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Atlassian combines Jira Software and Work Management tools | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 9:30 PM0


At its Team ’24 event in Las Vegas, Atlassian today announced that it is combining Jira Software with Jira Service Management into a single product under the ‘Jira’ brand.

The origins of Jira, Atlassian’s flagship project management tool, are in software development and issue tracking for developers, but throughout the past few years, the company started to launch Jira versions for other teams as well. These included Jira Work Management for business teams like marketing, sales and human resources, which launched in 2021 and replaced a previous product called Jira Core.

“We believe great teams are built on a foundation of shared goals, coordinated work, and free-flowing information across functions,” writes Dave Meyer, the head of product for Jira, in today’s announcement. “That’s why the latest evolution of Jira offers a shared place for every team to align on goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build something incredible, together. We’ve taken the best of Jira Work Management and Jira Software to make a single project management tool ready to help any team go from good to great.”

The idea here is to offer a cross-functional tool that allows different teams inside a company to more easily collaborate and track their work. While there were already connections between Jira Software and Jira Work Management (plus Work Management is already included in every Jira subscription for free), Atlassian says that this combined version will reduce friction and help different teams align on common goals, no matter whether they are engineers, marketers or designers, for example.

It’s worth noting that Jira Service Management for IT teams is not affected by this change.

Atlassian launches a Jira for every team

More AI in Jira

With this change, Atlassian is also bringing a number of new features to Jira to enable this kind of collaboration. Unsurprisingly, these include several new AI-based tools.

Maybe the most interesting of these is the new AI work breakdown (coming to Jira and Jira Premium users soon), which can help teams break down their epics into individual issues (or issues into sub-tasks) automatically — with the ability to edit them manually, too, of course. That takes away some of the grunt project management work and will free up project managers to focus on the bigger-picture items on their to-do lists.

Soon, Jira will also be able to sum up issue comments automatically. This capability will also come to Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like workspace tool.

Currently, to become a Jira power user, you’ll need to learn the Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues on the platform. Now, thanks to the power of large language models, users will be able to use natural language to create these JQL queries.

Image Credits: Atlassian

And for those occasions where you don’t know exactly what to write, Atlassian is also introducing a new generative AI writing tool to Jira that can create, summarize and improve descriptions and comments. These same capabilities are also coming to Atlassian’s Trello and Bitbucket, with Jira Product Discovery and Confluence following soon.

Setting Goals

Since the entire purpose of combining these two tools is to make collaboration easier, Jira is also getting a few new features that help teams align on their overall goals. That feature, imaginatively dubbed ‘Goals,’ will roll out in the coming month and aims to help users to “create goals in Jira’s list and issue views to visualize how each task maps to a higher objective.” There will also be a directory of goals and goal progress charts “where goals can be viewed in the context of your projects.”

Image Credits: Atlassian

New views

Jira is also introducing a few new ways to work with issues and visualize them. You can now see every project in a spreadsheet-like list view, for example, and make in-line edits. Atlassian notes that this will also make bulk edits easier.

To better track complex projects, Jira Premium and Enterprise users now get access to the new ‘Plans’ feature, which allows users to track issues from different boards and projects in a single view.

Image Credits: Atlassian

“Now everyone – from leaders to program managers to team members – can estimate release dates for cross-team projects, answer staffing and resource questions, or map out yearly goals, all in a single view,” Meyer explains in today’s announcement.

Speaking of time, there is now also a new calendar view for tracking business projects with issues organized by due date. This, Meyer notes, will help business teams more easily align their work in sync with upcoming software releases. The full launch of this calendar feature is still a few months out, though.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

PVML combines an AI-centric data access and analysis platform with differential privacy | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 12:13 AM0


Enterprises are hoarding more data than ever to fuel their AI ambitions, but at the same time, they are also worried about who can access this data, which is often of a very private nature. PVML is offering an interesting solution by combining a ChatGPT-like tool for analyzing data with the safety guarantees of differential privacy. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), PVML can access a corporation’s data without moving it, taking away another security consideration.

The Tel Aviv-based company recently announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by NFX, with participation from FJ Labs and Gefen Capital.

Image Credits: PVML

The company was founded by husband-and-wife team Shachar Schnapp (CEO) and Rina Galperin (CTO). Schnapp got his doctorate in computer science, specializing in differential privacy, and then worked on computer vision at General Motors, while Galperin got her master’s in computer science with a focus on AI and natural language processing and worked on machine learning projects at Microsoft.

“A lot of our experience in this domain came from our work in big corporates and large companies where we saw that things are not as efficient as we were hoping for as naive students, perhaps,” Galperin said. “The main value that we want to bring organizations as PVML is democratizing data. This can only happen if you, on one hand, protect this very sensitive data, but, on the other hand, allow easy access to it, which today is synonymous with AI. Everybody wants to analyze data using free text. It’s much easier, faster and more efficient — and our secret sauce, differential privacy, enables this integration very easily.”

Differential privacy is far from a new concept. The core idea is to ensure the privacy of individual users in large data sets and provide mathematical guarantees for that. One of the most common ways to achieve this is to introduce a degree of randomness into the data set, but in a way that doesn’t alter the data analysis.

The team argues that today’s data access solutions are ineffective and create a lot of overhead. Often, for example, a lot of data has to be removed in the process of enabling employees to gain secure access to data — but that can be counterproductive because you may not be able to effectively use the redacted data for some tasks (plus the additional lead time to access the data means real-time use cases are often impossible).

Image Credits: PVML

The promise of using differential privacy means that PVML’s users don’t have to make changes to the original data. This avoids almost all of the overhead and unlocks this information safely for AI use cases.

Virtually all the large tech companies now use differential privacy in one form or another, and make their tools and libraries available to developers. The PVML team argues that it hasn’t really been put into practice yet by most of the data community.

“The current knowledge about differential privacy is more theoretical than practical,” Schnapp said. “We decided to take it from theory to practice. And that’s exactly what we’ve done: We develop practical algorithms that work best on data in real-life scenarios.”

None of the differential privacy work would matter if PVML’s actual data analysis tools and platform weren’t useful. The most obvious use case here is the ability to chat with your data, all with the guarantee that no sensitive data can leak into the chat. Using RAG, PVML can bring hallucinations down to almost zero and the overhead is minimal since the data stays in place.

But there are other use cases, too. Schnapp and Galperin noted how differential privacy also allows companies to now share data between business units. In addition, it may also allow some companies to monetize access to their data to third parties, for example.

“In the stock market today, 70% of transactions are made by AI,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX general partner and co-founder. “That’s a taste of things to come, and organizations who adopt AI today will be a step ahead tomorrow. But companies are afraid to connect their data to AI, because they fear the exposure — and for good reasons. PVML’s unique technology creates an invisible layer of protection and democratizes access to data, enabling monetization use cases today and paving the way for tomorrow.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Storiaverse launches a short-form storytelling app that combines video and written content | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 5:39 PM0


Agnes Kozera and David Kierzkowski, the co-founders of podcast sponsorship marketplace Podcorn, today launched their newest app — Storiaverse, a short-form entertainment platform that offers a multi-format reading experience, combining animated video and written content.

Available on iOS and Android devices, Storiaverse caters to graphic novel readers and adult animation fans who want to discover original stories in a short-form, animated format.

“Our mission is to make Storiaverse the biggest storytelling platform and to make reading more immersive and engaging,” Kozera, who also co-founded YouTube marketing platform FameBit (which Google acquired in 2016), told TechCrunch.

“We believe our format not only caters to existing fans of literature and animation but also has the potential to attract wider audiences that are seeking new forms of entertainment…Even people who have shied away from reading because they are more [visual readers] can enjoy reading through our patent-pending read-watch format,” she said.

Image Credits: Storiaverse

Storiaverse’s “Read-Watch” format is exactly how it sounds. Users swipe up on a story to watch a series of animated clips, then tap on the screen to enter reading mode. There’s also an option to skip the videos if they prefer reading all the chapters first and then going back to view the animation. Stories range in length, from five minutes to 10.

At launch, Storiaverse offers 25 original titles spanning genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery and comedy. Creators who released stories on the app include animator Josh Ryba, who has contributed to projects such as popular TV shows “Raised by Wolves” and “One Piece;” animator Jonathan Fontaine, who has worked on the Disney movie “Descendants;” and writer John M. Floyd, who has been featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, among others.

Notably, book publisher HarperCollins is also partnering with the company to adapt titles like Madeleine Roux’s horror novel series Asylum and Joelle Charbonneau’s new fantasy series Dividing Eden. Additionally, TikTok star and independent animator King Science (Science Akbar) is teaming up to create an exclusive story on the app.

There are currently more than 100 creators working with Storiaverse and more than 100 stories in development.

Co-founders Agnes Kozera and David Kierzkowski. Image Credits: Storiaverse

Storiaverse launches at a time when many creators are panicking about the future of TikTok, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app where many storytellers have built a sizable audience (like King Science and his 13 million followers) and use the platform to show off their work.

Like TikTok and YouTube Shorts, Storiaverse offers an additional revenue stream for creators.

“There is a vast community of independent writers who often struggle for recognition and compensation. We believe their content can be invigorated in a more modern format to reach new readers,” Kozera said, adding that Storiaverse compensates both writers and animators for their contributions to the app. “The [compensation] fee varies based on factors such as length and complexity of the story,” she explained.

The company may also take other pages out of its competitors’ playbooks by bringing in ads, merchandise and subscriptions. Another idea on the table is adding product placement to videos, Kozera told us.

Storiaverse says it has already received thousands of submissions from writers. Creators can apply on Storiaverse’s website. When writers are accepted, they’re connected with an animator who helps bring the words to life.

The company is also building a Creator Suite for creators to collaborate with each other, access story performance insights and explore “more monetization opportunities,” Kozera said.

Storiaverse has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by 500 Global.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

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