working in

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will

South Korean prosecutors sought a five-year prison sentence and a 500 million KRW fine, equivalent to $375,000, for Samsung Electronics chief Jay Y. Lee at an appeals court on Monday. The appeals case comes 10 months after Lee and 13 former Samsung executives were originally acquitted of manipulating stock prices and committing accounting fraud in

Anthropic is proposing a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides. Called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short, Anthropic says the standard, which it open sourced today, could help AI models produce better, more relevant responses to queries. MCP lets models — any models, not just Anthropic’s —

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) biggest conference of the year is around the corner, and all signs point to it being an eventful one. AWS re:Invent 2024 kicks off in Las Vegas on Sunday, with sessions scheduled to run through December 6. A keynote address featuring AWS CEO Matt Garman will take place December 3, starting

Amazon Japan has said it will collaborate with Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) after the watchdog conducted an on-site inspection related to suspected violations of anti-monopoly laws. The e-commerce giant is under suspicion of inappropriately urging vendors to lower their prices on its online shopping platform in return for better product placement, as first reported

In June, Google announced the Google Developer Program, a free program to give devs access to resources designed to help them build applications using Google services. Now that “millions” of devs have signed up (according to Google), the company is introducing a second, paid tier to commercialize the program. On Monday, Google launched the Google

Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology company Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million. The transaction prices Brightcove at $4.45 per share, translating to a 90% premium on its 60-day average. Founded out of Boston in 2004, Brightcove develops

As companies’ server infrastructure grows, they often run into challenges keeping tabs on the health of their various assets, like cloud instances and local data centers. Monitoring tools, also known as observability tools, can help — but lots of tools quickly becomes overwhelming. According to one survey, seven in 10 organizations believe that monitoring is

Insurance has been fertile ground for artificial intelligence innovation, working as it does at the nexus of giant datasets, risk assessment, predictive analytics, fintech, and customer service. Federato, a startup riding that momentum, has now raised $40 million to expand its business: an AI-powered underwriting platform to help insurers better understand and respond to risk. 

WordPress.com owner Automattic has added another company to its portfolio of online content creation tools and services with its acquisition of Grammarly competitor, Harper. Although it’s competing in the same space as the popular grammar checker used by many online writers, Harper’s tool is aimed at developers, open source, and works to maintain privacy by

Last-mile delivery, the very last step of the delivery process, is a common pain point for companies. According to one survey, nearly 90% of retailers struggle with their last-mile delivery operations, either because of technical issues, costs, or a combination of both. Bill and Lisa Catania understand this well. The husband-and-wife team founded OneRail, a

Belgium-based Odoo decided to use open source tools as a way to attack the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, going up against giants like SAP. Fast-forward a couple of decades and it’s now picking up €500 million in secondary investment — or around $527 million at current exchange rates — led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s

The open source funding problem is very real, but a slew of initiatives have emerged of late, with startups, corporations, and venture capitalists launching various programs to support some of the most critical projects via equity-free financing. Today it’s GitHub’s turn, launching the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund with an initial commitment of $1.25 million

Meta hired Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta’s apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch. “I’m thrilled to share today that

Kubernetes, the open-source system that helps manage containerized applications (software packages that run in isolated environments), long ago breached the mainstream. According to one recent poll, 60% of organizations have adopted Kubernetes, and Gartner estimates that more than 90% of all enterprises could run Kubernetes in production by 2026. But Kubernetes itself remains difficult to

The Department of Justice is reportedly pushing to force Google to spin off its Chrome browser business. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports that the Justice Department is also planning to recommend to a federal judge that Google face antitrust requirements related to AI and its Android mobile operating system. The enforcement actions are the

People prefer texts over phone calls — especially when it’s a company on the other side. According to one survey, two-thirds of consumers say they’d switch to a company that offered texting as a contact option. With the text-message marketing industry expected to grow to $12.6 billion by 2025, it’s not surprising that vendors like

Nokia, once the world’s biggest mobile phone company but now mainly a provider of infrastructure and services to telecoms carriers, has made an acquisition in its bid to be a bridge between the worlds of tech and telecoms. It’s acquiring Rapid, formerly known as RapidAPI, a startup that operates an API marketplace. Nokia will be

With the advent of flexible workspaces, companies are increasingly adopting smartphone-based authentication to let employees enter and leave. In a recent poll, nearly two in five firms said they’re letting staff use their phones to access office buildings. The boon has benefited vendors like SwiftConnect, which sells a platform for managing access to physical offices. Chip

More consolidation is afoot in the world of cybersecurity. Bitsight, a cybersecurity startup last valued at $2.4 billion when ratings firm Moody’s took a stake in the business and became its largest shareholder in 2021, is acquiring Cybersixgill for $115 million. Boston-based Bitsight’s focus is cyber risk management. It works with enterprises to assess their

If you’re an hourly worker, the number of go-to options you have for finding new jobs is shrinking a little. JobGet, a Boston-based startup that operates an hourly job-hunting site with social features built in, à la LinkedIn, is acquiring Snagajob, one of its rivals in the U.S. market. JobGet claims this will make it

The FTC is reportedly readying an investigation into whether Microsoft used anti-competitive tactics to maintain a dominant position in the cloud market. According to Financial Times, the agency is looking into allegations that Microsoft imposed punitive licensing agreements to prevent customers from moving data off its platforms. Sources told FT that the FTC is also

Bob Wise, the CEO of Heroku, Salesforce’s cloud platform as a service, has left. A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the news to TechCrunch in a statement via email. “Bob Wise has left Salesforce for his next career move,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate all that Bob has done for Salesforce and Heroku and we wish him

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the next big thing for enterprise software, particularly Salesforce, is AI agents — or software bots that will do limited tasks on their own taking those tasks off of human workers.  “What if your workforce had no limits? Now, that is a question we could not ask in the last

AMD has confirmed that it’s laying off 4% of its workforce to focus on “large growth opportunities.” It’s unclear how many workers have been impacted by the reduction — and which divisions. AMD had roughly 26,000 employees as of last year, according to the company’s annual 10-K filing. Four percent would translate to approximately 1,000.

Prelude is a relatively new French startup that focuses on SMS verification; it’s announcing new funding from Singular and Seedcamp on Wednesday. The two founders met when they were working for Zenly, a popular location-sharing app with tens of millions of users that was acquired by Snap (and later shut down). While you might not

Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to become a top-level project at the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess. To graduate to this level, a project has to be

It was 2020, and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were beyond frustrated with Apache Kafka. The tool for handling real-time data streams simply couldn’t keep up with the trio’s engineering needs — particularly during the pandemic, when companies were rushing to embrace cloud services. “Many companies were finding it difficult to scale their

A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms. Last year, Bloomberg launched its FOSS (free and open source software) fund, committing up to $90,000 per year to various projects. And in October, Indian financial services company Zerodha launched