Microsoft's cloud-based business intelligence service is celebrating a major user growth milestone with a handful of new features, including the ability to import data from an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into live-updating charts and graphs.

Intel Corp. announced new chips targeting cloud computing as well as partnerships to address concerns of companies that have stayed on the sidelines of that technology trend. The Silicon Valley giant, whose chips power the vast majority of server systems, on Thursday expanded its Xeon line with new models that boost computing performance. Intel executives, at an event in San Francisco, also pointed to built-in features that could boost the security of cloud computing jobs.

Companies are using behavioral analytics and sentiment analysis to better understand their customers, but there are still important pieces of insight missing. Few businesses have the ability to engage individuals in a way that is appropriate to the emotions they are feeling in the moment. Emotional analytics can help bridge cognitive gaps between humans and machines.

The Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club don’t take their commercial partnerships lightly. The club is very careful about who they partner with and permits only four minutes of commercials per hour during the television broadcast of golf’s first annual Major tournament.

Domo – the Utah-based company that has raised more than a half-billion dollars since being founded six years ago – this week is unveiling broad new capabilities for its business analytics cloud computing platform.Domo, which we identified as a Cloud Company to Watch back in 2012, is software as a service that aims to democratize data analytics for everyone in a company, from C-level executives to employees executing day-to-day work, says Matt Belkin, Domo's chief analytics officer.

TransUnion launched a suite of solutions, named Prama, to assist companies in evaluating and exploring valuable corporate data more efficiently. The Prama portfolio leverages latest technologies to harness big underlying data sets and applies advanced analytics solutions to facilitate better decision making.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. is dismantling its robotics effort after less than three years and aims to sell Boston Dynamics, the legged-robot maker that was the centerpiece of the program, according to people familiar with the matter. The moves reflect internal disagreements about the direction of Boston Dynamics and concerns about Alphabet’s ability to make money from robots as the company increases its scrutiny of costs, said the people familiar with the matter.

Don’t let love for your college alma mater derail your good judgment when filling out a March Madness bracket this week. An unemotional, data-driven approach is the key to a successful showing in your office’s NCAA basketball tournament pool, according to one consulting firm.Americans will wager an estimated $9.2 billion on more than 70 million brackets this year, according to the American Gaming Association.