Pivotal CEO talks IPO and balancing life in Dell family of companies

Pivotal has kind of a strange role for a company. On one hand its part of the EMC federation companies that Dell acquired in 2016 for a cool $67 billion, but it’s also an independently operated entity within that broader Dell family of companies — and that has to be a fine line to walk. Whatever the challenges, the company went public yesterday and joined VMware as a  separately traded company within Dell. CEO Rob Mee says the company took the step of IPOing because it wanted additional capital. “I think we can definitely use the capital to...

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In the NYC enterprise startup scene, security is job one

While most people probably would not think of New York as a hotbed for enterprise startups of any kind, it is actually quite active. When you stop to consider that the world’s biggest banks and financial services companies are located there, it would certainly make sense for security startups to concentrate on such a huge potential market — and it turns out, that’s the case. According to Crunchbase, there are dozens of security startups based in the city with everything from biometrics and messaging security to identity, security scoring and graph-based...

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Through luck and grit, Datadog is fusing the culture of developers and operations

There used to be two cultures in the enterprise around technology. On one side were software engineers, who built out the applications needed by employees to conduct the business of their companies. On the other side were sysadmins, who were territorially protective of their hardware domain — the servers, switches, and storage boxes needed to power all of that software. Many a great comedy routine has been made at the interface of those two cultures, but they remained divergent. That is, until the cloud changed everything. Suddenly, there was increasing...

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Up-and-coming enterprise startups in NYC

New York City has an incredible density of up-and-coming enterprise-focused startups. While the winners are publicized and well-known, we felt it was time to put a bit of a spotlight on younger companies, ones you may not have heard about yet, but are likely to in the coming years. TechCrunch asked two dozen founders, venture capitalists, and other community members which companies — other than ones they are directly connected to — they thought were most likely to change the enterprise world in the coming years. From a list of 64 nominated startups,...

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Full-Metal Packet is hosting the future of cloud infrastructure

Cloud computing has been a revolution for the data center. Rather than investing in expensive hardware and managing a data center directly, companies are relying on public cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to provide general-purpose and high-availability compute, storage, and networking resources in a highly flexible way. Yet as workflows have moved to the cloud, companies are increasingly realizing that those abstracted resources can be enormously expensive compared to the hardware they used to own. Few companies want...

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BigID lands in the right place at the right time with GDPR

Every startup needs a little skill and a little luck. BigID, a NYC-based data governance solution has been blessed with both. The company, which helps customers identify sensitive data in big data stores, launched at just about the same time that the EU announced the GDPR data privacy regulations. Today, the company is having trouble keeping up with the business. While you can’t discount that timing element, you have to have a product that actually solves a problem and BigID appears to meet that criteria. “This how the market is changing by having...

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Timescale is leading the next wave of NYC database tech

Data is the lifeblood of the modern corporation, yet acquiring, storing, processing, and analyzing it remains a remarkably challenging and expensive project. Every time data infrastructure finally catches up with the streams of information pouring in, another source and more demanding decision-making makes the existing technology obsolete. Few cities rely on data the same way as New York City, nor has any other city so shaped the technology that underpins our data infrastructure. Back in the 1960s, banks and accounting firms helped to drive much...

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Special Report: New York’s enterprise infrastructure ecosystem

New York City is a marvel of infrastructure planning and engineering. There are the visible landmarks — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Empire State Building — and also the invisible ones that run the city beneath its crowded streets, such as one of the world’s most complex water tunneling and reservoir systems. That infrastructure was built for the economy of the 20th century, a market that emphasized the manufacturing and trading of goods. Infrastructure though has a very different meaning in the 21st century. The digital economy...

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SmugMug acquires Flickr

Two photo-sharing services are teaming up, as SmugMug buys Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. USA Today broke the news and interviewed SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who said he hopes to revitalize Flickr. At the same time, he said he’s still figuring out his actual plans: “It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he’s going to do, but we haven’t built SmugMug on a master plan either. We try to listen to our customers and when enough of them ask for something that’s important to them or to the community, we go and build...

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German Supreme Court dismisses Axel Springer lawsuit, says ad blocking is legal

{rss:content:encoded} German Supreme Court dismisses Axel Springer lawsuit, says ad blocking is legal https://ift.tt/2K4euLp https://ift.tt/2qQuVCj April 20, 2018 at 10:24PM Germany’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit yesterday from Axel Springer against Eyeo, the company behind AdBlock Plus. The European publishing giant (which acquired Business Insider in 2015) argued that ad-blocking, as well as the business model where advertisers pay to be added to circumvent the white list, violated Germany’s competition law. Axel Springer won a partial...

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Startup ecosystem report: China is rising while the US is waning

Startups are a gamble, but it’s possible to better understand why some thrive and many more die by looking at the ecosystems in which they operate. Such is the mission of eight-year-old Startup Genome, composed of a group of researchers and entrepreneurs who, every year, interview thousands of founders and investors around the world to get a better handle on what’s changing in the regions where they operate, and what remains stubbornly the same. The larger objective is to figure out how to help more startups succeed, and the outfit — which this...

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Twitter banned Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab from buying ads

The U.S. government isn’t the only one feeling skittish about Kaspersky Lab. On Friday, the Russian security firm’s founder Eugene Kaspersky confronted Twitter’s apparent ban on advertising from the company, a decision it quietly issued in January. No matter how this situation develops, we won’t be doing any more advertising on Twitter this year. The whole of the planned Twitter advertising budget for 2018 will instead be donated to the @EFF. They do a lot to fight censorship online. — Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) April 20, 2018 My open...

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Twitter is down again for some [Update: It’s Back]

Rough week to be in Twitter support. Three days after the site experienced downtime across the globe, the site was hit by another outage. Status.io’s service site is currently listing an “active incident,” leaving many users unable to tweet. In other cases, the site isn’t loading at all, instead serving up internal server errors or messages stating that the service is “over capacity.” Here in the States, at least, the issue doesn’t appear to be quite as widespread as Tuesday’s incident. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update...

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ZTE says export ban will ‘severely impact’ its survival

{rss:content:encoded} ZTE says export ban will ‘severely impact’ its survival https://ift.tt/2K0ptFX https://ift.tt/2qOwoJp April 20, 2018 at 08:23PM It’s been a hell of a week for ZTE. News Monday that it was being hit with a seven-year export ban sent the company scrambling. The Chinese handset maker suspended its earnings report and reportedly sent its lawyers to meet with Google to see if anything could be worked out about a punishment that could hamper its ability to utilize Android and various key services. Four days after we first reached...

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iOS 11’s new App Store boosts downloads by 800% for Featured apps

{rss:content:encoded} iOS 11’s new App Store boosts downloads by 800% for Featured apps https://ift.tt/2JcSvkl https://ift.tt/2HAfvfR April 20, 2018 at 07:45PM When Apple launched its new App Store in iOS 11 back in September, it aimed to offer app developers better exposure, as well as a better app discovery experience for consumers. A new study from Sensor Tower out today takes a look at how well that’s been working in the months since. According to its findings, getting a featured spot on the new App Store can increase downloads by as much as...

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Facebook has auto-enrolled users into a facial recognition test in Europe

Facebook users in Europe are reporting the company has begun testing its controversial facial recognition technology in the region. Jimmy Nsubuga, a journalist at Metro, is among several European Facebook users who have said they’ve been notified by the company they are in its test bucket. The company has previously said an opt-in option for facial recognition will be pushed out to all European users next month. It’s hoping to convince Europeans to voluntarily allow it to expand its use of the privacy-hostile tech — which was turned off in...

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AT&T CEO says a new $15-per-month, sports-free streaming service is launching in a few weeks

{rss:content:encoded} AT&T CEO says a new $15-per-month, sports-free streaming service is launching in a few weeks https://ift.tt/2qLINhZ https://ift.tt/2HODaXP April 20, 2018 at 04:07PM AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson revealed on Thursday the carrier’s plans to launch another live TV service called “AT&T Watch,” which would offer a cheap, $15-per-month bundle of channels for customers, and be provided to AT&T Wireless subscribers for free. At this price point, the service would be one of the lowest on the market – less than Sling TV’s...

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This robot can build your Ikea furniture

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who hate building Ikea furniture and madmen. Now, thanks to Ikeabot, the madmen can be replaced. Ikeabot is a project built at Control Robotics Intelligence (CRI) group at NTU in Singapore. The team began by teaching robots to insert pins and manipulate Ikea parts and then, slowly, began to figure out how to pit the robots against the furniture. The results, if you’ve ever fought with someone trying to put together a Billy, are heartening. From Spectrum: The assembly process from CRI is not quite...

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