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You’ll Never See The World The Same Way Again
Google Cloud (GOOG +2%, GOOGL +2.1%) has a deal with the Defense Dept. to respond to cyber threats, Axios reports.
The deal, with the Defense Innovation Unit, is in the “seven figures,” according to the report; not large (particularly in comparison to the contested JEDI deal), but may lead to a broader deal in the future as the Pentagon looks to work with multiple cloud providers.
“Multi-cloud is the future,” Google’s Mike Daniels tells Axios. “This is now coming to the federal government as well.”
Looking to remain a leader in a competitive market, Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) will invest $1.4B to develop AI-powered smart speakers.
The tech giant says the funding will help advance its tech development and the integration of its speakers with other business segments, such as watching events and placing orders through its e-commerce site.
Alibaba will also help partners build out integrations. KFC outlets in China will offer in-restaurant ordering and payments through BABA’s Tmall Genie speakers.
About 46M smart speakers were sold in China last year, up 110% Y/Y. According to IDC data, Alibaba moved 15.6M units.
Alibaba and closest competitor Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) (14.9M units last year) take a similar smart speaker approach to Amazon’s Alexa: sell the speakers for an affordable price to make connections and offer other money-making services.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) acquires Rivet Networks, which makes network interface cards responsible for a laptop’s network connection.
Rivet’s Killer-branded NICs appear in laptops from Dell, HP, and other popular manufacturers.
The Killer products are slanted towards gaming, helping to minimize latency and prioritizing traffic for games and other important applications.
The Rivet team will join Intel’s Wireless Solutions Group within the Client Computing Group. Rivet’s key products will integrate into Intel’s broader PC Wi-Fi portfolio.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Visa (V +2.1%) is making an investment and forming a partnership with GoodData, a global analytics company.
The move is part of Visa’s efforts to provide aggregated data and analytics that help Visa clients and partners understand the impact and effectiveness of decisions.
For GoodData, “Visa’s investment will allow us to increase our focus on interactive self-service analytics, user interfaces and data visualizations, as well as expand our customer support for managing complex data governance, compliance, cybersecurity, and privacy matters,” said founder and CEO Roman Stanek.
Twitter (TWTR +5.7%) has rolled out new feature settings aimed at improving platform health, giving users more control over their online conversations.
The company is testing a setting where users can choose before they tweet who can reply (from everyone, only people the user follows, or only those mentioned in the tweet). The reply button will be disabled for those not permitted to reply.
The settings are only available to a limited set of users for now, though everyone can see the conversations involved.
