software News of 01/29/20

Jira Software Gets Better Roadmaps

Atlassian today announced an update to Jira Software , its popular project and issue tracking tool, that brings a number of major updates to the roadmapping feature it first introduced back in 2018. Back in 2018, Atlassian also launched its rebuilt ...

TikTok Inks Licensing Deal With Merlin To Use Music From Independent Labels In Videos And New Resso Streaming Service

TikTok , the fast-growing user-generated video app from China’s Bytedance, has been building a new music streaming service to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. And today it’s announcing a deal that ...

Opera And The Firm Short-Selling Its Stock (Alleging Africa Fintech Abuses) Weigh In

Internet services company Opera has come under a short-sell assault based on allegations of predatory lending practices by its fintech products in Africa. Hindenburg Research issued a report claiming (among other things) that Opera’s ...

Tencent To Grow Gaming Empire With $148m Acquisition Of Conan Publisher Funcom In Norway

Tencent , one of the world’s biggest videogaming companies by revenue, today made another move to help cement that position. The Chinese firm has made an offer to fully acquire Funcom , the games developer behind Conan Exiles (and others in ...

Nigeria’S Paga Acquires Apposit, Confirms Mexico And Ethiopia Expansion

Nigerian digital payments startup  Paga has acquired Apposit , a software development company based in Ethiopia, for an undisclosed amount. That’s just part of Paga’s news. The Lagos based startup will also launch its payment ...

China Roundup: Tencent’S New US Gaming Studio And WeChat’S New Paywall

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. The spotlight this week is back on Tencent, which has made some ...

Chrome Gets Global Media Controls

Here is a small but useful new feature in Google Chrome: global media controls that allow you to control all of the audio and video sources in your current tabs from a single widget. With this, you can switch to the next song from your favorite ...

Mozilla Lays Off 70 As It Waits For New Products To Generate Revenue

Mozilla laid off about 70 employees today, TechCrunch has learned. In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as ...

Google Cloud Gets A Premium Support Plan With 15-Minute Response Times

Google Cloud today announced the launch of its premium support plans for enterprise and mission-critical needs. This new plan brings Google’s support offerings for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in line with its premium G Suite support ...

Felix Capital Closes $300m Fund To Double Down On DTC, Break Into Fintech And Make Late-Stage Deals

To kick off 2020, one of Europe’s newer — and more successful — investment firms has closed a fresh, oversubscribed fund, one sign that VC in the region will continue to run strong in the year ahead after startups across Europe ...

Google Wants To Phase Out Support For Third-Party Cookies In Chrome Within Two Years

Google today announced its plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The fact that Google will drop support for these cookies, which are typically used to track users across the web, doesn’t ...

Grab ‘Em Quick: More Tickets Released For 3rd Annual Winter Party At Galvanize

You better move fast if you want to party with us and 1,000 of your closest startup entrepreneur and investor friends. We just released a fresh round of tickets to our 3rd Annual Winter Party at Galvanize in San Francisco on February 7. Tickets are ...

Sisense Nabs $100m At A $1b+ Valuation For Accessible Big Data Business Analytics

Sisense , an enterprise startup that that has built a business analytics business out of the premise of making big data as accessible as possible to users — whether it be through graphics on mobile or desktop apps, or spoken through Alexa ...

Plenty Of Fish App Was Leaking Users’ Hidden Names And Postal Codes

Dating app Plenty of Fish has pushed out a fix for its apps after a security researcher found they were leaking information that users had set to “private” on their profiles. The app was always silently returning users’ first names ...

Levelset Raises $30 Million To Improve Money Management For Contractors In Construction

Scott Wolfe, chief executive officer of the New Orleans-based money management and payment startup for contractors in the construction industry, always thought he’d be in the grocery business. His family owned a number of grocery stores around ...

Medigate Partners With Cerner To Secure Medical Devices And Networks

Medigate , an Israeli startup working to secure medical devices and manage assets inside a hospital, has partnered with the medical information technology juggernaut Cerner on services and support for the Israli company’s security software. ...

Odoo Grabs $90m To Sell More SMEs On Its Business App Suite

Belgium-based all-in-one business software maker Odoo , which offers an open source version as well as subscription-based enterprise software and SaaS, has taken in $90 million led by a new investor: Global growth equity investor Summit Partners. ...

Photoshop For IPad Gains ‘Select Subject’ Feature

Adobe’s Photoshop on the iPad got off to a rocky start that doesn’t seem to have left fans of the desktop version very happy, but the company looks intent on incorporating user feedback and releasing meaningful feature updates on a ...

Cisco Acquires Ultra-Low Latency Networking Specialist Exablaze

Cisco today announced that it has acquired Exablaze , an Australia-based company that designs and builds advanced networking gear based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The company focuses on solutions for businesses that need ...

Google Makes Moving Data To Its Cloud Easier

Google Cloud today announced Transfer Service , a new service for enterprises that want to move their data from on-premise systems to the cloud. This new managed service is meant for large-scale transfers on the scale of billions of files and ...