Stories by Blair Hanley Frank

Slack apps can now use drop-down menus

Apps that integrate with Slack can now include drop-down menus in the messages that they post to the service, as part of a push to improve the interactivity of third-party integrations.

Microsoft acquires Deis to boost its Kubernetes chops

Microsoft is acquiring Deis, a company that makes tools to work with the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system. The deal, announced Monday, marks Microsoft’s continued interest in container orchestration.

US Department of Labor accuses Google of underpaying women

The U.S. Department of Labor says Google discriminates against female employees in pay at a level that's even worse than the tech industry as a whole, The Guardian reported on Friday.

Microsoft launches Windows 10 beta program for business users

Business users get access to their own version of the Windows 10 beta program this week.

Facebook's M assistant launches in US, will offer chat suggestions

More than a year after introducing a virtual assistant in its Messenger app, Facebook is launching M to the masses. While it was originally conceived as a bot that users would chat with, M now only offers a set of suggestions that are supposed to hel...

Tableau switches to subscription pricing for its BI products

Tableau is making a big change in the way it sells its business intelligence products. The company announced Thursday that all of its software will be available as a subscription, rather than a single license plus a service fee.

Google is helping to build another Asia-Pacific submarine cable

Google is investing in another massive undersea fiber-optic cable as a part of its plans to build out network connectivity around the world. The company announced Wednesday that it is helping to fund a project called Indigo, which will connect Jakart...

Google says its AI chips smoke CPUs, GPUs in performance tests

Google released a paper Wednesday detailing the benefits of using its dedicated Tensor Processing Units for machine learning inference, and the results are staggering.

Google's Espresso networking tech takes SD-WAN to internet scale

Google is working to accelerate the performance of its applications over the internet by building out a software-defined network at broad scale. On Tuesday, the company announced Espresso, a system that provides increased network performance to users...

DigitalOcean adds free monitoring to its cloud virtual machines

DigitalOcean’s cloud platform became more useful to developers running production applications on Tuesday with the addition of monitoring capabilities for its virtual machines.

Office 365's deskless worker package expands with new features

Microsoft is adding new capabilities to one of its cheapest enterprise plans for Office 365, in a push to capture a group of users traditionally underserved by the productivity suite.

HelloSign branches out to fix frustrating forms

Getting set up at a new job can be a frustrating maze of forms that require overlapping information to be entered perfectly. That’s the idea behind HelloWorks, a new service from HelloSign designed to simplify the process of filling out forms.

Here's how Microsoft is helping companies build IoT hardware

One of the biggest challenges with building connected hardware is getting from proof-of-concept (PoC) prototypes to a devices that are ready for a large-scale production rollout. Microsoft is aiming to help with that issue through a trio of lab space...

This company is turning FAQs into Alexa skills

People looking for an easier path to integrating with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant have good news on the horizon. NoHold, a company that builds services for making bots, unveiled a project it’s working on that can turn a document into an Alexa sk...