Sisense hauls in $80M investment as data analytics business matures

Sisense, a company that helps customers understand and visualize their data across multiple sources, announced an $80 million Series E investment today led by Insight Venture Partners. They also announced that Zack Urlocker, former COO at Duo Security and Zendesk, has joined the organization’s board of directors. The company has attracted a prestigious list of […]

Twilio’s contact center products just got more analytical with Ytica acquisition

Twilio, a company best known for supplying communications APIs for developers has a product called Twilio Flex for building sophisticated customer service applications on top of Twilio’s APIs. Today, it announced it was acquiring Ytica (pronounced Why-tica) to provide an operational and analytical layer on top of the customer service solution. The companies would not […]

Anaxi brings more visibility to the development process

Anaxi‘s mission is to bring more transparency to the software development process. The tool, which is now live for iOS, with web and Android versions planned for the near future, connects to GitHub to give you actionable insights about the state of your projects and manage your projects and issues. Support for Atlassian’s Jira is […]

Zendesk expands into CRM with Base acquisition

Zendesk has mostly confined itself to customer service scenarios, but it seems that’s not enough anymore. If you want to truly know the customer behind the interaction, you need a customer system of record to go with the customer service component. To fill that need, Zendesk announced it was acquiring Base, a startup that has […]

Intel acquires NetSpeed Systems to boost its system-on-a-chip business

Intel today is announcing another acquisition as it continues to pick up talent and IP to bolster its next generation of computing chips beyond legacy PCs. The company has acquired NetSpeed Systems, a startup that makes system-on-chip (SoC) design tools and interconnect fabric intellectual property (IP). The company will be joining Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group, and […]

New Relic shifts with changing monitoring landscape

New Relic CEO Lew Cirne was feeling a bit nostalgic last week when he called to discuss the announcements for the company’s FutureStack conference taking place tomorrow in San Francisco. It had been 10 years since he first spoke to TechCrunch about his monitoring tool. A lot has changed in a decade including what his company […]

Adobe looks to AI to lift customer experience business

For years, marketers have been trying to optimize the online shopping experience to better understand their customers and deliver more customized interactions that ultimately drive more sales. Artificial intelligence was supposed to accelerate that, and today Adobe announced enhancements to Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager that attempt to deliver at least partly on that […]

Salesforce updates Sales Cloud ahead of Dreamforce with increased automation

Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference is coming later this month to San Francisco, but the news is starting already well ahead of the event. Today, the company announced updates to its core Sales Cloud with an emphasis toward automation and integration. For starters, the company wants to simplify inside phone sales, giving the team not […]

Don’t Fear Chatbots If You Have a Rich Content Strategy

“OK, Google, how do I integrate helpful chatbots into my existing content strategy without spending a fortune or frustrating my audience?” Many brands fall into one of two traps: Indecision – taking the wait-and-see approach to AI-based bots while continuing to create content without a back-end strategy. This increasingly […]

10 Elements that Attract Students to Your Website

The new 2018 E-Expectations® Trend Report by OmniUpdate and Ruffalo Noel Levitz is out with the latest research about how college-bound students engage digitally with higher ed websites. The findings? Students are sophisticated digital consumers who expect personalized engagement and information at their fingertips. How does your school stack […]

Forethought looks to reshape enterprise search with AI

Forethought, a 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant, has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise. The startup takes a bit of an unusual […]

PoLTE lets you track devices using LTE signal

Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF. If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need […]