Symantec announced overnight it had purchased Blue Coat Systems for $4.65 billion with the hopes of creating an enterprise security juggernaut. As part of the deal, Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will take over the same role at Symantec. The company has been operating since April without one when Michael A. Brown stepped down. It was a stunning turn of events for Blue Coat, which was sold just… Read More
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These are strange days for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The (ostensibly) trade-only event draws immense attention, but it has long been fraying at the edges. Yet we’re here anyway because this year E3 comes at an auspicious time for technologies that could represent a major change to the industry: virtual and augmented reality. Read More
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Like a fly frozen in amber, the App Store’s fundamental deal has remained unmoving since its inception. As an enormous ecosystem swelled around it, crystalline structures of new rules and avenues of customer interaction have also grown — but not nearly fast enough for most developers. Read More
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When I walked into a conference room last Tuesday at the Cloud Identity Summit in New Orleans to interview Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand, it was my first chat with him since the company had been sold the week before for $600 million (as reported by The Information), a tidy exit for the 14 year old company.
I had questions, lots of questions. After all, in conversations with Durand and CFO… Read More
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I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Toronto and learned there’s more to this city than Drake calling it home and the recent successes of their professional sports teams. We made one investment there in 2015 and the experience — with the company specifically and the city generally — has been overwhelmingly positive. Indeed, the city has all the markings of a world-class… Read More
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Mobile phones have emerged as the dominant alternative payment method to cash for buying and selling goods and services in emerging markets. And with a service akin to alternative payment providers like M-Pesa and Pagatech in Africa and a slew of alternative payment platforms in Southeast Asia, Tapp’s technology is one that the region understands well. Read More
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About two years ago, Pinterest launched a different flavor of search engine called Guided Search. Instead of relying on deep data on the user, it would create a network of related topics that users can dive deep into. The idea being that a search like “iPhone” would net additional categories, like “design,” “hardware” and such. Now Guided Search is about… Read More
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Dango is an emoji suggestion chatbot — wait, where are you going? Stay with me, this is actually pretty cool.
Okay, so Dango is one of those virtual assistants that lives in your chat apps, and this one is based on a neural network that has been trained with millions of examples to understand what emoji mean. So not only can it suggest an appropriate one, but it can translate entire… Read More
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RaisedBy.Us, an organization that facilitates charitable giving at startups, has added three entrepreneurs and investors to its board of directors — Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above), VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk and Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn. The nonprofit works with startups so their employees can donate a set amount of each paycheck to the charity of their choice. (The system… Read More
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Apple is about to kick off its annual developer conference in San Francisco on Monday. As usual, the company will get things going with a good old keynote filled with secret and not-so-secret announcements. Here’s what I expect to see.
A good chunk of the conference should be about iOS and OS X updates. Usually, Apple showcases some of th Read More
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