Oculus is getting serious about monetizing VR for enterprise. The company has previously sold specific business versions of the headsets, but now they’re adding a pricey annual device-management subscription. Oculus Go for business starts at $599 (64 GB) and the enterprise Oculus Quest starts at $999 (128 GB). These fees include the first year of…
Month: April 2019
Facebook Messenger will get desktop apps, co-watching, emoji status
To win chat, Facebook Messenger must be as accessible as SMS, yet more entertaining than Snapchat. Today, Messenger pushes on both fronts with a series of announcements at Facebook’s F8 conference, including that it will launch Mac and PC desktop apps, a faster and smaller mobile app, simultaneous video co-watching and a revamped Friends tab,…
Docker looks to partners and packages to ease container implementation
Docker appears to be searching for ways to simplify the core value proposition of the company — creating, deploying and managing containers. While most would agree it has revolutionized software development, like many technology solutions, it takes a certain level of expertise and staffing to pull off. At DockerCon, the company’s customer conference taking place…
Docker updates focus on simplifying containerization for developers
Over the last five years, Docker has become synonymous with software containers, but that doesn’t mean every developer understands the technical details of building, managing and deploying them. At DockerCon this week, the company’s customer conference taking place in San Francisco, it announced new tools that have been designed to make it easier for developers,…
UiPath nabs $568M at a $7B valuation to bring robotic process automation to the front office
Companies are on the hunt for ways to reduce the time and money it costs their employees to perform repetitive tasks, so today a startup that has built a business to capitalize on this is announcing a huge round of funding to double down on the opportunity. UiPath — a robotic process automation startup originally…
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth on dueling open-source foundations
At the Open Infrastructure Summit, which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he…
Mirantis makes configuring on-premises clouds easier
Mirantis, the company you may still remember as one of the biggest players in the early days of OpenStack, launched an interesting new hosted SaSS service today that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy their on-premises clouds. The new Mirantis Model Designer, which is available for free, lets operators easily customize their…
With Kata Containers and Zuul, OpenStack graduates its first infrastructure projects
Over the course of the last year and a half, the OpenStack Foundation made the switch from purely focusing on the core OpenStack project to opening itself up to other infrastructure-related projects as well. The first two of these projects, Kata Containers and the Zuul project gating system, have now exited their pilot phase and…
Tray.io hauls in $37 million Series B to keep expanding enterprise automation tool
Tray.io, the startup that wants to put automated workflows within reach of line of business users, announced a $37 million Series B investment today. Spark Capital led the round with help from Meritech Capital, along with existing investors GGV Capital, True Ventures and Mosaic Ventures. Under the terms of the deal Spark’s Alex Clayton will…
Slack files to go public, reports $138.9M in losses on revenue of $400.6M
Slack has filed to go public via a direct listing. Similar to what Spotify did last year, this means that the company won’t have a traditional IPO, and will instead allow existing shareholders to sell their stock to investors. The company’s S-1 filing says it plans to make $100 million worth of shares available, but…
AWS expands cloud infrastructure offerings with new AMD EPYC-powered T3a instances
Amazon is always looking for ways to increase the options it offers developers in AWS, and to that end, today it announced a bunch of new AMD EPYC-powered T3a instances. These were originally announced at the end of last year at re:Invent, AWS’s annual customer conference. Today’s announcement is about making these chips generally available….
SalesLoft nabs $70M at $500M valuation for its sales engagement platform
Artificial intelligence and other tech for automating some of the more repetitive aspects of human jobs continues to be a growing category of software, and today a company that builds tools to address this need for salespeople has raised a tidy sum to grow its business. SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that has built a platform…
Gavin Piper 