Enterprise

Directus wants to democratize data across the enterprise • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in data management, developer tools, Enterprise, Startups, True VenturesNo Comments

A startup that wants to democratize data in the enterprise? That may sound awfully familiar, but Directus, which is announcing a $7 million Series A round led by True Ventures today, is taking a different approach to most of its competitors by combining traditional developer tools with a no-code approach to offer a highly flexible open-source data platform for its enterprise users. Using the service’s tools, developers can easily turn any SQL database into an API to power their apps — or use the service’s no-code tools to build apps that way, too. Even though it only launched in 2020, the New York-based remote-first company has already added enterprises like Bose, Adobe and Tripadvisor to its roster of paying customers. And while the company itself is only a couple of years old now, Directus CEO and cofounder Ben Haynes actually started toying with the ideas that led to launching Directus as early as 2004 after leaving the Air Force and starting a web consultancy business. Image Credits: Directus “What I identified was that there’s a lot of repetition in the engineering being done — the authentication and authorization, the connectivity, the database, the data access, caching,” Haynes explained. “That’s all for building the deliverable, but once you hand that off, you need a way to manage it.” At the time, that mostly involved a CMS like WordPress or maybe Drupal and database administration tools for the LAMP stack like phpMyAdmin. But there weren’t any great tools for building out the information architecture for new projects, so Haynes ended up coding the first versions of what would become Directus himself. And while he kept working on it as a side project during stints at SoulCyle and AOL, it only became a full-time job and a startup in 2020 when he and his co-founder Rijk van Zanten started getting more serious inquiries for this tool that they had previously only used in their consultancy business. Today’s Directus is obviously not a PHP app anymore. It’s been completely rewritten and sits on top of a modern Jamstack platform. Directus co-founders Ben Haynes (l.) and Rijk van Zanten (r.). Maybe the best way to describe the Directus users experience today is as a mix of a code-centric database management tool and the service’s Airtable-like Directus Studio no-code tool. As Haynes stressed, the company isn’t in the business of managing the databases themselves. Instead, it can sit on top of any SQL database. “The database is not part of our platform,” he noted. “That is your data. You have authority. We layer on a database administrator administration tool. We try to provide tools and a portal into that database, for your schema, your optimizations, your foreign key constraints — whatever you’ve optimized, that remains completely untouched. We don’t commingle any of our system data. If you delete our software, six months or six years later, it’s completely pristine.” And while business users can use the service, too, the core audience — even for the no-code/low-code tool, is developers. “We remain exclusively focused on the developer as our ideal customer profile. We are talking and working with developers,” Haynes said. He argued that services like Retool or Airtable are no-code platforms first that then try to backfill the technology. “You end up with a band aid — a stopgap solution that maybe developers aren’t going to be happy with when it needs to scale,” he said. “We are database first, then API, then the connectivity, and then no-code.” This developer focus is also exemplified by the fact that the service offers REST and GraphQL APIs to connect to its service, on top of a command line interface and a JavaScript SDK. Image Credits: Directus For developers, this means they get a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the tool and manipulate their data (no matter whether that’s text, images or geographic data). The tool is available as open-source as well as a freemium fully-managed service with prices for the paid tiers starting at $25/month. The company now has 25 employees and has raised a total of $8.5 million. In addition to True Ventures leading this Series A round, Handshake Ventures also participated. “Empowering non-technical users with no-code tools is a massive shift underway in the corporate world,” said True Ventures Co-founder Phil Black, who will join the Directus Board of Directors. “Directus is an open-source project that has been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. Among many benefits, the software helps teams greatly reduce the hours developers might spend creating data-driven projects. What’s more, we like how the founding team spent time deep in this problem prior to starting Directus. Hands-on struggle begets innovation.”

Okta CEO opens up about Auth0 acquisition, SaaS slump and Lapsus$ attack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in auth0, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, identity access management, Okta, Security, todd mckinnonNo Comments

Okta launched a cloud identity product back in 2009 when most people were locked into Microsoft Active Directory, an on-prem incumbent so entrenched that nobody believed that anyone could touch it. It took a little audacity to go after a giant like that, but Okta took a cloud-first approach, a markedly different strategy from Active Directory at the time. The company raised over $230 million before going public in 2017. It reached unicorn status with a $75 million raise on a $1.2 billion valuation back in 2015 when the designation meant a little more than it does these days. With ownership of the workforce side of the market, Okta decided to make another bold move when it acquired Auth0 for $6.5 billion during the stock market bubble that accelerated in 2020. The idea behind the deal was not simply to own an identity tool favored by developers — although that was certainly a big part of it — it was really about owning another large piece of the market, one that could make Okta a one-stop identity shop. “There’s a very deep divide between legacy and modern in this market.” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon Okta wanted to own both the workforce market, the core of its approach to that point, as well as the customer identity market where Auth0 lived. And Okta made a substantial bet for a company of its size to make that happen. Okta isn’t alone in the identity space; competitors include companies large and small like ForgeRock, SAP, IBM, Ping Identity, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Akamai, among others. Like every other SaaS company out there, Okta has had a rough year in the public markets, down over 80% in the past year (although it was up almost 10% in midday trading Thursday). It also had to deal with an attack spearheaded by the group Lapsus$ that happened in January but was reported in March — and the fallout from its response. Despite these headwinds, the company has big long-term goals to own the cloud identity market and believes it can ride out the current temporary macroeconomic conditions and the legacy vendors to get there. We sat down with CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon recently and asked him about how he is navigating these times — and the lessons he’s learned along the way. Growing Auth0 McKinnon emphasized that he spent 14% of his stock value at the time to acquire Auth0, a number he knows off the top of his head, because he wants his company to own the cloud identity market, and he doesn’t think he could do it without Auth0. “We bought them to change, and we bought them because we needed change to win this customer identity market,” he told ZebethMedia. “Our strategy is that we have to win both the workforce market and the customer identity market. And the only way we’re going to turn identity into one of these most important platforms for every company is we have to [own] both use cases.” He said integrating two companies like this didn’t come without challenges, and he may have moved too quickly to bring the products together.

Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in analytics, Apps, battery ventures, business intelligence, Coefficient, Enterprise, startup, StartupsNo Comments

With the explosive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage — leading to data being siloed across countless different systems. That makes analysis challenging. To wit, according to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. Ideally, analysts need something that connects disparate enterprise systems, like business intelligence and analytics tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, leading employees to spend hours each day searching and gathering information. In search of an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he’d previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms. “Tsai and I had worked on consumer technologies for many years, and we saw a big opportunity to bring consumer-grade experiences to companies,” Loiwal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early engineer at location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most data products are designed for the technical user, which results in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity that they expect in their consumer lives.” To this end, Coefficient — which today closed an $18 million Series A funding round — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users have to complete daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform lays on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel forthcoming), bringing in data from customer relationship management (CRMs) systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools. Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards and decks and revenue analyses), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts within their spreadsheets. Coefficient’s spreadsheet add-on. Image Credits: Coefficient “Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, yet business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data — requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeat, manual analysis, reducing team efficiency and productivity,” Loiwal said. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling the business to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they’re working: in spreadsheets.” That’s a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like UIs to organize business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with granular access controls. Indeed, at first glance, Coefficient sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates for getting started. But to its credit, Coefficient got off to an auspicious start — Loiwal claims that Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Combined, tens of thousands of people are currently using the platform. “We are seeing our customers grow their contracts with us despite undergoing layoffs — a testament to the value proposition of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased remote work and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.” Loiwal says that the proceeds from the Series A will be put toward expanding Coefficient’s product offerings and “scaling global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools. Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital. Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added: “It is a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting use of the product throughout the organization … Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed to reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”

With $7M raised, Keyo launches a biometric palm verification network • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in biometrics, Enterprise, Gadgets, Hardware, KeyoNo Comments

Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with the Chicago-based firm in the interim. “I think we were probably a bit naïve in the beginning to underestimate the true complexity of this undertaking,” admits co-founder/CEO Jaxon Klein. “There’s a lot involved in building a global scale identity solution. We’ve been in deep engineering mode for several years now. We’ve put the last five years and millions of dollars into building what we really view as the first global scale biometric identity ecosystem.” It’s not a unique case, in that respect. And may well mean that your organization is on the right track, if members of the press are willing to discuss your technologies at such an early stage. But the kind of technology Keyo has been working on is the sort of thing it’s important to get exactly right, given the security, privacy and financial implications of its biometrics. Image Credits: Keyo “That early press coverage was us prematurely saying ‘hey, look what we’re doing,’” Klein adds. “It settled in what we were really doing and the reasons that no other companies were competing for the space and how just how long and hard the road were heading down. We then retreated from that and said, ‘okay, we have a lot to build and we need to go actually deploy this into the real world, work with real customers work with real users and make sure we’re doing it right.” This week, the company’s got something to show for that work. Fueled by an aggregate $7 million in seed funding, the Keyo Network had previously been in beta. It’s a combination of hardware and software designed to bring palm scanning to a broad range of different markets and services. Today it’s announcing the Keyo Wave hand-scanner hardware, Keyo mobile app, third-party partner program and the Keyo Identify Cloud, which “enables users to instantly and privately identify themselves based on a simple scan of their hand at any business participating in the Keyo network.” The Keyo team remains small, with 33 remote employees, though Klein says the firm has been hiring around an employee a week. Not huge growth, though he winkingly notes that at least the startup is bucking the current brutal trend in startup land. Image Credits: Keyo “One of the things we’ve gotten really good at is scalable supply chain deployment. We’ve deployed 15,000 devices just recently, and we manage our supply chain internally. Even pre-pandemic, we’ve been building out our supply chain in North America — largely in the U.S. We’ve built a lot of institutional knowledge and capabilities around operating and expanding supply chains. We are really unique in the hardware space — or part of a very small cohort — that designs and builds their own devices, that’s entirely distributed.” The notion of replacing more traditional payment methods like cards — or even phones — with hand scanning will continue to attract its share of critics. That will only increase as massive corporations like Amazon adopt such technologies, but there’s little doubt the interest is there, at least with the corporations fueling such change.

How OVHcloud’s Octave Klaba is building a different cloud computing company • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Octave Klaba, OVHcloudNo Comments

When people think about the cloud computing industry, three names come to mind — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And yet, smaller cloud companies are still doing well. OVHcloud, a French company that has been around since 1999, is one of them. Of course, cloud computing wasn’t even a thing in 1999. The company has managed to remain relevant after all these years thanks to an opinionated approach to hosting and internet infrastructure. A few days ago, I caught up with Octave Klaba, the company’s founder and chairman. “There is a difference between impossible and unlikely. Maybe we are an unlikely company, but we exist,” he told me. We talked about his long-term vision for OVHcloud, which involves data centers as a service, private 5G networks, satellites and quantum computing. Playing catch-up How do you compete with companies like Amazon and Microsoft when you “only” have 2,800 employees and no side business to finance your cloud division? OVHcloud’s vision could be summed up in two says: leveraging open source as the cornerstone of product innovation, and uncompromised sovereignty. The company’s project of offering data centers as a service is a good example of these two points. “There will be more supermarkets that will use robots. Companies like Auchan or Carrefour will have fulfillment centers that will be robotized. There will be Renault factories with more IoT. There will be airports, container terminals… We will have to bring intelligence and automation to many different places,” Octave Klaba said. And he believes computing resources will have to be closer to the end clients. Companies will decide where their “cloud” is located. He calls that concept “operational sovereignty.” “Today, customers don’t get to choose. They can either opt for our data centers, or for AWS’s data centers that are located I don’t know where,” Klaba said. “Operational sovereignty doesn’t exist today because you don’t get to choose.” We are refactoring our entire data center stack so that data centers can operate autonomously even if they are disconnected Octave Klaba Essentially, OVHcloud wants to be able to provide the best of both worlds. Some clients are looking for the abstraction layer of public cloud infrastructure and the flexibility of on-premise installations. They want to pick their own data center colocation or they want to convert their own data centers into OVHcloud-enabled data centers. With this service, the cloud company brings its own server farms and handles hardware refreshes. It runs its pre-integrated cloud services system on these servers so that it works more or less like your own dedicated OVHcloud data center. And because it’s a service, clients pay a monthly bill. They don’t have to get a loan from their bank to amortize hardware over multiple years. “Some clients have very sensitive and secret data. They want us to operate their data centers without any external connection. Now that’s a challenge,” Klaba said. “So we are refactoring our entire data center stack so that data centers can operate autonomously even if they are disconnected. Everything that is required to run a data center is inside the data center,” Klaba said. And it will eventually be open source. When it’s time to update the software stack, somebody goes to the data center with a NUC mini PC and a USB key. Updates are quickly deployed to all the servers in the data center. “That’s exactly why we became a public company, that’s why I raised €350 million. We are going to open-source our software stack so that you can download and deploy it yourself,” Klaba said. “I want to give it away for free so that you can do my job.” In that case, there would be two main advantages. First, cloud companies keep reinventing the wheel. For instance, all cloud companies offer database-as-a-service products, but they don’t usually share the code behind these services. Everybody keeps developing the same thing over and over again. Second, a strong open-source community is usually more efficient than a private company developing its own proprietary component. OVHcloud wants to be at the center of this community of open-source data center software. “It’s a crazy bet. You only get to make a bet like this once in your life. But we think we are going to succeed,” Klaba told me. Image Credits: OVHcloud Private 5G, satellites and quantum computing When talking about edge computing, Octave Klaba was a bit annoyed about all the hype in the industry. “There’s so much bullshit around edge. So many people talk about edge computing but they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. He then gave me an example of what he means by edge computing. Like other cloud computing companies, OVHcloud wants to offer private 5G networks. “There are big warehouses, airports, inland ports, refineries, big factories… They need some sort of connectivity that covers a huge area with low latency and a lot of bandwidth. It has to be secured, easy to deploy and connected to the cloud,” Klaba said. So many people talk about edge computing but they don’t know what they’re talking about Octave Klaba In that industry, OVHcloud competes with traditional telecom companies and manufacturers, but Klaba believes these companies don’t necessarily know how to build something stable, always up-to-date and always online. “Now they have to use Kubernetes and they think: ‘Oh my god, how do I manage Kubernetes,’” he joked. “On the other side, Microsoft, AWS or Google invest a lot in these areas. They are buying companies. They say that they can do everything for you and for free. But then, it’s going to be connected to their infrastructure and they sell you value-added services and charge you for that. That’s an amazing hack,” Klaba said. OVHcloud doesn’t necessarily want to follow the same strategy, but it has developed proofs of concept for private 5G networks. Once again, it’s all about remaining in the race for this market, and for edge computing in general. When it comes to satellites,

GitHub teases new Copilot feature that lets developers code with their voice • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Copilot, Enterprise, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Hey GitHub, Robotics & AINo Comments

GitHub is working on a new tool that will allow developers to code with their voice. Announced at the annual GitHub Universe conference yesterday, the experimental feature works in tandem with Copilot, GitHub’s controversial AI-powered pair-programmer that collaborates with software developers by suggesting functions or lines of code — a bit like Gmail’s Smart Compose. Copilot officially launched for everyone back in June, costing $10 per month or $100 per year after a free 60-day trial. GitHub is serving access to the new voice feature via a waitlist that’s open for interested developers now, but essentially it will allow developers to activate Copilot’s ears via the “Hey, GitHub” wake word. It is limited in scope for the time being, insofar as it only works with Microsoft’s source-code editor VS Code, but it’s apparently working to expand things in the future. According to GitHub, its new voice assistant can understand natural language requests for Copilot to suggest a code snippet, or summarize what a specific section of code does. But even if a developer doesn’t want any code suggestions, it can serve other practical use-cases such as helping them navigate a codebase by saying something like “Hey GitHub, go to line 34,” or even control the IDE by toggling to zen mode. GitHub copilot voice assistant in action Image Credits: GitHub While this is still an early stage experiment developed by an R&D team called GitHub Next, it could have significant ramifications from an accessibility perspective, as it reduces the amount of interaction that’s required with a mouse and keyboard. It’s also not clear whether Copilot is yet able to talk back to a developer, but based on the initial demonstrations GitHub has published, it would appear not. A two-way dialog could be useful though, for example if a developer wants a quick audio summary of what a piece of code does, or if Copilot needs clarification on a specific request the user has made. Elsewhere at GitHub Universe yesterday, the Microsoft-owned company also revealed that it would soon targeting Copilot at the enterprise, with a new plan that allows businesses to buy licenses at a seat level — this will also mean additional admin controls so companies can manage and control their Copilot deployment across the organization.

Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Enterprise, EV, Tesla, Transportation, zoomNo Comments

Zoom is working with Tesla to bring video conferencing into its vehicles. The announcement, made at the 2022 Zoomtopia conference, was light on details. But according to Zoom’s group product manager Nitasha Walia, the video conferencing feature “will come standard on all new Tesla models soon.” “You’ve been zooming from your home, your office, your phone, and even your TV,” Nitasha Walia, group product manager at Zoom Video Communications, said Tuesday. “We’re going to make it even easier for you to zoom from anywhere.” Image Credits: Zoom What’s unclear is what Zoom means by “comes standard on all new Tesla vehicles.” Will this integration require additional hardware in Tesla vehicles or can this feature be rolled out via a software update? And when? Tesla has continued to add features to its infotainment system designed to entertain its driver or passengers while sitting parked, likely at an EV charger. Its vehicles, all of which have large touchscreen displays, can stream Netflix and YouTube, has karaoke and offers a host of video games, including Fallout Shelter, Cuphead and Stardew Valley. All of these entertainment features as well as performance related improvements have been rolled out via wireless software updates.

OpenAI leads $23.5M round in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Mem, note taking, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment in Mem, a work-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes. The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $29 million. Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Xu’s words. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users and add recurring reminders to notes. Mem users can capture quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features let teams share, edit and comment on notes and directly attach them to shared calendars for faster reference. Mem’s search experience uses AI to search across notes, aiming to understand which notes might be most relevant in a given moment to a particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their typical responsibilities, like reading through pages of information, extracting the pieces relevant to a particular question and transforming the information into an answer or a report. Image Credits: Mem There’s no doubt knowledge-seeking tasks are time-consuming. According to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and on average take 18 minutes to locate a file (albeit the veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over the years). One source estimates that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses, making Mem an attractive proposition if the tech works as advertised. “The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to marry their vast troves of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models — to support use cases that range from conducting research to writing to selling and beyond,” Moody and Xu told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own private and proprietary data along with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual outputs. We combine knowledge sources across the individual, team and organizational levels, leading to significantly better performance across the board.” Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see suggestions for similar tweets. It’s also continuing to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which leverages AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents and let users use natural language commands to edit or format text. Image Credits: Mem The plan for the foreseeable future is to increasingly lean into these sorts of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “OpenAI is obviously leading the wave of technological revolutions that we are riding,” Moody and Xu said. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we’re building — for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.” Mem competes with a number of companies seeking to tackle the same knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was valued at $2 billion in 2020, still dominate. But Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has an advantage in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in less manual curation and labor. While they declined to reveal Mem’s revenue or the names of any major customers, they assert that Mem is successful, owing to its AI-driven tech. “We’re confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but also go beyond simply helping find things — we actually help people do their work,” Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the market slowdown has caused companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-assisted knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement in large language models gives us a further tailwind.”

IBM unveils its 433 qubit Osprey quantum computer • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Hardware, IBM, quantum computingNo Comments

IBM wants to scale up its quantum computers to over 4,000 qubits by 2025 — but we’re not quite there yet. For now, we have to make do with significantly smaller systems and today, IBM announced the launch of its Osprey quantum processor, which features 433 qubits, up from the 127 qubits of its 2021 Eagle processor. And with that, the slow but steady march toward a quantum processor with real-world applications continues. “The new 433 qubit ‘Osprey’ processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems,” said Darío Gil, Senior Vice President, IBM and Director of Research. “We are continuously scaling up and advancing our quantum technology across hardware, software and classical integration to meet the biggest challenges of our time, in conjunction with our partners and clients worldwide. This work will prove foundational for the coming era of quantum-centric supercomputing.” Image Credits: IBM IBM’s quantum roadmap includes two additional stages — the 1,121-qubit Condor and 1,386-qubit Flamingo processors in 2023 and 2024 — before it plans to hit the 4,000-qubit stage with its Kookaburra processor in 2025. So far, the company has generally been able to make this roadmap work, but the number of qubits in a quantum processor is obviously only one part of a very large and complex puzzle, with longer coherence times and reduced noise being just as important. Ideally, that’s something developers who want to work with these machines wouldn’t have to worry about, so increasingly, the tools they use are abstracting the hardware away for them. With the new version of its Qiskit Runtime, for example, developers can now trade speed for reduced error count. The company also today detailed its Quantum System Two — basically IBM’s quantum mainframe — which will be able to house multiple quantum processors and integrate them into a single system with high-speed communication links. The idea here is to launch this system by the end of 2023. Image Credits: IBM

Equals secures $15M investment to supercharge spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Apps, Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Startups, worklifeNo Comments

Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine. Co-founded by Ben McRedmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals claims its spreadsheet is one of the few with built-in connections to databases, versioning and collaboration features. Equals isn’t the first startup on a mission to kill the traditional spreadsheet. There’s Airtable, of course, plus upstarts like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for its data analytics and visualization service. But Pinero, Equal’s CEO, claims that Equals is unique in that it doesn’t so much replace the spreadsheet as incorporate additional tools, like live data integrations. “Equals comes from a really simple and obvious insight: that the spreadsheet is the best way to do analysis,” Pinero told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Excel was built nearly 40 years ago. Google Sheets 16 years ago. The way companies work today is meaningfully different. Our data is way more accessible. We should automate much of the painful, manual work of getting data into a spreadsheet. And we’ve learned so much about how teams better collaborate over the past decade. A spreadsheet should incorporate those learnings. That’s Equals.” Customers can tap Equals to build analyses with real-time data directly from a database or data warehouse, with or without using sequel query language. It supports standard formulas and offers templates for common use cases, like tracking recurring revenue and measuring user engagement. Image Credits: Equals Soon, Equals will be able to import scripts to allow users to connect spreadsheets to different APIs and internal tools with JavaScript or Python. Also on the way are pivot tables and connectors to business intelligence apps from Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe and Google Analytics. “Equals represents a massive opportunity to get business stakeholders — typically folks who are neglected from being able to get their own data — access to data. To be able to work with data in a tool they’re comfortable and already know how to use: a spreadsheet,” Pinero said. “No more manual spreadsheets that take hours to manually update across the team. No more dumping data from BI tools into spreadsheets to then do analysis.” That’s a lot to promise, but Pinero is well aware of the hurdles ahead. He doesn’t expect 10-employee Equals to be profitable for a while — the Series A proceeds will go mostly toward R&D, he says; Equals has raised $23 million to date — and the platform will remain gated behind a waitlist pending the next major product release. Pinero claims that “thousands” of people have signed up so far. “It speaks to the excitement and traction with Equals that in this market we’ve been able to raise a significant series A. At our current burn, we have eight-plus years of runway,” Pinero said. “We’re very well positioned to outlast this downturn, however long it may go. As the saying goes, generational companies are built during these downturns, and we plan on making Equals one of those.”