Google makes it easier for companies to transfer data to its cloud

 Onstage today at Google’s Cloud Next conference, the company announced a series of new tools to assist users with data preparation and integration. The updates bolster both the power and agility of Google Cloud for businesses.
The first of these releases is the new private beta of Google Cloud Dataprep. Dataprep makes the data preparation process more visual. The tool includes anomaly… Read More

Astro raises an $8 million Series A for its AI-powered email solution for teams

 On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on… Read More

Google goes after Slack and splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet

Google’s messaging strategy can be confusing, but if there’s one thing that’s clear after today’s Cloud Next keynote, it’s that the company is doubling down on the idea that Hangouts is its enterprise product and Allo/Duo are its consumer communications apps. Read More

New version of Google App Engine supports all programming languages

 Google announced that an entirely overhauled version of App Engine was generally available as of today. It made the announcement at Google Cloud Next being held this week in San Francisco.
App Engine is Google’s platform-as-a-service for building application backends without having to worry about maintaining a complex infrastructure.
The big news is that App Engine now supports any… Read More

Google updates Drive with a focus on its business users

 Google today announced a number of major updates to Drive, its online file storage service, which all aim to make it more useful for the company’s business and enterprise users. In addition, the company announced that Drive now has 800 million daily active users, which probably makes it the largest online file storage service in the market today. Read More

Google adds add-on support to Gmail

 Here’s some welcome news for Gmail users: Google is adding support for third-party add-ons that can integrate directly into the service. There are plenty of services that add functionality to Gmail already, of course, but they typically do that through a browser extension. With this new capability, which Google announced at its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco today, users will be… Read More

Google’s Jamboard will cost $5,000, plus an annual management fee

 Google’s delivering on its promise of keeping its interactive whiteboard under $6,000. Priced at $4,999, the Jamboard is just a hair more expensive than the 55-inch version of Cisco’s Sparkboard and considerably less so than the $8,999 Surface Hub, which was both the first of the trio to be announced and first to market when it started shipping last March.
Google’s 55-inch… Read More

Networking services startup Cradlepoint lands $89M investment from TCV

Network diagram In a world where having internet connectivity is the lifeblood of just about every business, Cradlepoint helps customers deliver consistent networking services, even when there is a lousy cell signal. Today the company announced it had secured an $89 million Series C investment from TCV. TCV is the only investor this round, and as part of the deal TCV’s general partner Ted Coons and… Read More

Google confirms its acquisition of data science community Kaggle

 Google today said it is acquiring Kaggle, an online service that hosts data science and machine learning competitions, confirming what sources told us when we reported the acquisition yesterday. The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference this morning in San Francisco, while not disclosing the terms of the acquisition. But it’s not all that surprising that… Read More

Amazon’s AWS acquired meeting productivity startup Do to expand Chime

A business meeting in a conference room. Amazon has quietly made one more acquisition to build out the productivity services on its cloud platform AWS. The company has acquired Do.com, a startup that had built a platform to make meetings more productive by doing things like managing notes in preparation for them, and creating reports for those who were not there, as well as organising the meetings themselves. Amazon is… Read More