Year: 2018

As Slack tries to graduate beyond a Silicon Valley darling to the go-to communications platform within a company, it’s had to find ways to increasingly pitch itself as an intelligent Swiss Army knife for companies — and not just a simple chat app — and it is trying to continue that today once again with a new feature called Actions.

Companies can now bake in a user experience of their own directly into the Slack application that isn’t yet another chatbot that’s tied into their services. Developers can essentially create a customized prompt for any kind of action, like submitting a support ticket, within the Slack core chat experience through a drop-down window called an Action. While Slackbots may have been an early incarnation of this, Slack’s platform has grown to include more than 200,000 developers, and there’s still constant need for robust tools internally. This offers partners and developers a little more flexibility when it comes to figuring out what experience makes the most sense for people that sit in Slack all day, but have to keep porting information to and from their own tools.

“There’s such a demand for specialized software, and for great tools that are easy to use and interoperable with all applications you use,” Slack chief product officer April Underwood said. “We think this is good, and we think more tools means customers have more choice. Ultimately there’s more competition in the marketplace, that means the best tools, the ones that truly help companies do their best work, rise to the top. But your work experience becomes increasingly siloed. Slack needs to be highly configurable, but in doing so we believe Slack is the collaboration hub that brings all this together.”

Each company that wants to build in an integration — like Asana for task management or Zendesk for ticket management — works to create a new flow within the core Slack experience, which includes a new dropdown inside a message and a prompt to bake something into the chat flow. Once that happens, all that information is then ported over to the integration and created in the same way an employee would create it within that environment. If someone creates a Zendesk ticket through an action in Slack, Zendesk automatically generates the ticket on their side.

Slack has sprawled out over time, and especially as companies using it get larger and larger, the company has to figure out a way to show that it can remain a dead-simple app without turning into a bloated window filled with thousands of instant messages. Actions is one potential approach to that, where users can know from the get-go where to coordinate certain activities like equipment procurement or managing some customer information — and not have to go anywhere else.

The other advantage here is that it makes the destination for completing a task not necessarily a “what,” but also a “who.” Slack is leaning on its machine learning tool to make it easier and easier to find the right people with the right answers, whether those questions are already answered somewhere or they know who can get you the information right away. Actions is another extension here, as well, as users can get accustomed to going to certain coworkers with the intent of completing tasks — such as their IT head in their office that they walk by every morning on the way to grabbing coffee.

The company says it’s also working on what it’s calling the Block Kit, which integrates those tasks and other elements directly into the Slack chat flow in a way that looks a little more user friendly from a kind of visual sense. The idea here is, again, to create an intuitive flow for people that goes beyond just a simple chat app, but also offers some additional way of interactivity that turns Slack into a more sensible feed rather than just a window with people talking to each other. Actions are available from Jira, Bitbucket, Asana, Zendesk, HubSpot, and several others.

Actions is a tool that Slack is unveiling at its own developer conference, Spec, this morning. That in of itself is yet another example of Slack looking to graduate beyond just a simpler information feed that works well with smaller companies. Developers are often the ones that figure out the best niche use cases for any platform, as it means Slack can focus on trying to figure out how all these integrations fit into its design ethos. The company has to figure out how to convince larger companies that they need a tool like this and it won’t get out of hand, and also ensure that smaller companies don’t graduate into something a little more flexible that can serve those niche cases as they get larger.

To be sure, Slack is growing. The company said it hit 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users earlier this month. That’s helped it quickly jump to a $5.1 billion valuation (as of its most recent funding round), and the company has been carefully rolling out tools that might make communication within larger companies a little easier — including the long-awaited launch of threads a little more than a year ago.

But Slack also faces increasing competition as time goes on, not only from the traditional companies looking to build more robust but simpler tools, but also from companies that have spent a lot of time working on collaboration tools and are now exploring communication. Atlassian’s opened up its communications platform Stride to developers in February this year. Microsoft, too continues to update its Teams product. Slack was able to expose pent-up demand for this kind of an approach, but it also has to defend that approach — and making it a little more flexible without feature-creeping is going to be its biggest challenge going forward.

Real Vision is entering the crowded business and financial new space with a bang. The company, which recently raised a $10 million Series B after a $5 million A, is working on a number of new initiatives including distribution on Apple TV, a content distribution partnership with Thomson Reuters and an upcoming documentary on PBS.

The documentary, “A World on the Brink,” will focus on threats to the global economy. The team is aiming at viewers ages 36-45 instead of the older Boomers who prefer cable financial news far.

“Unlike most video-based media businesses where short-form video is deemed to have the highest user engagement, Real Vision have found that almost 70% of their customers who start a half, or an hour-long, video will watch all of it. This engagement in long-form content is breaking boundaries within the industry,” said co-founder and CEO Raoul Pal. “Sensationalism and clickbait is at an all-time high. Traditional financial news has continued to degenerate into attention-seeking sound bites that are at best of little value and at worst, downright dangerous.”

Pal worked at Goldman Sachs before moving into media.

“I lamented on the state of financial media – how it had let the ordinary person down repeatedly in 2000 and 2008 and was busy treating finance as entertainment and not taking into account that this was peoples live savings they were dealing with. I also noted how far financial programming had become versus the fast-changing world of on line video. Viewing habits and content types were changing but the financial TV incumbents hadn’t changed,” he said “I decided that it was time for someone to disrupt the way in which television worked – particularly with regard to financial and business information.”

The team will use the cash to create programming aimed at “those who want to create new business opportunities and startups, manage new enterprises and leverage new technology.” The videos can run as long as 90 minutes but usually hit the five to thirty-minute mark. They are also distributing their content to Thomson Reuters . It uses a subscription-based model and costs $180 annually.

The team met at a bar in Jesus Pobre, Spain. Pal and his co-founder Damian Horner found each other during their travels and had drinks at a place called Rosita’s where Horner, a former ad exec, learned of Pal’s experience in finance and they both mapped out a new type of online news channel with some real energy. Thus was born a model that mixes on-demand with high-impact news, something that few cable stations can manage.

“Almost all traditional media outlets rely on an ever-dwindling advertising revenue model. Real Vision is subscription-based and built that way from the ground up,” said Pal. “Most media business are still trying to figure out a subscription model to diversify away from advertising. In a highly competitive digital world, the pressure ‘to get clicks’ has a massive impact on the tone, direction and quality of the editorial content itself. Real Vision’s subscriber model means there is no need to sensationalize, no dumbing down of ideas, no incessant ‘breaking news’ headlines, no clickbait soundbites and no cutting things short for commercial breaks.”

Po.et is an open source, not-for-profit publishing network built on the blockchain with the broad ambition of changing how we distribute, license and monetize content on the internet. Today, it announced it was opening the Po.et Development Labs, a place for developers to experiment with new ideas on the po.et platform.

It also announced the first company to launch an app out of the lab called Inkrypt. It’s an application designed to provide a way to publish content in a distributed fashion, meaning the article doesn’t live on any particular server. That makes it nearly impossible for sensors to block it.

“The first project to build on Po.et is Inkrypt, a global decentralized system providing a censorship-resistant solution for journalism hosting and delivery that will render journalism content permanent and immutable,” Po.et CEO Jarrod Dicker wrote in a blog post announcing the launch of Po.et Development Labs.

Dicker, who formerly ran the innovation team at the Washington Post, says the company wants developers to see po.et in a similar manner to Ethereum, a place where they can build applications making use of the underlying blockchain technology.

“Think of what Ethereum did for the spawn of new applications on the blockchain. We want to do the same for media applications on the blockchain by allowing them to leverage the protocol to build and push the media industry in the right direction,” Dicker told TechCrunch.

Po.et Development Labs offers a mechanism for developers to work with the po.et blockchain protocol. “With Po.et Development Labs, we’re introducing an innovation marketplace for all creators to build products on the blockchain. Companies can leverage Po.et and build vertically to introduce new innovations or solve problems in the space on top of that foundation,” Dicker explained.

Dicker says Inkrypt is just a starting point. “Inkrypt is an example and many more will come, especially as we invest and push more features that others can leverage and build [upon].”

Dicker points out that po.et is not just a platform for developers though. It’s also for media companies to define how they want to share and license their content, giving them a platform outside of advertising to monetize it. “Where it gets real interesting is that media companies can start taking advantage of it as well,” he said.

If you think about Creative Commons licensing, it provides a way for publishers to decide how they want to share their content, but it doesn’t give the content producers any way to enforce that license beyond the good will of users. Po.et takes that licensing concept one step further, giving content owners a marketplace to sell their content on the blockchain, creating an enforceable and immutable way to license the content.

In the trailer for Solo, Chewbacca dangles for dear life from a high speed train barreling through a snowy landscape. “Chewie!” the young Han shouts, as the Wookiee’s head comes within spitting distance of a rocky mountainside, moments before everything goes black.

For those with even a passing familiarity with the Star Wars universe, it’s about as low stakes as cliffhangers get. Chewbacca will be fine. He’s made it to 190, and by all accounts, he survives well into the sequel trilogy, several cinematic decades later. It’s a bit silly, as far as these things go, but it also just might be the perfect setup for the film.

Solo is, by its very nature, low stakes. The fate of the galaxy is never at play, nor are the destinies of any of its familiar faces. In many ways, it’s a slight film, so far as the grandiosity of epic space operas are concerned, and for the most part, its filmmakers seem perfectly content to operate within those parameters.

Fans of the franchise were understandably skeptical in the lead up to release. It never bodes particularly well when a film’s directors are fired so late in the game. And while we may never get a straight answer as to why Chris Miller and Phil Lord were unceremoniously dumped by Disney toward the end of filming, rest assured that the unamicable parting of ways between the two sides is never peeks through the film’s shiny veneer.

If you should ever find yourself in charge of a major film studio, looking to deliver the latest entry in the world’s premier film franchise on time and in one piece, you can do a heck of a lot worse than Ron Howard. The man behind Apollo 13 and those Dan Brown movies is Hollywood’s leading auteur when it comes to delivering a film right down the middle of the road. 

However you might have ultimately felt about The Last Jedi, the movie was downright giddy in its attempts to subvert the series’ tropes. Solo, on the other hand, revels in them — at least as much as a film can that isn’t directly tied to the Skywalker saga and the never-ending tug of war between Jedi and Sith.

Like The Phantom Menace before it, the anthology entry is downright obsessed with tracing the origins of every available nook and cranny of the original trilogy. But where the prequels had a much larger mythology to explore, Han’s story is decidedly more narrow. As such, the film is content to offer the origins of elements you almost certainly never wondered about.

Why, for example, does Solo call Chewbacca “Chewie?” Or how about the fact that Lando pronounces “Han” differently that practically everyone else in the series? All of these questions, and more, are answered. If Solo winked at the camera any more, it would be flying with its eyes closed.

But Howard and a capable cast weave those elements into a largely enjoyable experience. In an era of blockbusters with ensemble casts 100 actors deep, Solo feels lean. It’s one part western and one part heist film, never requiring you to think too hard, instead just letting the film wash over you. In those moments when planned courses of action do get complex, however, never fear — there’s bound to be someone on screen explaining their plan.

Alden Ehrenreich is capable in the unenviable role of filling Harrison Ford’s massive shoes. Like the film itself, the actor plays it down the middle. He’s charming, but not overly so, and while Solo falls into some of the Episode I traps of excessive exposition, his Han is almost instantly more fleshed out than the young Anakin. From the opening scenes, which play like a cross between Oliver Twist and Blade Runner, it’s clear that Han Solo came into this world fully formed.

Donald Glover, for his part, clearly revels in the role of Lando Calrissian — a character like Solo himself, that is seemingly inextricable from its originating actor. But there’s a overwhelming joy in watching him inhabit the role it seems he’s been waiting his entire life to play — a force of chaotic-good cloaked in a velvet cape and goatee.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s L3-37, however, is undoubtedly the film’s breakout character. The bipedal droid presents a moral center of a kind in a film without otherwise populated by ethically ambiguous characters. A strong-willed crusader for robotic rights, L3-37 is easily the film’s most entertaining addition to the canon, as well as a sly thumb in the eye of fanboys who have turned their backs on a more inclusive Star Wars universe.

Droid aside, however, those concerned that the most recent films has strayed too far from the films of their youth will find plenty to like in Solo. It’s a perfectly middle of the road adventure that’s unlikely to end up at either the top or bottom of anyone’s list of Star Wars films.

To paraphrase Han, “I’ve got a perfectly okay feeling about this.”

Dropbox announced several enhancements today designed to beef up its mobile offering and help employees on the go keep up with changes to files stored in Dropbox .

In a typical team scenario, a Dropbox user shared a file with a team member for review or approval. If they wanted to check the progress of this process, the only way to do it up until now was to send an email or text message explicitly asking if the person looked at it yet — not a terribly efficient workflow.

Dropbox recognized this and has built in a fix in the latest mobile release. Now users can can simply see who has looked at or taken action on a file directly from the mobile application without having to leave the application.

In addition, those being asked to review files can see those notifications right at the top of the Home screen in the mobile app, making the whole feedback cycle much more organized.

Photo: Dropbox

Joey Loi, product manager at Dropbox says this is a much more streamlined way to understand activity inside of Dropbox. “With this feature, we think about the closing loop on collaboration. At its heart, collaboration is feedback flows. When I change something on a file, there are a few steps before [my co-worker] knows I’ve changed it,” Loi explained. With this feature that feedback loop can close much faster.

The company also changed the way it organizes and displays files putting the files that you opened most recently at the top of the Home screen, which is somewhat like Recents in Google Drive. It also provides a way to favorite a file and puts those files that are most important at the top of the list, making it easier to find the files that are likely most important to you more quickly when you access the mobile app.

Finally you can now drag and drop a file from an email into a Dropbox folder in a mobile context.

While none of these individual updates are earth shattering changes by any means, they do make it easier for users to access, share and work with files in Dropbox on a mobile device. “All the features are to help teams collaborate and be efficient on mobile,” Loi said.

Circle Invest is one of the easiest products when you want to get started with cryptocurrencies. When Circle first launched the app, I compared it to Coinbase. And Circle is making it even easier to get started as you can just “buy the market” now.

Circle Invest started with just a handful of cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin. But now, the company has added Monero and Zcash. If you don’t know anything about cryptocurrencies, it’s hard to know where you should put your money.

That’s why Circle has created a button that lets you buy all coins available on Circle Invest, weighted depending on their respective market capitalization. The total market cap of Bitcoin is much higher than the total market cap of Zcash, so you’ll end up with more Bitcoin than Zcash.

Circle Invest is available on the App Store and Play Store in the U.S. except in except in MN, HI and WY. The company plans to launch in Europe at some point.

The app only supports market orders. ACH transfers are free and you can buy instantly for transfers below $10,000 before the money arrives on Circle’s bank account.

Circle says you can expect a bit of spread between the buy and sell price, just like on other exchanges. But the company doesn’t add any fee on top of that.

Correction: Circle Invest is now available to users who live in NY.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

People really love getting their coffee more quickly. Starbucks, which has operated its own mobile payments service since 2011, is the market leader in terms of mobile payments users, beating out Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, according to a new reporter from eMarketer out this morning. However, Starbucks’ lead over Apple Pay is only a small one – in 2017, it had 20.7 million users compared with Apple Pay’s 19.7 million. And that gap will remain small this year, with 23.4 million using Starbucks’ mobile payments compared with 22 million using Apple Pay.

The wide adoption of the Starbucks mobile payment service is not only due to speed and convenience that the barcode-based payment system offers – it’s also because payments are tied to loyalty, and the Starbucks app is where customers can monitor and manage their card balance and their “star rewards.” In addition, Starbucks has the benefit of being able to offer a consistent payments experience across its stores – there’s never a question in consumers’ minds as to whether they can use its mobile payments service. They know they can.

Other mobile proximity payment services don’t have the same advantage, as many retailers still don’t offer payment terminals that support the tap-to-pay services like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

According to eMarketer’s forecast, 23.4 million people ages 14 and older will use the Starbucks app to make a point-of-sale purchase at least once every six months, compared with 22 million who will use Apple Pay, 11.1 million who will use Google Pay, and 9.9 million who will use Samsung Pay.

Those numbers will increase across the board through 2022, but the rankings will remain the same – with Starbucks then seeing 29.8 million users to Apple Pay’s 27.5 million.

However, this forecast appears to be discounting the impact of the recent expansion of Apple Pay, which will allow users to send payments to friends through iMessage. When you receive this money, it’s added to an Apple Pay Cash card in your iPhone’s Wallet, which can then be used in stores, in addition to in apps or online. This built-in payments service inside one of the largest messaging platforms could prompt more users to adopt Apple Pay, even if they hadn’t before.

Another note: it seems which services are more popular than others is also tied to how long they’ve been around.

Apple Pay launched before Samsung and Google Pay, and is now accepted at more than half of U.S. merchants. Google Pay isn’t as widely accepted, but is pre-installed on Android, which will help it grow. Samsung Pay, meanwhile, has the lowest adoption in terms of users, but is most accepted by merchants, says eMarketer.

The rankings of the various payment services wasn’t the only notable finding from eMarketer’s new report.

The analysts also found that this year, for the first time, more than 25 percent of U.S. smartphone users ages 14 and older, will have used a mobile payment service at least once every six months. The number of payments users will increase by 14.5 percent to reach 55 million by the end of 2018, the firm estimates.

But over the next several years, these top four services will see their share of the mobile payments drop, even as their user numbers grow. That’s because they’ll face increased competition from other new payment apps, including those from merchants themselves.

“Retailers are increasingly creating their own payment apps, which allow them to capture valuable data about their users. They can also build in rewards and perks to boost customer loyalty,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu says.

eMarketer’s forecast (paywalled) is based on an analysis of third-party data, including Forrester, Juniper Research, and Crone Consulting’s data.

Instagram today introduced a way to mute accounts, giving users a way to continue following accounts without seeing their posts all the time.

Muted accounts will not be made aware that they’ve been muted, and users can unmute accounts at any time. Users can still see posts on the muted account’s profile page and get notified about comments or posts they’re tagged in.

Users can mute accounts by tapping the “…” in the corner of the post and choosing between muting posts, stories, or posts and stories.

First and foremost, this continues Instagram’s effort to block bullying and harassment on the social network. While users have had the ability to block accounts for a long time, muting is a next step in blocking out someone without any of the consequences that might come from blocking them.

This could also come in handy for folks going through a break-up or some other social split, as they don’t necessarily want to see every single post from their ex but don’t want to be seen unfollowing them either.

Of course, the broader demographic will simply have more control over Instagram’s algorithmic feed, which prioritizes accounts and posts it thinks you will like (read: promotes engagement at all costs).

The algorithmic feed has added a layer of complexity to Instagram, making users think more cautiously about the way they throw around likes. Posts, and accounts, that you like may very well get top billing in your feed because of it, even if you only liked the post to show friends some love.

Muting gives users a bit more control over what they see regardless of what they’ve liked or what Instagram’s algorithm deems relevant.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a method for growing and connecting single neurons using geometric patterns to route the neurons more precisely, cell by cell.

The article, “Assembly and Connection of Micropatterned Single Neurons for Neuronal Network Formation,” appeared in Micromachines, a journal of molecular machinery.

Thus far researchers have created simple brain matter using “in vitro cultures,” a process that grows neurons haphazardly in a clump. The connections associated with these cultures are random, thereby making the brain tissue difficult to study.

“In vitro culture models are essential tools because they approximate relatively simple neuron networks and are experimentally controllable,” said study author Shotaro Yoshida. “These models have been instrumental to the field for decades. The problem is that they’re very difficult to control, since the neurons tend to make random connections with each other. If we can find methods to synthesize neuron networks in a more controlled fashion, it would likely spur major advances in our understanding of the brain.”

Yoshida and the team looked more closely at how neurons behave and found that they could be trained to connect using microscopic plates made of “synthetic neuron-adhesive material.” They look like little frying pans with extra handles and “when placed onto the microplate, a neuron’s cell body settles onto the circle, while the axon and dendrites – the branches that let neurons communicate with each other – grow lengthwise along the rectangles.”

The researchers then connected the neurons, testing if they would fire simultaneously as predicted.

“What was especially important in this system was to have control over how the neurons connected,” Yoshida said. “We designed the microplates to be movable, so that by pushing them around, we could physically move two neurons right next to each other. Once we placed them together, we could then test whether the neurons were able to transmit a signal.”

It worked.

“This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first time a mobile microplate has been used to morphologically influence neurons and form functional connections,” said investigator Shoji Takeuchi. “We believe the technique will eventually allow us to design simple neuron network models with single-cell resolution. It’s an exciting prospect, as it opens many new avenues of research that aren’t possible with our current suite of experimental tools.”

Unfortunately, this is just the first step for this technology, especially considering the millions of neurons necessary to eat, breathe, and sleep (and use the Internet). It is, however, a good start.

Reese Witherspoon’s media empire, Hello Sunshine, has teamed up with Audible to work on an audiobook project. The collaboration will initially see the launch of a showcase of Audible audiobooks as selected by Reese’s Book Club, which focus on strong but complex female characters. However, the two companies said that further down the line Hello Sunshine Witherspoon and Amazon-owned Audible will work together on original audio productions, details of which will be announced later in the year.

You may already have heard of the Hello Sunshine brand in passing.

Witherspoon’s company is producing a range of content including feature films, TV shows, social series, and more, including the upcoming Hulu original series starring Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, “Little Fires Everywhere,” based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestseller. It’s also producing a number of series for Apple’s forthcoming streaming service, including a comedy series with Kristen Wiig, a true crime thriller with Octavia Spencer, and a two-season drama series with Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. Amazon, meanwhile, has yet to tap into the Hello Sunshine brand until now, by way of its Audible subsidiary.

“When I started Reese’s Book Club, I wanted to highlight the voices of female storytellers and I am so excited to work with Audible to literally deliver on our mission!” read a statement by Witherspoon about the new project. “It can be hard to find time to read a highly recommended book, and love that with this partnership we are providing a way to experience these beautiful stories in audio form.”

The deal makes sense in terms of growing Hello Sunshine and anointing books as “must-reads” that are later turned into video projects, as is often the case today.

For example, the Apple/Kristen Wiig drama is based on Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection, “You Think It, I’ll Say It;” a film for Fox 2000 by Hello Sunshine is based on Catherine Steadman’s novel “Something in the Water;” and Hello Sunshine’s psychological thriller for TriStar Pictures “A White Lie” is based on Karin Tanabe’s novel “The Gilded Years.”

And for Amazon, a collaboration between its audiobook business, Audible, and Hello Sunshine, could give it insight (and potentially leverage) in the negotiations for upcoming Hello Sunshine video projects.

The new audiobook collection will kick off in June, the companies said.