Friday Tech News

01/10/2025

Author

Phil Moroni
January 10, 2025

In partnership with

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Friday Tech News! I hope you’ve had a wonderful week.

Shorter edition this week featuring a ton of AI related updates from MSFT, Cohere, Anthropic, etc… Some slight M&A activity to start the year.

If you’re in NC, just remember this photo below and stay safe…I remember this vividly as I was sitting in my Jeep on Wade stuck in this.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend and enjoy FTN!

OEM News & Updates 📰

  • Hugging Face has introduced the Smolagents library, which allows devs to build AI agents using open-source LLMs or select cloud based LLMs.

  • The library includes roughly 1,000 lines of code that define the basic functionality of an AI agent to make it easier for devs to create and use agents in projects.

  • You can also share tools built for these AI agents on the Huggin Face platform so others can access and use it.

  • Still a McAfee shop? Well they just launched an AI powered Scam Detector to protect against text, email, and video scams.

  • It uses advanced AI technology to analyze and flag risky messages in real time to avoid scams.

  • Included at no extra cost for the still existing customers of McAfee.

  • Code Intelligence has introduced Spark, an AI Agent that autonomously finds bugs and vulnerabilities in any codebase.

  • Spark can save up to 1,000 hours of manual effort on average when testing a codebase with 100,000 lines of code.

  • The AI Agent not only identifies bugs but also attempts to fix them, automating the entire software testing part of the SDLC.

  • Microsoft has introduced the Phi-4 language model which is now freely accessible on HuggingFace.

  • Despite being only 14 billion parameters, it outperforms significantly larger models like Llama 3.3 70B and GPT 40Mini in key reasoning and math benchmarks.

  • Phi-4’s streamlined architecture makes it suitable for deployment on local hardware including PCs and laptops, empowering devs with cutting-edge capabilities without extensive and super costly cloud consumption.

  • Cohere has launched North, a secure AI workspace platform designed for privacy focused businesses.

  • North combines LLMs, search, and automation tools and can be deployed in private cloud environments or on prem.

  • The platform aims to provide customized AI solutions for regulated industries like Healthcare.

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

  • a number of people have looked at this - staggering growth projections for CVE’s in 2025. How are you evolving to stay as parallel to these as you can?

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

  • Phylum is a Colorado based SaaS platform that provides solutions such as supply chain security and vulnerability assessment for businesses.

  • CYNC is an Israeli based threat intelligence startup.

  • Give these cats a google if you don’t know anything about Anthropic. Or ask Gemini or ChatGPT 😀 

  • Cado is an England based Cybersecurity platform that offers solutions such as cloud forensics and incident response for businesses.

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

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Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!

What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.

Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.

Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.

Key areas of focus for me are:

  1. Cloud Computing, Security, Trends

  2. Developer & Security Tools

  3. Networking & Infrastructure Tools

  4. End User Tools & Workspace Tech

  5. Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts

If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!

Thank you for reading and stay digitally and physically safe!

Phil

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