Cheaper Gas Lowers Measure Of Us Consumer Prices

Amplify, the new education venture at News Corp., is getting into the gaming business.  On Tuesday, the company rolled out more than 30 digital games designed to help middle school students improve their language arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills. The games won’t be made widely available to districts until the spring of 2014, but they’re being piloted now in a few schools across the country.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale Enterprise cloud backup provider Zetta.netv has raised $8 million in new funding to help it bolster its backup, disaster recovery, and archiving services, the company said today. Zetta.net competes with cloud backup providers such as Carbonite and Mozy, but it differentiates itself by claiming top-tier performance.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners is doubling down on its big data investments, announcing on Monday evening that it’s launching its second $100 million fund dedicated to analytic software and applications. The aptly named Big Data Fund 2 follows on the firm’s initial Big Data Fund that it announced in November 2011. Since then, Accel has put a name on the types of companies it’s seeking to fund with the new allocation — namely, those selling what it calls “data-driven software.” That’s a fancy way of saying that it’s not looking to fund infrastructure-level software such as Hadoop or NoSQL databases, but rather software that leverages these technologies and others in order to make analytics simpler.

AMD is debuting a new lineup of chips for servers, including its first ever ARM-based part. For AMD, which built its business around a license of Intel’s x86 architecture, building an ARM part is both a declaration of independence and a necessary step for the chipmaker struggling to reinvent itself. The chip firm is introducing three new parts for servers.

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now There wasn’t much big news today in the tech world today, but the deals kept flowing. We saw some big money around a rolodex for the world’s most interesting people and a platform to help connect doctors and patients. But, surprisingly, our most popular funding story of the day happened to be the smallest deal — people just can’t get enough of privacy solutions ahead of the NSA data snooping controversy.