Author: pekandesigns

We hear so much about managing the customer relationship, but companies have to manage the products they sell, too. Propel, a Santa Clara startup, is taking a modern cloud approach to the problem, and today it landed an $18 million Series B investment. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous investors Cloud Apps […]

A new startup called Italic says it’s already received more than 100,000 signups for a marketplace where you can buy handbags, eyewear and other luxury products directly from the manufacturers who work with the world’s best-known brands. The marketplace is officially launching today. Italic is also announcing that it’s raised $13 million in funding from […]

Personalization comes at a steep price. All your data gets sucked up into a company’s servers where they can do whatever they want with it. But Canopy is a new content discovery startup that’s invented impressive technology that lets it learn about you anonymously while all your data stays on your device. Built by the […]

Apple recently unveiled a bunch of new products during a press event in New York. But the company also quietly shared a press release with new configurations for the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Customers can now get a MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 or Vega 20 graphics processing unit. Before this update, […]

It’s not always easy to do the right thing or to make ethical decisions in a complex business environment. People get lost inside large organizations and group think can overwhelm even normally ethical individuals. Converscent has created a platform to help, and today it announced a new benchmarking dashboard to allow companies to measure just […]

For the last year or so, Disney has been dabbling with massive virtual reality experiences that let players strap on a portable VR rig and run around in a warehouse-sized environment. In partnership with TheVOID (part of Disney’s 2017 accelerator class) and Lucasfilm’s ILMxLab, it launched a Star Wars-themed experience, Secrets of the Empire, at […]

Over the last year or so, Facebook has slowly been encroaching on LinkedIn’s territory as the go-to platform for people who want to leverage their networks of contacts to expand their career prospects with the launch of a way for people to connect with each other in mentoring relationships, and to look for jobs. Now, […]

After IBM announced its plans to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion, pundits quickly started speculating about when Red Hat competitors like Suse and Canonical would sell as well. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, though, doesn’t seem to have any interest in selling — at least for the time being. “I value my independence,” he told […]

Zendesk has always been strongly focused on customer service in the cloud. They began to look at this more broadly in September when they purchased Base to move into sales automation and CRM. Today, the company announced Zendesk Sunshine, a new platform for creating customer-focused applications on top of Zendesk’s toolset. All of this appears […]