A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building.
Modal provides personalized technical skills training for a company’s staff, offering on-demand coaching and a pedagogical approach that groups users into semi-structured online learning communities.
First, Shimkus says, by honing in on hot trends: data and AI.
“The rise of AI is bringing more visibility to data teams than ever before,” Shimkus said.
“It’s hard in today’s ever-changing workplace landscape to predict what your teams need, meaning most leaders don’t have a reliable way to plan for and improve their team’s skills.
As Microsoft unbundles Teams, it might not have the impact on Slack you thinkOne of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft.
For years, company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365, calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack.”The company went so far as to file a complaint against Microsoft with the European Union in 2020.
This morning, Microsoft announced it was finally unbundling Teams from Office 365 in the future, although current customers could continue to use the bundled license.
The market has matured to the point that many larger firms have made their choice, and since swapping out solutions isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable impact on market share.
What’s more, rather than aiding Slack, he sees this as helping Microsoft to get Teams into more accounts where companies weren’t buying Office 365 licenses.
Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack.
The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year.
The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017.
Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued.
In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft said the unbundling “also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”Reuters reported that Microsoft will introduce the new Office 365 lineups on Monday.
But despite this being the case, rarely are solutions teams adequately staffed and resourced, according to entrepreneur Dan Chen.
So with his friend Michael Graczyk (with whom Chen also co-founded Hero), he created Quilt, a platform that hosts AI assistants for solutions sales teams.
Surveys show that many businesses are concerned about the privacy and security risks associated with generative AI.
But the majority believe generative AI has the potential to boost productivity by streamlining existing tasks.
“Given the kinds of customers Quilt is working with, we’re well-positioned to be the preferred AI partner for solutions teams,” Chen said.
Stashpad, a developer-focused “DM to yourself”-styled notebook app, is now pivoting to a docs app that you can use without logging in.
The company will still maintain its original notes app and call it “Stashpad Lists.”StashPad Docs is the company’s new offering that doesn’t require any login and supports Markdown formatting.
The product is browser first and document history is stored locally, so users can search for docs without querying the server.
They might do so even without fully acknowledging that Google Docs remains a big part of their workflow.”With this new product, Stashpad aims to attract both technical and non-technical users.
Plus, it sees a venture-sized opportunity for the docs product.
The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires.
For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network.
Bluesky says installing filters from independent moderation services will be as easy as following another account.
People running moderation services will be able to set custom labels and determine what they do.
Moderation services aren’t tied to individual accounts, so multiple people can manage them together.
In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing, a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service, is gaining ground.
According to a report from VC firm OpenView, ~60% of SaaS businesses offer some form of usage-based pricing today.
But while usage-based pricing has its advantages, it can be tougher to keep tabs on from a billing perspective.
There, he ran into blockers collecting usage-based pricing data from different providers and infrastructure and aggregating and analyzing this usage together.
“Competitors in the usage-based space only cater to the revenue teams with a closed-source, billing-first approach,” he said.
In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic in its packaging.
Nonprofit ocean conservation firm Oceana, on the other hand, put that figure at approximately ~700 million pounds.
Take for example, its ongoing efforts to reduce package weights and replace plastics with paper products.
The first is a robot that is primarily deployed in recycling facilities to sort through different materials.
We’ve also received a pretty significant grant from the Michigan Department of Environment for further deployments of our technology.
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses.
Many teams already keep their documentation in GitHub repositories today, making it relatively easy for Copilot to reason over it.
On top of talking about today’s release, I also asked Dohmke about his high-level thinking of where Copilot is going next.
“Different use cases require different models.
We will continue going down that path of using the best models for the different pieces of the Copilot experience,” Dohmke said.
Spain’s Embat, which has raised $16M, plans to compete with Trovata in real-time accountingFor obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a lot of interest.
Today Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury management”, has closed a financing round of $16 million Series AS led by Creandum.
Their solution automates accounting and bank reconciliation, and deals with corporate treasury management, centralising collections, payments, and treasury processes, thus saving time, says the startup.
Last year Embat partnered with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform in an effort to reduce errors for accounting teams.
Tomás Gil, co-founder and CTO of Embat, said the company has “significantly improved” its accounting and bank reconciliation module and was now applying AI to its platform.
