Business software giant Intuit has just splashed out $423.5 million to acquire Software as a Service (SaaS) company Demandforce. The blockbuster acquisition comes in the wake of other high-profile purchases like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion and the lesser purchase of Archive.com for $100 million by Ancestry.com. All this of course leads to the question, “why are tech companies so expensive these days?” Demandforce in some ways justifies its price tag better than other buys in recent months, not least because it actually delivers a service to actual businesses.

No other company online does “free” like Google and for every paid service, the tech giant uses its leverage to offer powerful and functional alternatives. One such alternative is Google Translate, a service that lets users translate from one language to virtually every other kind of language on multiple platforms and environments.

WordPress has been in the tech news of late for some big numbers regarding its usage and spread among website developers, but very little has been revealed about the financials of the company until now. The blogging platform as you may know is run by Automattic, which in a nutshell is the for-profit engine behind the entire operation. WordPress continues to be 100% free but on the back of its popularity Automattic is reporting revenues of $45 million

When Apple entered the cloud storage fray with the iCloud service, many scoffed at the move and predicted that it wouldn’t take hold, but how wrong could they be? Today the iCloud service is growing at a rapid rate and according to an announcement by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer; the service now has over 125 million users and counting. To put the growth in perspective, it was only a few months ago that Oppenheimer announced that the service had 85 million users; forward on from that (2 months ago to be exact) and we heard from CEO Tim Cook that iCloud had a commanding 100 million users

Apple seems to be incapable of doing wrong and in keeping with this positive trend, the company announced record sales for its flagship iPhone and iPad products.

Just when you thought the cloud storage space couldn’t get any more crowded, Google swoops in and launches its own service.

It is not surprising to hear that the amount of internet users has drastically increases over the last decade, or even 2 decades ago. Virtually everything can be done nowadays on the internet; from paying bills, car insurance, communication, work, school, entertainment, and the list goes on and on and on…What is more abnormal these days: hearing about someone that uses the internet, has multiple e-mail and social media accounts and banks online, or someone who does not use the internet at home, doesn’t have a computer in their house, and still uses good old fashioned pen and paper? Obviously the 2nd is more abnormal to hear about these days.

Technology is now well and truly in our schools and learning management company, Schoology, is gunning to be one of the top names in the space. The company announced recently that it had raised $6 million in Series B funding to help the company take on the two biggest players in the market, Blackboard and Moodle. The funding round was led by FirstMark Capital which was joined by Series A investor Meakem Becker Venture Capital, and marks a serious push to pump some serious cash into the young start-up