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Australian mining giant Rio Tinto just completed its rollout of huge driverless trucks to transport iron ore and other material around its Pilbara sites. They can run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The seven metre high trucks are Rio's way of increasing onsite efficiency, cutting costs, and improving safety.

They're controlled by employees in a control centre in Perth, 1,200km away. The idea is to cut the need for high-risk jobs where employees face rough working conditions in extreme heat and often suffer extreme fatigue. 

According to a report in the Financial Times, Rio is already seeing noticeable benefits to the deployment of the driverless trucks which are transporting around 20 million tonnes of iron ore every month and have the potential to save up to 500 working hours per year. 

Andrew Harding, the company's iron ore chief executive, said: "Our autonomous fleet outperforms the manned fleet by an average of 12%, primarily by eliminating required breaks, absenteeism and shift changes."

Rio Tinto isn't the only company employing autonomous vehicles.

BHP Billiton and Fortescue have also been testing the new technology, but Rio Tinto boasts the most advanced fleet, by far. The company has been rolling out the automated vehicles for the past three years, but completed the rollout this week. There are 69 vehicles in total which make up a fifth of its fleet in Pilbara, the location of one of its major operations.

While the technology will most likely take away jobs traditionally performed by humans, other jobs will be created in areas such as technology development and data analysis, according to Dr Carla Boehl from Curtin University’s school of mining.

The introduction of the fleet comes at a difficult time for mining companies. Commodity prices have been on the decline, and in April, it was reported that Rio Tinto was shipping less iron ore than it digs up. The introduction of these technologies is an important way of cutting costs.

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NOW WATCH: This 3-minute animation will change the way you see the universe

 Back in 2013, YouSendIt changed its name to Hightail because it had evolved beyond its original file-sharing roots. Today, the core of the service is still about sharing files, but with a greater focus on professional use. To emphasize this, the company is officially launching Hightail Spaces out of beta today, a new tool that wants be the Google Docs for visual files — and kill… Read More

Windows 10 users are being encouraged to "give Microsoft Edge a shot" when they attempt to change their default browser to Google Chrome, The Verge reports. 

In a newly leaked version of Windows 10 (build 10568), users who try to jump ship receive one final message that lists the upsides of using "an app built just for Windows 10." Under this message there is a button that says "Don't switch and try it now" which opens Edge and doesn't change the default browser. 

Microsoft has previously made overtures to those wanting to switch, placing a message within the Bing search for "Chrome" and "Firefox" which advertises the benefits of Edge.  

According to Netmarketshare, Edge has around 2.4% of the total browser share on desktop as of September 2015. Safari, the default browser on OS X, has around 5%. 

The company is also targeting people who want to switch to third-party photo and music apps, offering a pop-up window that displays the virtues of the built-in Photo or Groove Music apps. 

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NOW WATCH: Here's Microsoft's amazing vision for what the HoloLens can do

Google is making an aggressive move to grow its Google Apps for Work business with a new plan that will make it easier and cheaper than ever for big companies to switch away from Microsoft Office.

If you're under a Microsoft enterprise agreement, or EA, Google will give you Google Apps for Work — free.

"We're going to meet the needs of customers with EA," Google Apps head of global sales Rich Rao says.

The EA is one of Microsoft's most potent weapons for ensuring customer loyalty with its biggest customers. Basically, if you agree to a three-year contract, Microsoft gives you deep discounts on Office and other enterprise apps.

Microsoft loves it because it locks you in to Office, no matter what. But since you sign up in advance, it means customers can sometimes end up paying for services they don't actually need, for the entire three-year span of the deal.

It also means most companies don't even look at alternatives like Google Apps, since they have to pay for Microsoft Office during the term of their EA no matter what.

That is why Google is now rendering it a moot point.

The only catch with this offer is that the qualifying companies have to promise that once the EA is up, they will use Google Apps for Work for a year at its standard price of $5 per user per month for just the productivity tools, or $10 per user per month for unlimited storage.

Moreover, Google knows that a lot of companies rely on trusted resellers for help buying and deploying their business software, from small local IT contractor shops all the way up to global mega-firms like Accenture or Price Waterhouse Cooper.

And so Google is paying a bounty of $25 per user to these resellers, out of pocket, to help cover the costs of training new Google Apps users. The idea is that the savings gets passed on to customers, removing one more thing in the way of going with Google Apps.

"It's cash from us, on behalf of customers, for resellers," Rao says.

Google claims some momentum in the enterprise space, with 60% of the Fortune 500 using Google Apps in at least some capacity. And in a global sense, Google's Rao says more than 600 companies outside the United States are using Google Apps, with more than 10,000 paying users.

Now, Rao says, a lot of Google Apps' features, including real-time collaboration and voice typing, are standard in the industry. Strategic moves like this one are designed to push Google deeper into the enterprise, now that the product is so well understood.

But it's facing stiff competition from Microsoft Office 365, which is using its established enterprise presence to push a cloud-based, subscription-based service of its own. And enterprises, with their deep pockets and hundreds or thousands of users, are the most prized customers of all.

So the question becomes whether Google can pry away those customers with the enticement of free software.

SEE ALSO: Apple users need a lot less help than PC users, IBM finds

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NOW WATCH: A random guy bought Google.com for $12

Microsoft has launched a new programme called "Easy Trade Up" that incentivises MacBook owners into buying a new Windows 10 PC by offering up to $300 (£194) for their laptop. 

The programme is available in the US, UK, Canada, India, Brazil, France, Germany, and Taiwan, and offers similar amounts in each local currency for a used PC. The US version appears to be the only market where Microsoft is offering a separate figure for a MacBook, however. 

This isn't the first time Microsoft has attempted to persuade users with discounts. The company has offered up to $650 (£420) off the Surface Pro 3 in exchange for a MacBook Air, $100 (£64) off the Xbox One for PS3 owners, and $200 (£130) off a Surface tablet when exchanged with an iPad. 

Whether the tactic works is still up for debate. Windows 10 is on over 110 million PCs at present but Microsoft's stated aim is to get to over one billion so there is still some way to go.

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NOW WATCH: Microsoft's first laptop looks like a MacBook killer

 Skype is working to make is service more broadly accessible, Microsoft announced today, detailing a new feature that will allow users to invite anyone – even those who don’t have a Skype account – to use the service via the Skype for Web interface. Invitees won’t have to create an account or download an app, but can instead join a chat as a guest simply by clicking a link. Read More

One of the first rules for starting a business, is to figure out who you plan to take money from. Otherwise, you’re into market creation which is hard and usually involves lots of dollars to educate & create the market. Symphony Communications, who got a whopping $100m this week from Google plus an assorted list of venture capitalists, strictly follows the take money from others model.

Symphony’s initial goal is simply to destroy Bloomberg’s Terminal product and like a half chopped down tree, it’s not hard sweating to accomplish this. Bloomberg Terminal is (or was) used by nearly every financial trader in the world to ‘chat’ with their buddies. They’re not talking about the weather or sharing stupid giphy images. They’re talking about money, real money and real money right now.

In the financial world, price is not a concern. If you do exactly what they want and do it exactly how they need it. They will pay you whatever you want. To wit, Bloomberg Terminal costs $20,000 per user per year. Yup, that’s not a typo. $20,000 per user per year (4 zeros). Bloomberg Terminal does other stuff but mostly no one really cared, it was the world’s most expensive chat system sold to a community where is price is no object.

Life must have been good. But Bloomberg screwed up, seems Bloomberg’s news reporters could access the chat history and used that information to publish their own news reports based upon trading activity and chats. Oh dear! That bomb blew a big hole in Bloomberg’s credibility. Worse – the traders assumed the information was super secure, then they learned that Bloomberg routinely turned over chat history to various authorities. Finally, Bloomberg Terminal experienced periodic outages.

Can shooting fish in a barrel get any easier?

So Symphony enters with financial support from the very customers upset by Bloomberg and says we’ll run your chat service, do it cheaper, do it more securely and do it more reliably.  How does $10,000 a user sound? (note has not disclosed pricing). Symphony clearly is working from a solid business case though with a very fickle customer base.

Slack however may not be so secure. A quick view of their privacy and user data request policy basically says all of your chat history is there in the open for slack to use however they see fit with under a wide “to protect Slack and our users” which is pretty vague. But do you care? Perhaps not. However, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services has a different feeling. At recent gathering, he commented that vendors should encrypt everything because the cost is low now and this prevents potential inquires down the road. Clearly he doesn’t want AWS to be in a position of having to make a decision on whether to disclose something or not.

Symphony has a quite detailed privacy policy, so they’re obviously serious about privacy. Not fully disclosed is how they will handle key encryption management but likely large paying customers will be given the option to manage the keys, allowing Symphony to operate with a free conscience that they have no idea what is being chatting about.

Symphony recently opened their platform for anyone to sign-up. I gave it a try. It’s clearly not as polished as Slack and the sign-up process was a bit clunky. Symphony’s web client interface is a bit sparse (think Slack minus half the features and at half the font size). I will admit I’ve grown fonder of Slack as a regular user.

But, I’ve also met several enterprise executives who have banned Slack inside their companies due to privacy concerns. Is this the tip of the iceberg?

Several have wondered aloud whether Google’s direct investment over Google Ventures over Google Alphabet means anything. Likely yes, but harder to say with more definition than that. Google clearly recognizes that encryption is becoming increasingly important and having a cat bird seat at Symphony likely doesn’t hurt. Google is also trying to be relevant in their offerings to Enterprises and here again Symphony provides them some much needed insight.

The post Is Slack secure? And Symphony raises $100m appeared first on Chris Kranky.

 For a while now, Google has offered a single-sign-on service based on the SAML standard. Today, the company is adding SAML 2.0 support for 17 additional enterprise SaaS apps like WebEx, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite, Smartsheet, Zendesk and — you can insert your own joke here — Amazon Web Services. Read More

Dell's $67 billion purchase of EMC is the biggest pure tech acquisition ever. (AOL's $162 billion buy of Time Warner in 2000 was larger, but Time Warner was a media company, not a tech company.) This chart from Statista shows some of the largest tech acquisitions of the past decade, measured in 2015 dollars. 

There are a lot of dogs on the list.

HP's deal with Compaq didn't lead to the expected synergies and was part of the reason the board fired then-CEO Carly Fiorina. HP is now laying off thousands of people from the Enterprise Services division it created largely out of its EDS buy, and it's involved in litigation with former Autonomy execs after writing off $8.8 billion in value from that acquisition.

Google only held on to Motorola for 2 years before spinning most of the company back out to Lenovo for less than $3 billion. Microsoft-Skype and Oracle-Sun were neutral at best — neither one helped the buying company create significant new businesses, although some of the technology and expertise might have percolated through the organizations.

Of all these, only Facebook-WhatsApp falls into the "too early to tell" category.

SEE ALSO: Teens and millennials are abandoning network TV

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 Symphony, the secure cloud-based communications platform, announced today that it has received a $100 million round from a list of investors that includes Google, Inc. Google’s part in the investment was first reported last week by the Wall Street Journal, but the search giant was also joined by Lakestar, Natixis, Societe Generale, UBS and existing investor Merus Capital.… Read More

This week was unusually busy on the tech media circuit in Silicon Valley, as several publications — Fortune, Re/Code, and Vanity Fair — hosted events featuring big-name tech execs and investors.

We talked to a lot of these execs, as well as the quieter folks behind the scenes, at the events and the parties afterwards, and a common theme shone through: Everybody agrees we're in a tech bubble.

At the Code/Mobile conference in Half Moon Bay, there was a lot of chatter about "on-demand" companies such as Uber, Postmates, and Instacart. These companies sprung up over the last few years to provide conveniences at the touch of a smartphone button to busy professionals with disposable income.

But investors are worried that these companies have been subsidized by easy VC money for too long.  In many cases, their customer and usage numbers are going up because they're using VC money to expand into new cities, but customer acquisition costs remain high and many of them are bleeding money. Worse, mature markets like San Francisco and New York are starting to see some scary, weak customer adoption numbers, which bodes poorly for these companies as they expand into other regions.

Vapor time

Basically the theory is that you can only sell a dollar for 75 cents for so long until you run out of money. That's going to happen at some point, and some investors believe a lot of these companies will vaporize.

At the Vanity Fair party, an attendee referenced Bill Gurley sounding the alarm about the tech bubble on stage, saying that today's tech scene in San Francisco has an awful lot of startups with business models based on essentially replacing young tech workers' mothers. That can't last.

At the beginning of Gurley's panel, moderator Nick Bilton asked attendees by a show of hands how many thought we were in a bubble. Most people flung their arms up. 

 There was also chatter that late stage rounds are getting much harder to raise without some serious revenue growth and a path to profitability — something that Fortune's Dan Primack also heard while he was in town this week, and that Business Insider heard from Tanium cofounder Orion Hindawi back when that red-hot (and already profitable) security company raised its latest $120 million funding round in September.

As for the biggest unicorn — Uber — some people are coming to the conclusion that it's overvalued at $51 billion, but will continue to raise even more money at even higher valuations and so may end up being a great investment. That's actually not as paradoxical as it might sound — recall how everybody thought Facebook was overvalued in its late-stage rounds, and it's now worth more than $200 billion on its fast growth in mobile advertising, a business it didn't even have when it was private.

Other common topics of discussion:

• Jack's return. For whatever reason, we ran into an unusually large number of people connected with Twitter — present or former employees, and investors. They were universally happy that the distracting CEO search was over and thought that Jack Dorsey could handle the job while still running Square. One longtime employee compared him to Steve Jobs with a completely straight face.
• The inevitability of self-driving vehicles. They're definitely coming, even if not everybody can agree on what they'll look like or who will use them first. 
• Us. It's not every day that the company you work for gets a new owner, so there were a lot of congratulations and questions about our soon-to-be owners Axel Springer. 

IT'S OVER: The 'unicorn' era comes to a screeching halt

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NOW WATCH: Inside the insane life of Facebook billionaire Sean Parker

LogMeIn plans to merge LastPass with another password-management company, Meldium, which it bought last year.

Silicon Valley cloud computing behemoth Box is planning to open data centres in Europe following a court ruling that could have a major impact on American technology companies, according to The Telegraph.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected the "Safe Harbour" agreement this week, which let American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe.

Box, as well as companies like Facebook and Twitter, may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over.

Box, a billion dollar enterprise software and collaboration firm, is one of the first American tech companies to say it will open data centres in Europe after the ECJ ruling was passed.

A Box spokesman told Business Insider that the company isn't opening data centres in Europe as a direct result of the ECJ ruling. He said Box had been planning to allow its customers to store their data in Europe long before Safe Harbour was rejected by the ECJ.

Speaking at Box's annual conference in San Francisco last week, Aaron Levie, the company's 29-year-old cofounder and CEO, said: "In a year from now I would absolutely expect we will have customers storing their data internationally. We’re building towards it now."

Box is planning to partner with IBM in order to host European customer data within the EU. IBM has 46 data centres around the world and from next year Box will use servers in one or more of IBM's European data centres to host European customer data.

The Safe Harbour ruling from Europe’s highest court came after Edward Snowden's NSA leaks showed that European data stored by US companies was not safe from surveillance that would be illegal in Europe.

Levie said at the BoxWorks conference that he understands why European countries want to store personal data within the EU.

He added that the end of Safe Harbour is a result of Europe becoming more privacy-sensitive, as well as political and trade concerns around the dominance of American internet giants. There are also practical concerns relating to how easy it is for law enforcement agencies to access data, said Levie.

"The problem is that none of our governments are able to comprehend the global nature of the internet in how it is used and how it has been architected," said Levie.

"Until we really appreciate how global and interconnected our societies and businesses are, we’ll probably never have legislation or policies that truly get to the heart of how you should regulate the internet."

Also speaking at BoxWorks, Box’s chief operating officer, Dan Levin, said: "Allowing our customers to store their data where they want to is an important future direction for us."

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NOW WATCH: Animated map reveals the 550,000 miles of cable hidden under the ocean that power the internet

The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called unicorn companies have been created every week in 2015, according to data from CB Insights. 

But now it looks like winter is coming to Silicon Valley.

Fortune's Dan Primack went to San Francisco this week and met with a number of people involved with unicorn companies with ballooning valuations. 

He says the mentality of people in Silicon Valley is starting to change, and people are getting scared.

"As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment," he writes. "The difference now is that their sentiment is fear."

Primack writes:

The past several years of raising too much, too high, too soon has run smack into a much more conservative investor ethos. Later-stage tech startups can still raise growth equity — and still lots of it — but not necessarily at the terms they were receiving just two months ago.

“This shift is only five or six weeks old, so most companies haven’t felt it yet,” a senior tech banker explains. “But I know of many companies who raised money at $1 billion valuations last year that are now being told that, to raise money now, they need to take around $700 million or $800 million. Probably with some serious structure that protects investors, like ratchets, on top of it.” 

It should be noted that Primack is one of the best reporters on private equity and venture capital. He's really plugged in, and he's not an alarmist. 

There's been a growing sense that the Fed could soon raise interest rates, which would impact startup investing. More importantly: Successful VC-backed tech sector IPOs have been few and far between. Just this week, flash-storage provider Pure Storage went public, but began trading below its $17 IPO price, and closed the day at $16.01.

The public markets are more harsh than private markets. This means private investors need to reset their expectations, which is leading to downward valuation pressure.

It certainly seems like this is the beginning of the downturn in the private tech sector that VCs like Benchmark's Bill Gurley have been warning about for a year now.

Read Primack's full story here.

SEE ALSO: Which billion-dollar 'unicorn' startups are at most risk of dying? Here's what some data suggests ...

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NOW WATCH: 4 things the new 'Steve Jobs' movie got wrong

Amazon just made it fast, easy and cheap for big companies to move ALL of their data into Amazon's cloud so they can close down their in-house data centers.

Amazon is doing this with a creative new piece of hardware, a "box" if you will, called Snowball.

Companies rent the Snowball box from Amazon for as little as $200.

After the box is plugged in, and the security is configured, it can vacuum ungodly amounts of data from a customer's data center into Amazon's cloud in a matter opf hours or days, intead of months or longer.

Amazon believes the turbo-charged pathway to its cloud will be a game changer. For instance, one company once came to Amazon wanting to move a bunch of apps and data into Amazon's AWS cloud, but it couldn't. It told the AWS team: "If we fully saturated our network, it would take us 8.5 years and want to shut our data center down faster than that," Amazon's cloud chief Andy Jassy told the crowd.

Big corporations are increasingly looking to cloud services as alternatives to maintaining expensive in-house data centers. 

Capital One is in the process of closing down 5 of its 8 datacenters because it's moving its apps and tech into AWS, Capital One's CIO Rob Alexander told attendees. GE intends to move over 60% of the global workload into AWS, closing 30 of its 34 data centers.

And some companies, like Yamaha America are going all in with Amazon, closing all of their datacenters altogether, saving $500,000 a year in the process.

This should worry the big IT vendors that sell severs, networking, storage and other hardware like Cisco, HP, IBM. Like all big cloud companies, Amazon builds much of its own data center hardware. Meanwhile, enterprises are saving money by not buying and maintaining all that gear themselves.

SEE ALSO: Amazon is about to announce a deal that should terrify Microsoft

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NOW WATCH: 5 of the richest countries on Earth are in the Middle East, and they won't take any refugees from their war-torn neighbors

Finding a great place to work is tough, but doable if you invest time in the process.

Working remotely sounds great, but spending the entire day alone in your pajamas can get depressing pretty fast. Which is why a lot of freelancers choose to work in coffee shops, libraries, or coworking spaces. But once you're out in the world, you open yourself up to all the same distractions that open office dwellers complain about.

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"I hate fundraising parties," famed investor Bill Gurley said on stage at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit, during a discussion about whether or not we're in a tech bubble. 

"Fundraising parties" are when a startup throws a big celebration after raising a big round at a hefty valuation.

We've been to quite a few: There's usually a lot of free food, alcohol, and branded tchotchkes for attendees, as well as a speech or two by executives about their "journey."

But Gurley says he hates these parties, because they fundamentally misunderstand what raising money and earning a big valuation means. 

"Valuations are not a reward for what you’ve done in the past," Gurley said.

Instead, they're a bet on where the company will be in the future.

"[After raising a round] people should really be thinking, 'Oh shit! We have huge expectations ahead of us, we better get to work.'" 

Gurley highlighted fundraising parties as a sign of the last tech bubble, and says he's wary when he sees startups throwing them now. 

He shared the stage with Julie Wainwright, current CEO of The RealReal and former CEO of now-defunct Pets.com, who shared her own story about what the last tech bubble looked like:

I remember a prominent professor at a prominent east coast school calling me and chewing me out for not hiring someone he considered to be a rockstar student, she recalled. That student had had only two years of work experience prior to grad school — and yet was asking for $225,000. 

"There was sense of entitlement of people coming into the tech workforce then," she says. "And we’re absolutely seeing that here again."

SEE ALSO: Google should be very scared of what Amazon built, according to investor Bill Gurley

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NOW WATCH: The insanely successful and unorthodox life of Google founder Sergey Brin

Apple has seemingly redesigned the logo for Windows 10, an odd move considering the company doesn't control the branding of Microsoft's products. 

The change appears on the Apple Support website for iCloud Calendar with no explanation for why the standard Windows 10 logo was not used. 

Alongside the correct logos for iOS, OS X, and iCloud.com, the "Microsoft Windows" logo is conspicuous for being an actual window, albeit one that closely mirrors the design of the real Windows 10 logo which is below. 

The reason for the "updated" logo is unclear and Business Insider has reached out to both Apple and Microsoft to ask about why the real Windows 10 logo didn't make it.

The reason is unlikely malicious, however, as the two companies have an increasingly friendly relationship. 

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NOW WATCH: If you think Apple is a cult, you haven't been to a Tesla event

Amazon Web Services has cut prices about 50 times. So will it keep doing so? Most would say “yes.” Will other suppliers such as Google and Microsoft follow suit? Most would also say “yes.”

Amazon's huge tech conference for its cloud computing business is next week in Las Vegas, and the company is going to announce a partnership with Rackspace that will shock the industry.

It will also put Microsoft on notice.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Rackspace will partner with Amazon to help enterprise customers move their tech into Amazon's cloud.

Rackspace had previously made a similar deal with Microsoft. So this new deal with Rackspace is a direct blow to Microsoft.

But it's more than that

Amazon historically hasn't been big on such partnerships. So this deal with Rackspace indicates how serious Amazon is about going after Microsoft's prime market: enterprise-business customers. It's beefing up its customer support and its partner network to do that.

Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla of cloud computing: It's got 29% market share, way ahead of everybody else (according to Synergy Research), and its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business is on track to book more than $7 billion in revenue this year.

Amazon got there mostly by attracting internet startups, some of which have gone on to become big companies, like Netflix and Airbnb.

In the early days, AWS wasn't thought to be reliable enough for established businesses. This was one of the main selling points Amazon's competitors, particularly Microsoft and IBM, used to keep lucrative business customers away from Amazon.

But as cloud computing has grown up and Amazon has radically built out its services, Amazon is no longer considered a scary cloud service. It is considered a top-notch provider.

Businesses like Yamaha of America are jumping on AWS with both feet, unplugging their computer servers, closing down their data centers, and renting Amazon's cloud instead. Yamaha is saving $500,000 a year in the process, Vimal Thomas, vice president of Yamaha of America, recently told us.

Such a thing on AWS would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. Microsoft wants to be the cloud-computing service where established enterprises land — those are the customers responsible for the bulk of its revenue today, although they still buy mostly software to run on desktop PCs and servers. IBM has similar hopes.

And, at one point, so did Rackspace

Amazon and Rackspace used to be such fierce competitors in cloud computing that Rackspace spearheaded a project called OpenStack to give itself and other IT vendors a chance to compete with Amazon.

OpenStack is a cloud operating system. An enterprise can install it in their own data center and then choose among many OpenStack cloud services, moving apps and data between them all, never being locked into to a single cloud provider. It was the anti-Amazon AWS.

OpenStack has been pretty successful, too, and is now being offered or supported by many big IT players like HP, Cisco, and Red Hat. OpenStack has even given birth to a Unicorn startup, Mirantis (whose CEO boasted a year ago that "We've gone from signing about $1 million in new business every month to $1 million every week.")

But the one company it didn't save? Rackspace. It was getting creamed by Amazon and other competitors.

In February 2014, its CEO, Lanham Napier, left the company. Then there were rumors it would sell itself or take itself private.

Instead, Rackspace dedicated itself to offering higher quality (and more expensive) cloud computing with great customer service, something that Amazon has a poor reputation for.

In July, it fired up a deal to become a Microsoft cloud reseller, helping companies move to Microsoft's cloud, Azure.

And now, it will help its ultimate nemesis, Amazon Web Service, grab enterprise customers, too.

Amazon did not comment to The Journal about the reported partnership, and has not yet responded to requests from Business Insider.

SEE ALSO: This is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's dream iPhone, which he jokingly calls the 'iPhone Pro'

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NOW WATCH: Maybe working at Amazon is hard for a reason

Six spoken languages will be supported at launch, including English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish.

IBM says Its atomic-thin transistors can blow silicon-based chips away.

IBM's Research division says it has discovered a way to replace silicon semiconductors with carbon nanotube transistors, an innovation that Big Blue believes will dramatically improve chip performance and get the industry past the limits of Moore's law.

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After watching the mobile industry try to implement and adopt RCS, Google bought a company that was largely focused on advanced messaging features and will bring it to Android.

Google announced on Wednesday that it's buying messaging startup Jibe Mobile for non-disclosed amount.

Jibe's technology is focused on a new version of SMS text messaging that is better able to handle features such as group chat, video chat and high-resolution photos.

The new messaging standard is called RCS, or Rich Communiations Services, and Google said in a blog post on Wednesday that the deal will help Google bring RCS to a global audience.

Amir Sarhangi, Jibe Mobile's CEO, wrote in a letter on its website that the Google acquisition offers the startup "the big opportunity we saw at the start: to change the way people communicate using their mobile phones."

The messaging startup describes itself as a "cloud communications company for mobile operators, handset manufacturers, and other communication networks" that "provides an open end-to-end technology platform enabling carriers to rapidly launch and commercially scale the most innovative IP communication services to mobile consumers globally."

Additional financial details about the acquisition have not been announced.

"We’re very excited to announce that the Jibe Mobile team is joining Google to help us bring RCS to a global audience," Google told Re/code. "Jibe is a leading provider of RCS services and they’ll continue helping carriers easily deploy RCS to their users. We can’t wait to work with them and build on the great work that they’ve already done."

You can read the full letter from Jibe Mobile's CEO below.

As a good friend once told me, if you want to do something big, start with something small — a single, singular challenge you can lead, and rally others to support.

For Jibe — a company we founded in 2006 — that lesson came true today with the announcement that we’ve  been acquired by Google. The big opportunity we saw at the start: to change the way people communicate using their mobile phones.

The "small" challenge we focused on: the future of messaging, the super simple mode for communication that's favored by billions of people, all over the world.

What we learned

Like many other startups, Jibe challenged the traditional approach. And through conviction, customer champions, and a great team, we’re starting to see some changes in the industry. We began Jibe at a time when:

• Internet growth had exploded
• mobile was picking up steam
• smartphones were just becoming popular
• iPhone and Android had not yet been born

As the mobile world was opening up, we had a hunch that carriers had to become more competitive by becoming innovative. So we decided to start a company with the vision of bridging the newer world of Silicon Valley with the older world of telecommunications.

Together, with the entire industry, we are making our vision come true.

At first we focused on the fringes, thinking the most important problems had already been solved by the industry giants who had invested millions in IP communications. But we then realized that the world of mobile was moving quickly, and the industry had not been able to keep pace.

This journey was absolutely necessary for us to find our way, by bumping into a real problem which needed to be solved = messaging.

In 2010, we foresaw the future of messaging and invested heavily in Rich Communications Services (RCS), the new standard that was being positioned as the evolution of SMS. We then introduced the Jibe model to put carrier messaging in the cloud and flip the infrastructure business model upside down.

The first bite

Of course, convincing the first carrier to trust a small startup with their messaging — a core part of their business — was not easy. But once we did, we knew we were on to something and never looked back. At times we have been seen as mavericks as we try to balance the need to stay competitive by running ahead versus making sure we build industry consensus. But one could argue that this is exactly what the industry has needed. Our persistent position has gradually been vindicated, first by our customers — who in every way deserve credit for our success — and now by Google’s belief in and commitment to us. We promise to stay true to our roots, and keep building great products for our customers.

Thanks to all

I want to thank all our customers, directors/advisors, and investors/lenders for not only supporting but keeping us focused. They’ve been partners in this journey — not idle watchers on the sidelines — looking out for the best interests of the entire industry.

Finally, I want to thank the team at Jibe, not just for their brilliance, but for their toughness, their resilience, their loyalty — and, yes, of course, their focus on a thing that might have looked small, but was not so small after all.

—Amir Sarhangi, CEO and Co-founder, Jibe Mobile

 

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He racked up more than 200,000 followers in just a couple of hours.

AT&T also reiterated its full-year financial guidance, including plans for a double-digit revenue increase and profit margin expansion.

Evernote announced a number of operating cutbacks on Tuesday, just a few months after the productivity software maker underwent a CEO shuffle.

The man who invented the first cell phone doesn't think Apple's newest iPhone is anything to get excited about.

Martin Cooper, who previously worked at Motorola and demonstrated his invention back in 1973 by placing the first ever cell phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk, said he thinks the iPhone 6S is "boring" when speaking to GeekWire. 

It's not that Cooper doesn't think the new iPhone is an improvement — it's just that he doesn't believe the improvements make the iPhone "essential." 

Here's what he said to GeekWire:

They’re struggling each generation to come up with something interesting. It’s a little bigger, has more pixels, more megahertz and people couldn’t care less. I think the future is the software. They have to figure out ways to make the phone essential.

Speaking more broadly on the smartphone industry in general, Cooper noted that the services we use on our phones are more about convenience than necessity.

We’re still in the game stage. Even though you can’t get along without your smartphone, there are not many essential services on your smartphone. They’re mostly convenience; you could live without it. Essential means you die without it. A gadget that warns you’re about to have a heart attack — that’s essential. We’re about to go into that phase with smartphones.

Some smartphones, including the latest ones from Samsung such as the Galaxy S6, come with heart rate monitors built in that help you keep track of your pulse. There are also apps such as Instant Heart Rate that allow you to measure your heart rate on any phone. The app uses the flash from your phone's camera to measure color changes in your fingertip every time your heart beats.

Cooper also thinks virtual reality will become a big part of computing in the future. He said virtual reality is moving at a faster pace in terms of development than cell phones did in their early days. 

SEE ALSO: Tim Cook called the teenager who said an Apple Watch saved his life and offered him an internship at Apple

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