Oh look, TripActions raised at a $9.2B valuation after reported $12B IPO filing

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TripActions, a corporate travel and expenses company, has raised a combination of equity and debt at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion, up from its prior valuation of $7.5 billion. The funding is a $154 million equity round from investors including returning investors Andreessen Horowitz and Premji Invest, and a $150 million structured financing deal … Read more

How cell carriers prepared for and responded to Hurricane Ian

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Mobile cell towers, drones, and helicopters. | Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images On September 28th, Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida, lashing the area with category four winds and proceeding to cross through the state and then into the Carolinas and Virginia. As someone with friends, family, and co-workers dotted … Read more

Microsoft launches new security services aimed at protecting code in the cloud

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At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced Defender Cloud Security Posture Management and Defender for DevOps, two new offerings within the company’s Defender for Cloud service (previously Cloud App Security) aimed at managing software development and runtime security across multicloud, multiple-pipeline environments. Currently available in public preview, they work with GitHub and Azure DevOps to … Read more

Microsoft expands Azure OpenAI Service with DALL-E 2 in preview

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When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service — a part of Azure Cognitive Services — provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. That’s not changing. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to … Read more

Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services

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Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document … Read more

Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them

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Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural … Read more

Microsoft Teams gains animated avatars and AI-powered recaps

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At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced updates heading to Teams, its ever-evolving videoconferencing and workplace collaboration app. New avatars are available, and more details were announced around Teams Premium, a paid set of Teams features including AI-generated tasks and meeting guides, which is set to arrive in December in preview. Teams Premium is … Read more

Apple brings more of its services, including iCloud and Apple Music, to Microsoft platforms

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During a Surface-focused event this morning, Microsoft announced that it’s integrating Apple’s iCloud storage service with the Photos app in Windows 11. After installing the iCloud for Windows app from the Microsoft Store and choosing to sync iCloud, iPhone users with Windows devices will be able to see their iPhone photos and videos within Photos. … Read more

With $24.2M in funding, Diagrid launches its fully managed Dapr service for Kubernetes

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Back in 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, an open source project that aimed to make it easier for developers to build microservices on top of Kubernetes. Dapr, which stands for “distributed application runtime,” handles a lot of the primitives for building distributed applications (think pub/sub, state management, secrets management, event triggers, etc.), allowing developers to focus … Read more

Microsoft Teams Premium arrives with meeting recaps and live translations

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Microsoft Teams Premium. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is launching Microsoft Teams Premium today, a new offering designed to boost its chat and collaboration app with some AI-powered smart features. The biggest addition is a new meeting recap feature that essentially adds an AI virtual assistant to each meeting to share highlights and automatically capture all … Read more

New Microsoft 365 app replaces Microsoft’s Office app with new features and design

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Image: Microsoft Microsoft is rebranding its built-in Office apps on Windows to Microsoft 365. While the existing app is mainly used for quick access to Office apps, this new Microsoft 365 one is designed to really leverage Microsoft’s Graph network to provide additional apps, relevant documents, and a feed of meetings and information that might … Read more