Hangouts Chat, Google’s Slack competitor, comes out of beta

 Hangouts Chat, Google’s take on modern workplace communication, is now generally available and is becoming a core part of G Suite. Hangouts Chat was first announced at Google Cloud Next 2017, together with Hangouts Meet. While Meet went right into public availability, though, Chat went into an invite-only preview. Now, Google is rolling Chat out to…

OpenStack gets support for virtual GPUs and new container features

 OpenStack, the open source infrastructure project that aims to give enterprises the equivalent of AWS for the private clouds, today announced the launch of its 17th release, dubbed ‘Queens.’ After all of those releases, you’d think that there isn’t all that much new that the OpenStack community could add to the project, but just as…

Square’s bets beyond a register brought in $253M last year as it posts a largely positive fourth quarter

 Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash app — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on at a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to…

IBM Watson CTO Rob High on bias and other challenges in machine learning

 For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. “It’s a challenge, it’s a goal and there’s certainly reason to believe that it’s possible,” High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Read…

EnvKey wants to create a smarter place to store a company’s API keys and credentials

 If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application components. That’s a huge hassle, because often times it’s hard to know where they are stored, who…

Hunter2 wants to teach engineers to handle web app security with a hands-on approach

 When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure security engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it. That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for security engineers…

Here’s the latest update on the very spicy beef between two massive chipmakers

 Broadcom and Qualcomm, the former of which is trying to acquire the latter, are continuing to duke it out on their respective investor relations pages by issuing public statements to investors over how much drama there is over the pricing of this deal. Read More

The Dropbox IPO filing is here

 It’s official, the Dropbox IPO filing is here. Going public is a huge milestone for Dropbox and has been one of the most anticipated tech IPOs for several years now. The company has been around since 2007 and has raised over $600 million in funding. We knew that it had already filed confidentially, but the…

Customer service bot startup Agent IQ announces $6.3 million Series A led by Sierra Ventures

 If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy…

Indigo Fair raises $12M to connect wholesalers with smaller retail outlets with a smarter service

 Max Rhodes was walking around that weird little parklet in Hayes Valley in San Francisco after taking a break from a five-year stint at Square to figure out what he wanted to do next — and he kept seeing Square registers everywhere. It was spotting them over and over again in smaller retail shops dotted…

Feature Labs launches out of MIT to accelerate the development of machine learning algorithms

 Feature Labs, a startup with roots in research begun at MIT, officially launched today with a set of tools to help data scientists build machine learning algorithms more quickly. Co-founder and CEO Max Kantor says the company has developed a way to automate “feature engineering,” which is often a time consuming and manual process for…

Teampay raises $4m so you don’t have to steal your CEO’s credit card anymore

 Few problems are as much of a headache for the modern corporate worker as buying things on the company’s dime. Companies are loathe to hand out credit cards to everyone in the building, but they also want their employees to do your job without having to fill out six forms in triplicate to requisition a…