This week smartwatch maker Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky blamed VCs for not giving him all the money he needs and laid off a quarter of its workforce.

Only a few years ago, Pebble was the darling of the crowdfunding crowd, having raised over $30 million on Kickstarter. This was when Apple was rumoured to be making one and the Tame Apple Press was claiming they were going to be the next big thing,

When Migicovsky confirmed the layoffs. He implied that VCs are now less keen on funding the dream.

Now Apple, which was said to be the market leader of smartwatches, has dropped the price of the Apple Watch by $50. It is probably not going to upgrade the next one with any serious bells and whistles. It looks like the only people who bought one were Apple’s hard core of fanboys who buy everything that Jobs’ Mob makes regardless of whether they need it.

The IDC sees wearable devices reaching 110 million by the end of 2016 which should be 38.2 percent growth. But it seems that this is not enough.

Fitbit was initially championed as an industry leader but this year saw its stock has been battered in 2016. It appears that Smartwatches haven’t set the market alight. Pebble’s rivals are Apple, Samsung, Motorola, LG and others. It also does not have any other businesses to fall back on.

Courtesy-Fud

Microsoft announced that it will be permanently reducing the prices for its Dv2 compute instances by up to 17 percent next month, depending on the type of instance and what it’s being used for. Users will see the greatest savings if they’re running higher performance Linux instances — up to 17 percent lower prices than they’ve been paying previously. Windows instance discounts top out at a 13 percent reduction compared to current prices.

Right now, the exact details of the discount are a little bit vague, but Microsoft says that it will publish full pricing details in February when they go into effect. Dv2 instances are designed for applications that require more compute power and temporary disk performance than Microsoft’s A series instances.

They’re the successor to Azure’s D-series VMs, and come with processors that are 35 percent faster than their predecessors. Greater speed also corresponds to a higher price, but these discounts will make Dv2-series instances more price competitive with their predecessors. That’s good news for price-conscious users, who may be more inclined to reach for the higher-performance instances now that they’ll be cheaper.

The price changes come after Amazon earlier this week introduced scheduled compute instances, which let users pick out a particular time for their workloads to run on a regular basis, and get discounts based on when they decide to use the system. It’s a system that’s designed to help businesses that need computing power for routine tasks at non-peak times get a discount.

Microsoft’s announcement builds on the company’s longstanding history of reducing prices for Azure in keeping with Amazon’s price cuts in order to remain competitive.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/microsoft-to-cut-azure-pricing.html