Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced VMWare Cloud on AWS, a solution due out in 2017 with VMWare (VMW), that lets businesses more easily run and manage applications, regardless of whether they’re hosted on-site, remotely or a mix of both.

According to Gartner VP Thomas Bittman, as much as 50% of all AWS clients, or hundreds of thousands of businesses, also users VMWare’s tools, so the benefits for those businesses are obvious.

Because VMWare had traditionally focused on an IT infrastructure with on-site servers, and AWS was built from the ground up to store and crunch data on remote servers, juggling the two services for clients involved getting around two distinctly different sets of software. VMWare Cloud on AWS promises to cut down on that juggling by offering one unified software experience to get around.

For Amazon (AMZN) and VMWare, the partnership allows both businesses to capitalize on the booming “hybrid cloud” — a trend which businesses run and manage applications on servers that are on-site, as well as remote servers.

For many businesses, the transition to a hybrid cloud set-up is already in full swing, as cloud computing offers them excellent performance at competitive prices. Indeed, the India-based market research firm Infoholic Research estimated in a June report that the global hybrid cloud market will balloon from $41.2 billion in 2016 to $241 billion in 2022.

Thursday’s announcement benefits AWS and VMWare, albeit in different ways. Although AWS remains the #1 public cloud provider — since its infrastructure relies on crunching and storing data entirely on remote servers — the VMWare Cloud on AWS solution acts as a veritable on-ramp for businesses long accustomed to running their businesses with servers on-site with VMWare but who also want the cost-savings and performance benefits of AWS and sheer global scale it provides.

VMWare’s own efforts to expand into the public cloud which AWS dominates are either early or have been largely unsuccessful. Partnering with AWS gives VMWare clients the best of both worlds: the ability to avail of AWS’s benefits, but with the familiarity of VMWare’s tools.

“Large enterprise customers want to go to the cloud,” explained Dave Bartoletti, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “They also need to figure out what to do with all their VMWare tools. It’s a big hurdle for them to say, ‘Ugh, I have to do everything, learn new tools from the ground-up.’ This solution takes some roadblocks out of the way for them.”

And while AWS already has over 1 million paid customers, including NASA, Netflix (NFLX) and Comcast (CMCSA), Thursday’s announcement gives AWS the ability in the medium-to-long term to win over more business from companies as they get more and more used to the idea of their applications running on servers as far-flung as Ireland, Mumbai and Beijing.

There’s also the issue of Microsoft (MSFT), which remains a distant second to AWS as far as public cloud market share goes, but which VMWare views as a fierce competitor. Where VMWare has stumbled in its cloud offerings, Microsoft has thrived over the last several years, outpacing on both price and feature roll-out. Microsoft has also done a better job building a virtual bridge from the private cloud to the public cloud, according to Bertoletti, with a product called Azure Stack, which launches next year. The VMWare Cloud on AWS solution allows VMWare to stay competive, added Bertoletti.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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With just under a month until Election Day, Sean Parker’s civics-focused startup Brigade wants to help American voters figure out which candidates to vote for.

Brigade, whose founders include billionaire tech investor Sean Parker and former Causes CEO Matt Mahan, rolled out on Tuesday a major update to all users of its desktop, iOS and Android apps that includes a digital ballot guide powered by social media. The election tool serves up personalized recommendations for more than 13,000 federal and state races and ballot propositions largely based on a user’s social connections with friends, neighbors and political influencers in their voting districts.

“There’s too much at stake in this election to stay home, and yet nearly half of eligible voters will do just that on November 8,” Mahan, Brigade’s CEO, told Yahoo Finance. “Even worse, half of those who turn out will fail to vote in the critical state and local races that affect their lives even more directly than who sits in the Oval Office. We’ve built a dead-simple social ballot guide for voters to help each other pledge to vote and ultimately turn out for candidates and ballot props that align with their values.”

Simply put, Brigade’s so-called social ballot guide feature will ask users to opt in and sync up their Facebook, email and phone book contacts so the app can figure out which of their friends are also Brigade users. The app also capitalizes on a feature in the app which lets users connect their Brigade accounts with their public voter file.

Based on a complex set of algorithms and data like how your contacts voted, or “pledged,” on issues inside Brigade, their public voter file, as well as a larger set of overall user pledge data, Brigade is able to decipher the views of candidates. That includes even down-ballot candidates on most issues and offers recommendations on who to vote for — all without having to perform the impossible task of manually pulling data on each and every federal and state race.

Additionally, from now through Election Day, users who recruit or invite pledges from friends on the app also become eligible to join Brigade’s Precinct Captains Challenge — a competition, replete with leaderboard, that awards users who recruit the most pledges on any given day with gift certificates from Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NLFX) or Spotify. The Precinct Captain with the most votes come Election Day snags a three-day trip to Washington, D.C. for the presidential inauguration next January.

Brigade contends that this kind of low-key social pressure from other Brigade users could improve voter turnout.

Indeed, real-world experiments on voter turnout appear to back up Brigade’s assertions.

“Offline field experiments demonstrate that voter turnout can be significantly affected by social pressure,” explained Donald P. Green, Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and one of the country’s preeminent researchers of the ways in which political campaigns mobilize and persuade voters. “The next frontier in voter turnout research lies in understanding how online social networks and social pressure affect voter behavior.”

Since Brigade launched in June 2015, the civics-focused social network has seen users take  7 million positions to date across a wide array of topics including civil rights and energy to religion and taxes. The startup has also raised about $9.5 million in funding to date from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and Parker, who carved out his name in Silicon Valley by co-founding the file-sharing service Napster and serving as early Facebook (FB) president.

With all that data, Mahan says he already knows what the next challenge is beyond the social ballot guide.

“We’ve got to figure out what to do with all that user-generated content and how to aggregate it up in interesting and productive ways,” explained Mahan.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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Confession: I’m obsessed with skincare.

Just ask people who travel with me. They can vouch that when I hit the road, my dopp kit overfloweth with exfoliants, cleansers, moisturizers, acne pads, eye cream and sunscreen — it’s like a one-stop skincare shop, to the point where my best friends leave their products home and use mine instead. Indeed, having served as GQ Magazine’s grooming editor in the mid-2000s, I clearly spent way too much time fussing over products.

Many people, of course, aren’t like me. Unless you’re a dermatologist or know your way around the local Sephora, it’s hard to make heads or tails of the hundreds of thousands of products topped with mystifying ingredients marketed to make your skin look younger or fresher.

That’s the very challenge ex-software engineer Brad Yim wants to address with Mavericks, a line of skincare products that follows the same model employed by Soylent. It’s not quite Soylent’s extremist  “all-in-one” philosophy, but it’s close enough. Like the controversial nutrition drink, which tries (a little too hard) to simplify food and nutrition to the absolute bare essentials, Mavericks tosses out pricey extra steps like exfoliants, toners, serums and eye creams, and whittles all that skincare mumbo-jumbo down to a $99 kit with three products: a self-explanatory face cleanser called Wash, a daytime moisturizer with SPF 30 sun protection named Protect, and Rebuild, a moisturizer you wear at night.  

Also like Soylent, Mavericks’ target demographic is guys in tech: affluent Americans with cash to burn who care about their looks but don’t know (or don’t care) enough about skincare to decipher what “retinoid” or “hyaluronic acid” means.

“Guys want to look good,” explained Yim, who consulted several anti-aging specialists while developing Mavericks over the course of four years. “When I used to work in Silicon Valley, the standard outfit was a standard polo and pleated khakis, but you never see that anymore.”

Yim is actually onto something, here, even if the de facto polo shirt of Web 1.0’s yesteryear has been replaced by the hoodie or pima cotton shirt emblazoned with a startup’s name. But guys generally do care more about how they look nowadays — they just don’t want to fuss too much over it.  

With that in mind, I warily decided to try Mavericks for 7 days, fearing the worst: a slew of pimples, even an unsightly face rash. Could three products from someone who’s never dabbled in skincare before satisfactorily get me through the day?

The first thing I had to get over was not soaping my face in the morning. Mavericks recommends you simply splash your face with water in the morning and skip the cleanser.

“The reason is you don’t have to wash your face that often,” Yim explained. “Americans in general tend to overwash ourselves. Our skin tends to dry out. Unless you’ve just walked through a jungle, you probably only need the cleanser part once a day.”

Then it was time to apply Protect, a daytime moisturizer with SPF 30. I don’t love the smell of sunscreen, which usually has this strong artificial scent. And with Protect, there’s no mistaking it — this stuff smells like it has sunscreen — but I got used to it after a few hours.

In the evening, I followed Yim’s further instructions and washed my face with Wash, a minty-smelling cleanser that supposedly contains very small beads that help scrub off dead layers of skin. I followed that with Rebuild, a night-time moisturizer that contains ingredients like retinol for staving off wrinkles and hyaluronic acid, which is usually excellent for retaining moisture.

Because Rebuild is so thin and light to the touch, it makes you wonder if the product is doing anything at all. It also took three days to get over the idea of not cleansing my face every morning. As someone whose yearbook photos were routinely Photoshopped by the photographer to iron out a smatterings of pimples, I worried my face might get oily and breakout.

But after a week, my face remains pimple-free. I’ve also had several friends, who had no idea what I was up to, compliment my skin with a straight face on looking fresh and glowing. (Yes, seriously.) And they were right. My skin looked more even and brighter, with far less product fussing than I’m used to. 

Was I impressed with Mavericks overall? Sure. If the $99 kit actually lasts me close to 99 days, that’s a great deal — I typically spend at least double that amount on a hodgepodge of products over three months.

However, not everything about Mavericks is ideal. I’d pass on Mavericks’ Shave cream, which now comes in a separate $25 Shaving Trifecta package, with moisturizer and aftershave. Shave felt too thin and diluted when I applied it to my stubble, even after using a quarter-sized dollop. (I’ll stick to my foamy $2 cans of old school Barbasol, thank you very much.)

It’s a stretch to call Mavericks the “best skin-care money can buy,” as the products’ site says. I’ve tried products from a list of brand names too long to name, but for $99, Mavericks is a streamlined, easy-to-use skincare option that gets the job done (and done well) at an affordable price. For many, that’s more than enough.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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During the third-annual Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, the message was abundantly clear: The future of virtual reality is social.

“The next phase [of VR] is all about building new, great software experiences,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained onstage during the conference keynote. Facebook (FB) purchased Oculus for $2 billion in 2014.

The most compelling moment? A 10-minute demo in which Zuckerberg wore a Rift headset and showed how easily it was for him to perform day-to-day tasks in VR, including playing a game of High Card with two of his colleagues’ VR avatars, checking on his Hungarian sheepdog Beast, viewing photos and even having an impromptu fencing match with a virtual sword one of the avatars sketched on the fly.

It was the first time I was actually impressed  by VR. Until now, Oculus, HTC and other VR entrants largely focused on their impressive hardware and a slew of upcoming games. But by emphasizing what Zuckerberg and crew called the “social” element, they connected the dots for me, showed me moments where VR could actually be immersive and useful and helped me realize that VR — clunky-looking headset or not — could actually have a place in my day-to-day life.

It would be wonderful to quickly parse through the gigabytes of photos I’ve snapped over the years, or make virtual house calls to my 10-year-old Shih Tzu staying with my parents in New Jersey. And it would probably be a blast to play a few casual games with my two best friends in New York, represented by their Oculus avatars, of course.

Still, there’s a long way to go before Zuckerberg’s compelling VR demo becomes reality. Those all-new, slick-looking Oculus avatars won’t arrive until some time next year. It will be an even longer time, probably, until my two friends and I each have the headsets we’ll need to fence, play card games or do anything else the Facebook founder showed off.

Regardless, Oculus finally accomplished what it’s long set out to do: Make people like me finally excited about what Zuckerberg called onstage the “next big platform.”

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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• Google unveils its new Pixel phones while making a dig at Apple
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• ‘You’re not the shooter, are you?!” — My night at LAX

Only in San Francisco will $8.9 million snag you a luxe condo without a washer and dryer. 

Such is the case with The Pacific, a new ultra-high-end condominium building nestled on Webster Street in San Francisco’s posh Pacific Heights neighborhood, which celebrated its grand opening this September. Designed by architect Glenn Rescalvo, who also designed the city’s 60-story residential Millennium tower and the W hotel in Santiago, Chile, The Pacific is being unofficially hailed by many city residents as the most expensive condo building in San Francisco, and for good reason.

Condos at The Pacific — a mix of one-, two- and three-bedrooms, as well as three-story townhomes — hover around $2 million and max out at $20 million in the nine-story building. One of the first units sold also proved the most expensive sale for a residence in the US per square foot outside Manhattan: a three-bedroom, 2,300-plus square-foot unit with three bathrooms on the sixth floor.

For $8.9 million, or $3,750 per-square-foot, unit #606 featured interiors designed by Jay Jeffers, with hand-milled woodwork, marble slab counters, bronzed and gold mirrors, and art deco-influenced chandeliers. Homeowners association fees generally range from $1,800 to $3,000 a month, covering services including valet, concierge and maintenance.

“There’s no other building that’s been done like this before,” explained Arden Hearing, Managing Director at Trumark Urban, which developed The Pacific over the course of nearly 5 years. “We’re seeing that reflected in the pricing and the overall market sentiment.”

Trulia Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlin recently told Yahoo Finance that San Francisco Bay Area rents and real estate prices are cooling off, down from 15%-17% growth year-over-year to 5%-6%. As a result, many Bay Area landlords are doling out crazy incentives like four to six weeks of free rent and preferred employee discounts for rental units. The Pacific, however, appears to be an anomaly: the créme de la créme of SF real estate, unaffected by the softening local market.

To wit, 35 out of 76 units are already sold, Hearing told Yahoo Finance, and as of September, Trumark Urban generated well over $120 million in sales.

Other amenities in the building include an art installation from artist Helen Amy Murray, known for her nature-inspired, hand sculpted leather creations and textiles, a fitness center with outdoor yoga terrace, valet, concierge, lobby attendant and an Observatory lounge on the eighth floor with 20-foot ceilings and indoor and outdoor fireplaces.

The drawback? No built-in washer or dryer by default in any of the units — owners must choose and pay extra for the washer-dryer of their choice. (To be fair, however, at this price point, a washer-dryer is pocket change for The Pacific’s target demographic.)

The Pacific also takes “personalization” to an extreme, depending on which unit someone buys. A standard one-, two-, or three-bedroom, which has 11-foot vaulted ceilings, nets you the ability to consult the building’s white glove concierge department to pick and choose flooring, audio-visual systems and customize closet layouts with the aid of either a domestic or Italian closet/shelving consultant. (Yes, seriously.)

Owners of one of The Pacific’s eight three- or four-story penthouses can personalize their homes even further, with options for window types and home automation systems. 

That’s all in all great news for Silicon Valley’s 1%. For everyone else? Enjoy the real estate porn.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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Google has produced its own Android-based phones for years under the “Nexus” brand. But on Tuesday, the company announced it would design its own smartphones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, which borrow their names from Google’s longstanding tablet and laptop products.

The Pixel and Pixel XL are the first-ever to come with Google Assistant built in, have unlimited cloud storage, and are compatible with the company’s new virtual reality headset, Daydream. Google also claims the camera on its new phones has “the shortest capture time on any mobile camera ever.”

Available for preorder today in black, blue and silver for $649 to start, the Pixel and Pixel XL sport 5-inch and 5.5-inch displays respectively, powered by Snapdragon 821 processors and 4GB of RAM. The Pixel and Pixel XL will be available from Verizon exclusively in the U.S.

Also on-board: 32GB or 128GB of internal storage, a 2770mAh battery for the Pixel and a 3450mAh battery for the Pixel XL with a polished aluminum case paired with a small glass pane on the back. There’s also a subtle wedge from top to bottom where the hand naturally grips it, supposedly to make it easier to hold. A 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with a feature called HDR+, enables the Pixel to capture significantly more light than other cameras, the company claims.

For those wondering, the Pixel and Pixel XL also sport the traditional 3.5 mm headphone jack, a longstanding feature on many smartphones that became controversial when Apple decided to omit it with the iPhone 7.

“And there’s no unsightly camera bump,” added Rick Osterloh, senior vice president of hardware, a none-too-subtle dig at Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone line.

Google also emphasized the Pixel’s software, which it built (and refined) from the ground up. Indeed, Osterloh highlighted five key points for the Pixel phones:

Google Assistant

When they launch, Pixel and Pixel XL will be the first smartphones to come with Google Assistant built in. When you touch and hold the home button, Google Assistant “jumps into action.” The A.I.-driven feature can bring up specific photos from the past and play whatever music you ask it to play. It even takes restaurant reservations with voice commands. 

That camera!

According to Google, the Pixel and Pixel XL rear camera score an 89 in DxOMark — the highest rating ever. Translation: These could very well be the best smartphone cameras on the market today, trumping even the iPhone. There’s also video stabilization on board, however there’s no optical image stabilization for still photos. 

Communications

Pixel users will be getting the latest Android updates directly from Google as soon as they become available. This is one of the biggest pain points with Android, and Google is stressing its lead in this category. Google has also built in 24-hour live phone support right into the Pixel’s software, so that a tech support operator can check out what’s on your screen and help you better. The Pixel comes with Google Duo preinstalled, if you’ve been jonesing for the company’s video chat app.

Unlimited cloud storage

Impressively, Google will also allow free unlimited storage for full-resolution images and videos shot with the Pixel. That’s much like the standard Google Photos backup ability, but takes off the size limit, even on 4K video shot with the new phone.

Virtual reality

The Pixel and Pixel XL are the first Daydream-compatible smartphones, which will work with the just-announced Daydream View headset. The Daydream View comes bundled with a tiny motion controller that is so precise you can even draw with it. When you’re done, the controller simply tucks inside the Daydream View itself for safe storage.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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The road to an IPO can be a long, tumultuous one, but DocuSign may be poised to go public sooner rather than later.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Tom Gonser in 2003, DocuSign has successfully evolved from a business focused on eliminating the pen and ink signature into a network that handles digital workflows and processes documents for well over 100 million people and 250,000 businesses, including Comcast (CMCSA), LinkedIn (LNKD) and Salesforce (CRM).

Over the last three years, DocuSign has made several strategic moves —  in addition to deepening partnerships with enterprise software providers like Oracle (ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT) — indicating the business is slowly gearing up for an IPO, if not later this year, then potentially next year.

Part of the reason the startup may be taking its time may have to do with 2015 being the worst year IPOs since 2008-2009 financial crisis. Now more than ever, investors are scrutinizing companies that go public for more bottom-line profits than simply revenue growth. But two venture capitalists Yahoo Finance recently spoke to indicated IPOs are poised to make a comeback over the next 18 months.  

Here are three reasons DocuSign may be headed for an IPO in the short-term:   

It’s basically the only way for it to raise even more money

In May 2015, DocuSign raised a whopping $233 million reportedly valuing the company at $3 billion. That particular round of fundraising was a “Series F” — venture capital terminology frequently corresponding to a very, very late stage of fundraising for a startup — bringing the total amount of fundraising to over $525 million.

It’s virtually unheard for a company to go beyond a Series F, with one exception being Uber, which raised $2.1 billion in a Series G late last year.

“DocuSign is a force to be reckoned with, and for years remained largely unchecked, in its dominance of the electronic signature market; however, some of DocuSign’s competitors have gotten their acts together and are going after it in a meaningful way — the most notable being Adobe Sign,” explained Gartner senior research analyst Neil Wynne to Yahoo Finance.

DocuSign is at the end of the line if wants to continue raising more money to fuel further expansion and hold onto its 70% market share. On simple principle, raising cash as a privately-held company becomes harder if there’s increased competition or competition is fierce.

It recently released new growth metrics

In late August, DocuSign released a slew of new metrics pointing to rapid user growth: 300% year-over-year growth. Indeed, 100 million users across 188 countries now sign and manage digital documents via DocuSign, and the company says 130,000 new users join DocuSign every day.

“On average, 84% of transactions are completed via DocuSign in less than one day; 62% in less than one hour; and 51% in 15 minutes or less — dramatically faster than the days or weeks typically required with paper,” the company stated in the press release.

In publicly releasing those growth stats, DocuSign is sending a signal to investors about the company’s current, thriving state. This may be part of DocuSign’s larger attempt to update its financial metrics — a move typically performed by companies in the walk-up to an IPO in order to focus attention on the factors driving business.

Docusign recently hired execs with IPO experience

Equally as telling, perhaps, are DocuSign’s management changes.

DocuSign has also added top executives over the last 3 years with experience in taking a company public. DocuSign chief financial officer Michael Sheridan, for example, was CFO at FireEye (FEYE), a network security company, for over four years and played an instrumental role in its successful IPO in September 2013. Meanwhile, DocuSign general counsel Reggie Davis served as General Counsel for gaming company Zynga (ZNGA)’s stock market debut in December 2011. And while Zynga’s stock eventually crashed due to a lack of innovation and a slow transition to mobile devices, there’s no denying the gaming company had a strong debut on Wall Street.

The only thing standing in the way of DocuSign going public? A new CEO. The hunt continues for someone to replace longtime chief executive Keith Krach, who initially announced he would step down in October 2015 for unspecified reasons. (Krach added he would stay for an additional three years as chairman after a replacement CEO has been brought on.)

Finding a new CEO pre-IPO isn’t commonplace, but it can happen when say, the company’s board of directors or management feels a new, more experienced leader is needed once a company has achieved a certain level of maturity and scale. Names like former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem were bandied about over the summer, but DocuSign has yet to name an actual replacement for Krach. Once that happens, expect DocuSign’s Wall Street debut to happen not long after.

With that pace of growth and revenue Forbes estimates in the hundreds of millions, DocuSign may just be one CEO away from having a compelling story to tell Wall Street.

Correction: The original version of this article noted that DocuSign raised over $700 million. The article has been corrected to indicate it has raised over $525 million.

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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Four years ago, Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University on a whim to become a member of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.

Twenty young men and women, including Field, were awarded $100,000 that year to drop out of (or take a leave of absence from) college to pursue and develop their idea.

Field knew exactly what he wanted to to do: take on Adobe (ADBE). After three years of development, his software interface design tool Figma launched on Wednesday for desktop and mobile.

Adobe, which runs a $6 billion business, has long dominated the design market as a veritable Goliath, with widely used software tools like Adobe Illustrator. But as Field and co-founder Evan Wallace saw it, there was very little innovation going on at Adobe.

While office tasks like word processing and spreadsheet creation have largely migrated to the cloud with products such as Google Docs, Office 365 and Quip, the Adobe Illustrators haven’t. Designers who wanted to create and collaborate on say, the graphic interfaces for apps, still had to save their work and share it with outside services like Dropbox or Box (BOX).

“The way we work has changed, and designers haven’t seen that change yet,” Field told Yahoo Finance. “Tools are still offline and haven’t changed. We can definitely innovate more.”

Figma’s backers include Greylock Partners, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and White House US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil.

“Figma is going after a very developed space dominated by one player, namely Adobe, with a better way of working on the designs that users generate,” explained Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, which also contributed to the $18 million in fundraising Figma has raised. 

The San Francisco-based startup with 20 employees promises a user interface inside its desktop and web browser app that’s much easier to get around than Adobe Illustrator and features that aren’t buried beneath layers and layers of options to click through. As Field demonstrated, creating an icon of say, a simple mechanical cog, is accomplished in a fraction of the time with Figma versus Illustrator.

Figma’s standout feature is simply called “Multiplayer.” Because much of Figma, and the work designers do in Figma, is saved and crunched on remote servers — instead of traditionally, your computer — two designers are able to easily design things together on the fly, even if one user is in San Francisco and the other is in Dubai. It’s a feature Google Docs users took for granted for years, but one designers haven’t yet enjoyed.

Field and Wallace hope that by offering designers a 3-month free trial — and letting student designers use Figma for free — they’ll be able to build a solid following among the design community, one that still largely relies on tools like Adobe Illustrator. And while they haven’t landed on a pricing plan, Field said Figma would follow a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, whereby software is licensed on a monthly or annual subscription basis.

Whether or not Figma gains the traction it needs to become a serious player in the design community, Rimer contends software design is ripe for innovation, and Figma has the goods to make a difference.

“Design has become more integral, whether in the technological arena or any arena, which is why companies like Slack and Dropbox are doing so well, because within the enterprise, in order to garner adoption, you need to have a much more consumer-oriented presentation,” added Rimer. “Now designers for the first time will be able to design, share their designs and work collaboratively on the same design. That’s a new concept for the way people design things.”

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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.  

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Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, now has 133 million active users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed on Monday during the Microsoft Ignition Conference.

The India-born chief executive said during his keynote at Microsoft’s (MSFT) annual Ignite conference that Cortana has 133 million people across 115 countries using it regularly. Even more impressive, those users have asked 12 billion questions since Cortana’s launch in 2015 alongside Windows 10.

“Cortana is more than just a voice assistant,” said Laura Jones, a Microsoft senior marketing product manager.

Jones pointed to Cortana’s current slew of features, including voice-to-text, managing events and alarms, and retrieving basic information via Bing like the height of a certain celebrity, what day a specific holiday falls and who the CEO of a particular company is.

But Jones said Cortana is poised to do much more, thanks to machine learning. In other words, Cortana will eventually get smarter and become more useful to you as time goes on. The digital assistant will soon pick out commitments you’ve made in email, sometimes recap an event or proactively remind you about a commitment you’ve made.

Also coming down the pike soon for Cortana: “health insights,” which will combine data about your physical activity and sleep patterns with your schedule and daily routine.

“If I’m going to miss a workout this week because I’m going on a trip, I’ll get a prompt for when I can reschedule my fitness routine,” Jones explained.

Cortana was just one aspect Microsoft’s larger artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. As Nadella said during his keynote, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.”

—

More from JP Mangalindan:

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Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, now has 133 million active users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed on Monday during the Microsoft Ignition Conference.

The India-born chief executive said during his keynote at Microsoft’s (MSFT) annual Ignite conference that Cortana has 133 million people across 115 countries using it regularly. Even more impressive, those users have asked 12 billion questions since Cortana’s launch in 2015 alongside Windows 10.

“Cortana is more than just a voice assistant,” said Laura Jones, a Microsoft senior marketing product manager.

Jones pointed to Cortana’s current slew of features, including voice-to-text, managing events and alarms, and retrieving basic information via Bing like the height of a certain celebrity, what day a specific holiday falls and who the CEO of a particular company is.

But Jones said Cortana is poised to do much more, thanks to machine learning. In other words, Cortana will eventually get smarter and become more useful to you as time goes on. The digital assistant will soon pick out commitments you’ve made in email, sometimes recap an event or proactively remind you about a commitment you’ve made.

Also coming down the pike soon for Cortana: “health insights,” which will combine data about your physical activity and sleep patterns with your schedule and daily routine.

“If I’m going to miss a workout this week because I’m going on a trip, I’ll get a prompt for when I can reschedule my fitness routine,” Jones explained.

Cortana was just one aspect Microsoft’s larger artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. As Nadella said during his keynote, “We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games.”

—

More from JP Mangalindan:

Why you should care about the cloud

I went a week without a headphone jack, and it was not good

San Francisco’s real estate market has reached ‘peak unaffordability’: housing expert

Facebook exec hints at ‘next logical step’ for Messenger

Box CEO: ‘Investors have two very different perspectives on our business’