The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking for help in explaining to the federal circuit why copyrighting APIs is such a bad idea.
The EFF’s request comes after a victory earlier this year when U.S.District Court Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle v. Google case that an API cannot be copyrighted. → Read More
Microsoft plans to offer devices based on Perceptive Pixel technology that uses both pen and touch to create what is equivalent to the human as the user interface.
Microsoft General Manager Jeff Han, who sold Perceptive Pixel to Microsoft earlier this year, hinted at the news with a slide in a presentation at this week’s Build conference in Redmond. It said “Devices *are* coming” along with an… → Read More
Microsoft has made a deal with China to offer Windows Azure in the country. The deal is ballyhooed as a landmark agreement but, at its core, represents something that only the Chinese government can love. → Read More
Lucky Sort, the Portland-based visualization engine for making sense out of live data streams, is announcing its first partner: StockTwits, a social network for traders that lets users share stock-related information in real-time. Additionally, Howard Lindzon, StockTwits CEO and co-founder, has now also invested in Lucky Sort alongside a couple of other angels, who, combined, have added an extra… → Read More
The tech press doesn’t always give enterprise software startups as much attention as companies on the consumer-focused side. That is slowly changing now, though — the words “enterprise” and “sexy” have shown up together in a growing number of conference panels and press reports in recent months. → Read More
Blue Box has raised $3.5 million for its OpenStack-infused cloud and hosting service designed for companies that have major traffic volumes and big apps and rely on a high level of uptime. → Read More
Gliffy is moving to an all HTML 5 platform, showing the change in developer and business users needs to collaborate online across any platform and within third party application environments. → Read More
The Rainmaker Group, a company founded in 1998, has accepted its first investment — $33.8 million from Norwest Venture Partners that the Atlanta-based company will use to extend its profit and price optimization technology to different markets. → Read More
The No. 1 gamification app on Salesforce.com AppExchange has secured $1 million from Detroit Venture Partners and ePrize. → Read More
Even as data usage has skyrocketed, U.S. carriers have remained stubbornly wedded to post-paid plans that offer users a surprisingly limited menu of pricing options. Yes, we’re talking about those monthly subscriptions that easily reach above $100 a month — even if you hardly touch voice calls or if you always come in far beneath your monthly data limit.
But this may be about to change. → Read More
Amazon has revealed a bit of detail for how it views Google’s cloud efforts in a lawsuit filed against a former employee on grounds he violated a non-compete clause.
Amazon filed the lawsuit on behalf of Amazon Web Services, claiming Daniel Powers, its former vice president of sales, has violated a severance agreement by taking a new job at Google as a director of cloud platform sales. → Read More
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the earnings call this past week that 80% of the Fortune 500 companies use iPhones and iPads. To make his point, Cook said companies such as Canon are outfitting its entire field sales teams with iPads. → Read More
Cindy Alvarez directs user experience at Yammer. At the Failcon conference this week she did an insightful if uncomfortable talk about the five types of people she should have fired sooner. → Read More
A memory leak and a failed monitoring system caused the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday that took out Reddit and other major services. According to a post Friday night, AWS explained that the problem arose after a simple replacement of a data collection server. → Read More
Google App Engine is down with a major service disruption affecting thousands of customers around the world that use the platform-as-a-service.
The Google Engine team posted the following update: → Read More
ExecOnline has raised $800,000 in seed funding from the Washington Post for executives to get online training from top 10 business schools.
The service will target Fortune 500 companies that often send executives to Harvard University and other top business schools for immersive business school training. → Read More
New Relic has added the capability to monitor data across multiple applications and systems for deeper, more detailed views — another sign that the new era of Internet models is taking the enterprise by storm. → Read More
Two of Salesforce.com’s most high profile “social media” acquisitions are showing signs of trouble. At Radian6, Salesforce.com is reported to be laying off “less than 100 people.” And at Buddy Media, the company amended its 8-K, which shows $20 million in net losses for the first six months of the year. → Read More
Shine Security has raised $3.3 million for its next-generation anti-virus technology. The round was led by Horizon Ventures with further participation from Initial Capital.
Shine addresses advanced persistent threats that we increasingly see. In broad strokes, Shine detects when your mobile device or PC shows just the slightest abnormality. → Read More
Sutter Hill Ventures has added two new directors from Twitter and Juniper Networks — a move that speaks to the next big focus in investment — enterprise IT and its integration with consumer technologies. → Read More
Just as much of a hit as the iPad has been in the consumer market, it’s also become a tool at the highest and widest reaches of business as well. Today Tim Cook said that almost every company in the Fortune 500 is testing iPads at the moment.
“In the office the iPad is showing up more and more and doing more and more things,” he said. → Read More
Data storage company Scale Computing, which provides clustered storage infrastructure for SMEs, has closed a $12 million Series D funding round, led by Heron Capital Venture Fund. Reservoir Venture Partners also contributed to this round as a new investor. Scale said it will use the new funding to accelerate growth of its HC3 datacenter-in-a-box product. → Read More
InfoArmy, only four months into its life as the operator of a crowdsourced competitive intelligence platform, is announcing a significant injection of capital as it continues to build out its business. The company has raised a $17.3 million Series B led by Norwest VenturePartners, with Trinity Ventures also participating. The total raised by InfoArmy to date is now $19.3 million. (The… → Read More
The U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, part of the Department of Homeland Security, recently revealed that it will be adopting iOS devices from a variety of service providers for its 17,676 users. It’s a win for Apple in terms of landing a sizeable government client, but also a significant vote of confidence for the overall security of iOS as a mobile platform. → Read More
Clever, a graduate of Y Combinator’s most recent batch of startups, launched in late June to bring a bit of Twilio’s vision to education. During their time at Y Combinator, the accelerator’s co-founder Paul Graham challenged the team to integrate with 40 schools by the end of the program. Clever far-surpassed that goal, announcing this morning that over 2,000 K-12 schools have now adopted its… → Read More
Telerik has developed a service called Icenium to automate the otherwise tedious task of using traditional integrated development environments (IDE) for mobile app development. → Read More
As it ramps up to the launch of devices running its next-gen OS in Q1 next year, RIM has announced a new series of BlackBerry developer events focused on its traditional user-base by helping enterprises and other organizations build apps for BlackBerry 10. The Blackberry 10 Jam World Tour will see day-long BB10 events held in 11 cities around the world, kicking off tomorrow in Toronto. → Read More
This week, Splice Machine raised $4 million to develop its SQL Engine for big data apps. MongoHQ raised $6 million for its database as a service. A third startup, Bloomreach, announced $25 million in funding for its big data applications. → Read More
There are any number of good reasons why Windows 8 will do just fine in the work world. But in today’s market, success is not guaranteed, especially as PC sales continue to slide. Gartner Research reports that third quarter shipments for PCs are down 8% compared to last year. → Read More
Brewster, the relationship-centric iOS address book app that went live in the U.S. in July with some fanfare (and a little controversy for good measure), is picking up some more steam. On the heels of an app update earlier this month, this week it is launching across Europe, available for the first time in iOS App Stores across the region. → Read More
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