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.
Bumble’s new CEO talks about her critical mission: to spice things up at the company Tis the season for turnaround CEOsSince Bumble’s blockbuster IPO at the height of the pandemic, investors’ ardor with the dating service has cooled.
Part of it ties to AI, which Bumble’s rivals are also leaning into more heavily.
But as we approach our 10-year anniversary, it’s a great moment to think about how we best serve our mission.
Historically, what we’ve seen is that a lot of men will come to Bumble who believe in women being empowered.
Bumble has always been great at community-based marketing: hosting events and finding ambassadors who really want to represent the brand.
Marissa Mayer’s startup just rolled out photo sharing and event planning apps, and the internet isn’t sure what to thinkWhen Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, Ca., expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee.
When that startup, Sunshine, revealed that its first app centered around subscription software for contact management, people wondered if something more ambitious might be around the corner.
Today, after Sunshine released two equally mundane features – event organizing and photo sharing – internet commenters were decidedly mystified.
I was also baffled last week, when Mayer walked me through Sunshine’s new offerings.
The core thesis has always been to take the mundane and make it magical.”The team “thought about naming it Mundane AI,” she continued.
Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.
Stability AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters, said Mostaque is stepping down to pursue decentralized AI.
In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can’t beat “centralized AI” with more “centralized AI,” referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important.
“The payoffs on proper generative AI R&D are clearer and faster to market than just about anything we’ve seen.
Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang.
Astera Labs makes connectivity hardware for cloud computing data centers.
Astera Labs’ IPO price valued it at around $5.5 billion, a figure that swells to around $8.9 billion at its current trading price.
The strong performance of Astera in its first hours as a public company could also ameliorate some investor activity that is holding back, or even preventing some public offerings altogether.
If VCs know that the startup could pop on the public market like Astera Labs, maybe they will think about the timeline differently.
“And the product was electricity.”He was comparing this — turning raw material into something else that have value — to the notion of data centers, which are purely money pits.
“There’s a new Industrial Revolution happening in these [server] rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said.
“The raw material that goes in is data and electricity.
It’s very valuable.”The distinction makes a lot of sense in a world where Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way.
“The last time, data centers went into your company’s cost centers and capital expenditure.
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft.
Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently).
Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it.
Ultimately Microsoft got a bit of extra leverage on the company instead of eating it alive.
Whether it was OpenAI or Inflection, Microsoft was feeding their cash and compute addictions, whispering in their ear about partnerships, and then as soon as they tripped, out came the hidden fork and knife.
Just like battery-electric cars 20 years ago, hydrogen fuel cell cars suffer from the old chicken and the egg problem.
Nobody wants to buy a fuel cell vehicle until the supporting infrastructure is in place, but it’s tough to invest in infrastructure when nobody owns a fuel cell vehicle.
Honda sees four ways to apply the second-generation hydrogen fuel cell: in consumer and commercial fuel cell vehicles, in stationary power stations and in construction machinery.
Honda learned that Clarity Fuel Cell owners usually drove very short distances, five or 10 miles at a time and a hydrogen fuel cell isn’t the most efficient on quick trips.
The fuel cell CR-V has a 10.2-inch digital gauge cluster with all the power-delivery information your nerdy brain could possibly want.
Despite all that growth, Eric Gylman, the co-founder and CEO of Ramp thinks that the industry, and companies like his, are just scratching the surface.
Glyman and his current co-founder Karim Atiyeh launched their first fintech startup, Paribus, back in 2014.
The company raised a mere $2 million before getting snapped up by Capital One.
When the team was building Paribus, the generative AI technology to craft the emails was still relatively rudimentary and the rest of the company’s AI technology was built on very simple language models.
The startup has raised more than $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and was last valued at $5.8 billion in August 2023.
Update: Starbucks announced Friday that it’s discontinuing its NFT program, to “prepare for what comes next as we continue to evolve the program,” according to an FAQ page.
“I think this year we’re going to see a lot of community-based brand building,” he shared on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Starbucks launched Starbucks Odyssey in 2022 as its initial foray into the web3 world.
The experience combined the company’s Starbucks Reward loyalty program with NFTs to enhance customer experiences, TechCrunch previously reported.
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