As cloud architecture becomes more widespread, many organizations are adopting a hybrid approach, combining SaaS in private and public clouds with on-premises products. IBM bought Apptio, a hybrid data tracking platform, for $4.6 billion in cash today, doubling down on the hybrid concept. IBM plans to use Apptio alongside its …

After meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week, Amazon said it would more than double its investment in India over the next seven years. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Friday that the company has invested $11 billion in India and plans to invest $15 billion more by 2030. Most …

According to two sources, Apple has been in talks with NPCI to launch Apple Pay in South Asia, hoping to compete with Walmart’s PhonePe, Google’s GPay, and Paytm. People familiar with the matter said Apple is working on a localized version of Apple Pay that works with UPI, a popular …

Organizations increasingly value observability—the ability to measure a system’s state using its data. Observability enabled business goals for 78% of IT decision-makers and practitioners in a New Relic survey. Given the web’s fluidity, website observability and analytics can be tricky. But ignoring them could hurt business. SOASTA found that longer …

A four-week-old startup has raised $113 million to compete with OpenAI in building, training, and applying large language models and generative AI. Paris-based Mistral AI, co-founded by Google DeepMind and Meta alumni, will focus on open source solutions and enterprises to solve what CEO Arthur Mensch calls the biggest challenge …

YouTube is lowering YPP requirements for creators to access monetization tools. The company is opening its shopping affiliate program to U.S. YPP creators with over 20,000 subscribers. The Google-owned company announced new partner program requirements: 500 subs; 3 public uploads in 90 days;   3,000 watch hours in the past …

Meta released an open-source AI-powered music generator to compete with Google. Meta’s MusicGen tool, a demo of which can be found here, can convert a text description (e.g., “An ’80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background”) into about 12 seconds of audio. MusicGen can …

The most popular VTubers, online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and elsewhere, have hundreds of millions of hours of viewership per month, loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships, and demand for more. Big tech appears to be taking notice. …

Prime minister Rishi Sunak announced at London Tech Week that OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic will provide “early or priority access” to their AI models to support evaluation and safety research. After several AI giants warned about the existential and even extinction-level risks of unregulated AI, Sunak became more interested …

Adobe announced today that enterprise customers can customize its Firefly generative image generator with their own branded assets. In addition, enterprise users will be able to access Firefly from Adobe Express, formerly Adobe Spark. “Enterprise leaders expect content demands to increase by five-fold over the next two years, making it …