Author: azeeadmin

Blissfully, a New York City startup that helps companies understand their SaaS usage inside their organizations, announced it has received a $3.5 million seed round.

The investment was led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Hubspot, Founder Collective, and several unnamed pre-seed investors also participated. They got a $1.5 million pre-seed investment, bringing the total so far to $5 million, according the company.

Company co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz says Blissfully actually helped him and his co-founder solve a problem they were having tracking the SaaS usage at their previous startups. Like many companies, they were using spreadsheets to track this information and they found it was untenable as the company grew beyond 30 or 40 people. They figured there had to be a better way, so they built one.

Their product is much more than simply a database of the SaaS products in use inside an organization. It can integrate with existing company systems like single sign-on tools such as Okta and OneLogIn, financial reporting systems and G Suite login information. “We are trying to automate as much of the data collection as possible to discover what you’re using, who’s using it and how much you are spending,” he said.

Blissfully SaaS report. Screenshot: Blissfully

Their scans often turn up products customers thought they had canceled or those that IT had asked employees to stop using. More than finding Shadow IT, the product also gives insight to overall SaaS spend, which many companies have trouble getting a grip on. They can find most usage with a scan. Some data such as customized contract information may have to be manually entered into the system, he says.

Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, whose company is one of the investors in this round, sees a growing need for this kind of tool. “The widespread growth of SaaS across companies of all sizes is a leading indicator of the market need for Blissfully. As business’ investments in SaaS increase, they lose visibility into issues ranging from spending to security,” Halligan said in a statement.

The company offers a freemium and pay model and is available in the G Suite Marketplace. If you go for the free version, you can scan your systems for SaaS usage, but if you want to do more complex integrations with company systems, you have to pay. They currently have 10 employees and 500 customers with a mix of paying and free.

One interesting aspect of the Blissfully tool is that it is built entirely using Serverless architecture on AWS Lambda.

Lime, the electric scooter and bike-share startup, is expanding its program for people with low incomes. Called Lime Access, the program enables people who qualify for state or federal assistance programs to access Lime’s fleet of vehicles at a discount.

Lime first launched the program in May. At the time and up until now, it enabled people to purchase 100 rides on pedal bikes for $5. But starting today, anyone who is eligible for state or federal assistance programs can access traditional pedal bikes at a 95 percent discount and electric bikes and scooters at a 50 percent discount per ride.

Those who are eligible can purchase credits via PayNearMe, a cash payment network that lets you pay for items and services from companies in person.

Electric scooter competitor Bird introduced a similar program called One Bird that eliminates the $1 fee to unlock a Bird scooter. Bird has raised $415 million in funding, while Lime has raised $467 million and, as of last month, partnered with ride-hailing giant Uber.

In a speech before the Department of Defense at the Pentagon today, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the broad contours of the new Space Force that the Trump Administration wants to create as the sixth branch of the U.S. military.

Emphasizing the need to both further militarize and privatize space as a new war-fighting domain, Pence stressed that the new branch of the military is targeted for a 2020 implementation date. The administration is pushing for $8 billion in new space spending.

“While other nations increasingly possess the capability to operate in space, not all of them share our commitment to freedom, private property and the rule of law,” said Pence. “As we continue to carry American leadership in space, so also will we carry America’s commitment to freedom into this new frontier.”

Pence cited threats from North Korea, Russia, China and Iran to the safety of the U.S. space program.

Newer threats include the Chinese government’s 2007 launch of a satellite-destroying missile and the development of hypersonic missiles that can evade U.S. missile defense capabilities. The Chinese government has set up a separate division within its own military to address space as a war-fighting domain, Pence said. “Our adversaries have transformed space into a war-fighting domain already.”

“It is not enough to have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Pence said quoting the president. “What was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial.”

To advance its goals of creating the new Space Force, the Trump Administration had commissioned the Department of Defense to issue a report on the necessary steps to create the new military branch.

The creation of a new branch of the military — the first since the Air Force was created in the wake of World War II in 1947 — could require a significant reorganization of the Pentagon. And some officials within the military and national security communities fiercely oppose the idea. The Air Force in particular is opposed to the idea, because it might lose key responsibilities. The proposal would also need Congressional approval.

In a report that will be issued later today, the DOD outlined four steps.

The first is the creation of a United States Space Command that will coordinate the nation’s space-fighting capabilities. Pence likened it to the special operations command established in the eighties that provided unified command and control capabilities for mobilizing terrestrial air, sea and land forces. “This new command structure for the physical domain of space, led by a four star flag officer will…. develop the space warfighting doctrine and tactics of the future.”

As part of the space plan, the Department of Defense will also create a new space operations force that will be “an elite group of joint war fighters specializing in the war-fighting domains of space,” according to Pence. They’ll support the space combat and command and carry out space missions.

Third, a new joint organization called the Space Development Agency will be created to develop new technologies for the space force. “While our adversaries have been busy weaponizing space, we have been bureaucratizing it,” Pence said. He pointed to the creation of the intercontinental ballistic missiles and the Navy’s nuclear fleet as examples of American military innovation and achievement from past initiatives.

(It’s a good thing he didn’t bring up the Air Force’s “half-a-trillion dollar drone boondoggle” of a new fighter plane.)

Finally, the process of creating the new organization will require oversight, which will include the creation of a new civilian position that will report to the secretary of defense, Pence said. That position will be called the assistant secretary of defense of space.

“Just as we’ve done in ages past, the United States will meet the emerging threats on this new battlefield,” Pence said. “The time has come to establish the United States Space Force.”

One thing is very clear upon first look at the Galaxy Home. Samsung is once again trying to beat Apple at its own game. The company could have gone any number of different directions with the product, taking on entry level devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home (or, for that matter, the Dot or Mini) or something a bit weirder along the lines of Harman Kardon’s Cortana speaker. 

Heck, even a Smart Display might have been in the cards for the company, though that would have meant embracing Google Assistant — something the company has clearly been not very keen to do.

Instead, the device’s black cloth cover and premium sound makes it pretty clear from the get go that Samsung once again has Apple firmly in its sites here. And why not? Bixby is still a ways away from being a true Alexa or Google Assistant competitor, so logic follows that it would take first aim at users who’ve got the disposable income to plunk down $1,000+ for a Note 9.

That said, while there are clear HomePod echos here, the design language is still unique. The speaker takes a quasi-teardrop form, which a base that seamless transitions into three metal tripods. It’s an interesting choice, which suggests that the premium speaker would be just as at home on the floor as it would a desk or tabletop.

There are no physical buttons on the top of the device. Instead its a touch surface that illuminates as a bright, white ring. There’s also a light up AKG logo, in case you forget that Samsung now owns the company that tunes all of its audio products. There don’t appear to by any inputs here, either, so there’s no plugging in auxiliary products. Instead, you’ll fully wireless on this one. 

It’s hard to imagine Bixby itself being a compelling enough motivating factor for more than a small handful of users, so the importance of Samsung’s Spotify partnership can’t be understated. Even among Apple users, there’s likely still a sizable contingent of users still holding onto Spotify accounts.

Sadly, we can’t really speak much to sound quality or other functionality yet. For now the Galaxy Home is really eye candy at the event. That said, the device is “soon,” which I expect means we’ll be getting our hands on it “sooner.”

Facebook is shutting down Friend List Feeds sometime today, according to a message posted in the Facebook app. The feature allowed users to scroll through only those posts from one of their designated friend lists – for example, family, work colleagues, neighbors, industry peers, and so on. The end result was a much more personalized version of Facebook – one where you could catch up on the updates that were important to you, without the clutter from Facebook Pages, posts from acquaintances, or those from friends whose updates you didn’t care to follow for any other reason.

To use Friend List Feeds, you would first have to create a friend list in Facebook. And to be clear – those friend lists are not going away.

So if you still want to brag about your professional successes to your industry colleagues or post baby pictures for your family to see, that will still be possible.

Facebook’s note regarding the feeds’ shutdown says “don’t worry – you can still continue to create, edit and share to your friend lists.” What’s winding down are the Friend List Feeds, which is a way to read these specific people’s updates in their own separate News Feed within the Facebook app.

To access this feature, there’s a section called “Feeds” in the Facebook app which would list all the feeds available to you, based on your friend lists.

Friend lists have been around on Facebook for a number of years, but the original version required a lot of manual labor. You’d first have to create a list, title it, and then go through all your friends one-by-one to determine who to add. And of course, as you added new Facebook friends, you’d have to remember to add them to the appropriate list, too.

Few adopted this feature – in fact, Facebook said in 2011 that 95 percent of Facebook users hadn’t made a single list. To make things simpler, Facebook launched “smart lists”, where it began auto-grouping your friends into lists for you to save you the effort. Facebook focused on making smart lists where it could identify some common factor based on profile data – like people who went to school with you, people you work with, people who live within 50 miles of you, and other things.

That way, you could use the lists for selective sharing and to browse their feeds, without having to do the work of list-building yourself.

But even with Smart Lists, it seems that not many people likely used the “Friend List Feeds” feature, specifically – or perhaps, even knew it existed.

In addition, with the rise of Facebook Groups, those who want to share and browse posts focused on a given topic – like neighborhood news, discussions about a favorite show, people going through a similar health crisis, or anything else – could just join a private group instead.

According to Facebook’s message, Friend List Feed are shutting down on August 9, 2018 – which is today. However, the feature is still available as of the time of writing.

Samsung didn’t just uneil new devices like the Galaxy Home, the Galaxy Watch and of course the new Galaxy Note 9 at its Unpacked event this morning — it also announced a partnership with Spotify.

The goal is to create a seamless cross-device listening experience on Samsung devices, including the ones announced today. As demonstrated on-stage, you should be able to start playing a song on your phone, then switch over to your TV, then over to your Galaxy Home.

This integration will allow you to play Spotify on your Samsung Smart TV through the SmartThings app deepens the integration between Spotify and Samsung’s voice assistant Bixby, making Spotify the default choice whenever you ask Bixby to look for music.

In addition, Spotify will become part of the set-up experience on Samsung devices.

For Spotify, this  partnership should mean more visibility, making it the preferred music experience on Samsung devices. And for Samsung, it highlights one of its differences compared to Apple, which has been focusing on Apple Music as it rolls out new devices like the HomePod.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Unpacked to talk about the partnership, which he also discussed in the official Spotify announcement.

“We believe that this significant long-term partnership will provide Samsung users across millions of devices with the best possible music streaming experience, and make discovering new music easier than ever – with even more opportunities to come,” Ek said.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro makes robots in Osaka. His latest robot, Ibuki, is one for the nightmare catalog: it’s a robotic 10-year-old boy that can move on little tank treads and has soft, rubbery face and hands.

The robot has complete vision routes that can scan for faces and it has a sort of half-track system for moving around. It has “involuntary” motions like blinking and little head bobs but is little more than a proof-of-concept right now, especially considering its weird robo-skull is transparent.

“An Intelligent Robot Infrastructure is an interaction-based infrastructure. By interacting with robots, people can establish nonverbal communications with the artificial systems. That is, the purpose of a robot is to exist as a partner and to have valuable interactions with people,” wrote Ishiguro. “Our objective is to develop technologies for the new generation information infrastructures based on Computer Vision, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.”

Ishiguro is a roboticist who plays on the borders of humanity. He made a literal copy of himself in 2010. His current robots are even more realistic and Ibuki’s questing face and delicate hands are really very cool. That said, expect those soft rubber hands to one day close around your throat when the robots rise up to take back what is theirs. Good luck, humans!

Samsung this morning showed of a new version of its Bixby voice assistant, which is now more conversational and is able to continue your conversation when you ask a follow-up question. For example, if you first ask the assistant about concerts over Labor Day weekend, as was demoed on stage at a Samsung press conference today, you can then follow-up by asking about another date without having to repeat the entire question. Other new features were also demoed, including support for making reservations, and the ability to tap into apps like Yelp, Uber, Ticketmaster, Fandango, OpenTable, and Google Maps.

The app integration allows Bixby to answer questions without opening the apps directly. Even if you don’t have those apps installed, Bixby will be able to use them for results, the company said.

Samsung also noted it was working with these partners so you could more easily take actions. For instance, instead of saying ‘buy a ticket on Ticketmaster” you could just say “buy a ticket.” With Google, the integrations will allow for things like routing, navigation and points-of-interest.

Bixby will also get smarter in time, as it will learn what you’ve done in the past to inform its responses.

One example Samsung showed off was with reservations – it will fill in the number of people in your party and the time, based on your prior bookings.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) may not be a household name, but it houses some important open source projects including Kubernetes, the fast-growing container orchestration tool. Today, CNCF announced that the Prometheus monitoring and alerting tool had joined Kubernetes as the second “graduated” project in the organization’s history.

The announcement was made at PromCon, the project’s dedicated conference being held in Munich this week. According to Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and COO at CNCF, a graduated project reflects the overall maturity where it has reached a tipping point in terms of diversity of contribution, community and adoption.

For Prometheus that means 20 active maintainers, more than 1,000 contributors and more than 13,000 commits. Its contributors include the likes of DigitalOcean, Weaveworks, ShowMax and Uber.

CNCF projects start in the sandbox, move onto incubation and finally to graduation. To achieve graduation level, they need to adopt the CNCF Code of Conduct, have passed an independent security audit and defined a community governance structure. Finally it needs to show an “ongoing commitment to code quality and security best practices,” according to the organization.

Aniszczyk says the tool consists of a time series database combined with a query language that lets developers search for issues or anomalies in their system and get analytics back based on their queries. Not surprisingly, it is especially well suited to containers.

Like Kubernetes, the project that became Prometheus has its roots inside Google. Google was one of the first companies to work with containers and developed Borg (the Kubernetes predecessor) and Borgmon (the Prometheus predecessor). While Borg’s job was to manage container orchestration, Borgmon’s job was to monitor the process and give engineers feedback and insight into what was happening to the containers as they moved through their lifecycle.

While its roots go back to Borgmon, Prometheus as we know it today was developed by a couple of former Google engineers at SoundCloud in 2012. It joined Kubernetes as the second CNCF project in May 2016, and appropriately is the second graduate.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s role in all of this to help promote cloud native computing, the notion that you can manage your infrastructure wherever it lives in a common way, greatly reducing the complexity of managing on-prem and cloud resources. It is part of the Linux Foundation and boasts some of the biggest names in tech as members.

It was just a matter of time, right? We knew Samsung had to be working on a Bixby-based Amazon Echo/Google Home competitor. Welp, the Galaxy Home was announced at today’s big Note 9 event, and the device is going right after Apple’s HomePod with a premium design and what looks to be some high-end hardware. 

The device has a cloth covering and a tripod stand, which would make it just as at home on the floor as it would on a desktop. There’s a built-in subwoofer and eight-microphones designed for a similar far-field communication as other smart speakers. Like the HomePod launch, there’s not really a lot of information at the launch — not even pricing or timing. Instead, the product is currently listed as “coming soon.”

Given the design and Samsung’s device history, I’d expect the thing to cost an arm and a leg — or, at the very least, something similar to the HomePod. At very least, some working reference units in the world. Dozens of the devices were present at the event, partially powering the sound system for today’s keynote.

Naturally, the company’s smart assistant is the key to the product, which is, well, a mixed bag at best. Bixby got off to a major rough start here in the space and still doesn’t offer much to differentiate it from Alexa/Assistant/Siri and the like. Instead, the company is no doubt hoping to making existing Galaxy users the base here.

Given that Samsung has failed to offer a decent music streaming service of its own, the company found a natural partner in fellow Apple competitor, Spotify. The popular music service will serve as the basis for the smart speaker’s music playback. That in and of itself may be enough to cause users to give it a second look. Though the Google Home Max, notably, also lets users make Spotify the default choice.

As with the rest of the competition, smart home functionality is also key, with Samsung’s SmartHome service as the the basis of that experience.