Author: TechBrunch
After building Google Lens to make it easier for users to shop online, Google is now helping users shop while in-store by providing product insights, price comparisons, and local availability. We are updating the product to make it possible. Alongside this news, the company is introducing new shopping features to Maps and adding more Google Pay features ahead of the holiday shopping season. The Google Lens update builds on the efforts Google already has through its Google Shopping space. The idea is that people need to make similarly informed shopping decisions in the real world, and Google Lens (Google's visual…
Enabling AI requires creating connections between vast amounts of data. That's where technologies like graph databases come in. Graph databases handle rapidly changing, interconnected data better than traditional databases designed to store strictly structured information. Of course, graph databases require management to take advantage of them. Many companies sell products for this purpose, and one of the leading vendors is Neo4j. Neo4j's roots date back to the early 2000s, when founders Emil Eifrem, Johan Svensson, and Peter Neubauer discovered problems with traditional database technology. The trio developed a prototype of Neo4j, which later became the company's graph database management software…
Microsoft plans to allow Teams users to clone their voices and speak similar to their own voices in other languages during meetings. At Microsoft Ignite 2024 on Tuesday, the company announced Interpreter in Teams, a tool for Microsoft Teams that provides “real-time voice-to-voice” interpretation capabilities. Starting in early 2025, users using Teams for meetings can use an interpreter to support up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish. You will be able to simulate speech in your language. “Imagine sounding just like you in another language,” Microsoft CMO Jared Spataro wrote in a blog…
If Windows in Mixed Reality sounds like your idea, rejoice! Microsoft announced Tuesday at Microsoft Ignite 2024 that it will bring “full functionality” of Windows 11 to Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S in December as part of a public preview. “Full-featured” in this context means that your Quest headset can access your local Windows PC or a cloud instance of Windows (via Windows 365). Microsoft says the connection takes just “seconds” and likens the experience to “a large, private, high-quality multi-monitor workstation.” We are the ones to judge that. Apps supported in this new Windows modality extend into 3D…
Microsoft on Tuesday announced new custom chips aimed at powering workloads on its Azure cloud and increasing security, especially new hardware accelerators that can manage data processing, networking, and storage-related tasks. Azure Boost DPU is Microsoft's first data processing unit and is designed for “high-efficiency, low-power data-centric workloads,” the company says. Microsoft expects future DPU-powered Azure servers to run storage workloads with four times the performance of existing servers and consume one-third the power. “Azure Boost DPU, designed for scale-out, composable workloads on Azure, delivers efficiencies in storage, networking, acceleration, and more for cloud infrastructure,” Microsoft said in a blog…
In the wake of CrowdStrike's devastating failure in July of this year, Microsoft vowed to do better, even as it claimed the incident was outrageous. Clearly not wanting to take any chances (or risk further damage to its reliability), the company on Tuesday revealed during Microsoft Ignite 2024 what changes it has made to Windows to prevent similar incidents. I shared what I was doing. Many of these changes will not go into effect for some time. Quick Machine Recovery, a new feature released in early 2025, will allow IT administrators to remotely fix certain software even if a Windows…
Microsoft on Tuesday announced Azure AI Foundry at its annual Ignite conference, a new product that brings together Microsoft's existing AI services for enterprises under one umbrella. Azure AI Studio is Microsoft's hub for building generative AI-based applications and the management console and portal for AI Foundry. “Business leaders are looking to reduce the time and cost of bringing AI solutions to market while continuing to monitor, measure, and assess their performance and ROI. We are excited to announce Azure AI Foundry as a unified application platform for Microsoft,” wrote Jessica Hawk, corporate vice president of data, AI, and digital…
AIOps stands for Artificial Intelligence in Operations and is the process of using AI to automate IT tasks. As AI becomes more commercialized, more organizations are adopting it, but adoption remains slow. A recent IDC survey found that nearly half of enterprises say they are just beginning their AIOps journey, and one-third say they have an AIOps roadmap but “there is still a lot of work to do.” did. Longtime Juniper Networks executives Kannan Kothandaraman and Nitin Kumar thought they might know how to spread AIOps broadly. In 2019, they founded Selector, which attempts to use data and AI to…
Dennis Sankachan is not someone you would expect to build a digital procurement startup. After graduating from college, Sankachan worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Two years later, he moved to hedge fund PointState Capital, where he helped manage stock investments. At PointState, which specializes in telecommunications, Sankachan said he faced unexpected challenges. It meant making multiple phone calls and waiting weeks to procure network technology. Inspired by modernizing processes, Sankachan founded Lightyear, a company that helps businesses acquire Internet, SD-WAN, and other critical network infrastructure. For Lightyear, the goal is to make the process of buying communications…
Creator marketplace startup Agentio builds an automated platform for YouTubers to sell ad slots to brands, raises $12 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark with participation from returning investors Craft Ventures and AlleyCorp was procured. With the new funding, the startup aims to expand its market for YouTubers and improve its AI technology to determine whether creators are brand-safe for companies. Agentio was founded in 2023 by former Cameo president Arthur Leopold and former Spotify automated content marketing team leader Jonathan Meyers. To date, we have raised more than $16 million in total funding. Last year, the company…