Technology

Amazon today is continuing to make good on its Whole Foods acquisition by introducing a new grocery pickup service at select Whole Foods locations in the U.S. The service, which is available only to Prime members, will initially be available at stores in Sacramento and Virginia Beach, but will expand to more cities through the year. Customers will be able to place their orders using AmazonPrime Now app or on the web via PrimeNow.com, then pick up in as little as 30 minutes, Amazon says.

Customers will be able to shop Whole Foods& fresh and organic produce, bakery, dairy, meat and seafood, floral, and other staples, then pick up their order in an hour from their local Whole Foods Market.

This is the same selection of the thousands of items that customers can order for delivery. The majority of in-store items are available across both pickup and delivery services, we understand.

For orders over $35, the grocery pickup service is free. Under $35, the pickup fee is $1.99.

If customers want to get their order more quickly, they have the option of pay an additional $4.99 for a 30-minute pickup instead.

Once they arrive at the store, customers will park in a designated spot and a Prime Now shopper will then bring the groceries out to their car & the customer can stay in their vehicle. The Prime Now app also has a feature that lets the customer alert the store they&re on the way, so the order will be sure to be ready when they arrive.

The pickup service, like Whole Foods delivery, will be offered from 8 AM to 10 PM.

&Pickup from Whole Foods Market is a perfect option for customers who want to grab healthy and organic groceries at their convenience, all without leaving their car,& said Stephenie Landry, Worldwide Vice President of Prime Now, AmazonFresh and Amazon Restaurants, in a statement about the launch.

Amazon already offers grocery delivery from Whole Foods Market across dozens of cities, but this is the first time it has offered grocery pickup.

The move is a direct challenge to rival Walmart, which has been steadily rolling out a grocery pickup service of its own for years. Today, that service is available at 1,800 Walmart locations in the U.S., with plans to reach 2,200 by year-end, Walmart confirmed to us.

Walmartgrocery pickup service offers shoppers the same general value proposition as Amazon&s. That is, you can shop online for your groceries, drive to the store, then have someone bring them out to you. Walmartservice has been especially well-received by parents with small children, who don&t like the hassle of bringing them into the store for grocery shopping, as well as by others who just don&t have a lot of time to grocery shop.

The service has made sense for Walmartmore value-minded customers, too. With grocery pickup, shopping can be more affordable because therenot the overhead of running a delivery service & as with Instacart and Target-owned Shipt, where itcostlier to use the app than to shop yourself. (Plus, you have to tip).

In addition to not marking up the grocery prices, Amazon notes that Prime members can also receive the same 10 percent off sale items they would otherwise get if shopping in the store, and they&ll enjoy the deeper discounts on select items. These savings are available in-store, or when using grocery pickup or delivery.

Alongside this launch, Amazon is also adding a new way to use Alexa for voice shopping from Whole Foods.

Prime members in supported regions can add Whole Foods Market groceries to their Prime Now cart with simple voice commands. For example: &Alexa, add eggs to my Whole Foods cart.&

Alexa will pick the best available match for your request, considering users& order history and purchasing behavior of other customers when it adds an item to the cart.

But customers will review these cart additions when they go online later to complete their order and checkout. Iteasy to swap the item in the cart for another one at that time.

A report released this week by The Information claimed that few Alexa owners were actively voice shopping using their Alexa devices, but this data seemed to overlook Alexalist-making capabilities. That is, people are more likely using Alexa to add items to an in-app shopping list, which they later revisit when they&re back on their phone or computer to complete the purchase. This behavior feels more natural, as shopping often requires a visual confirmation of the product being ordered and its current pricing.

Itnot surprising that people aren&t using Alexa to transact directly through the voice platform, but it is a bit far-fetched to claim that Alexa isn&t providing a lift to Amazonbottom line. In addition to list-making, Alexa also helps to upsell customers on Prime memberships, and its other subscription services, including Prime Music Unlimited, the number 3 music service behind Spotify and Apple Music, as well as Audible subscriptions.

Plus, Alexa controls the smart home, and Amazon has acquired smart home device makers and sells its own smart home hardware. It also offers installation services. Those sales, like music or audiobooks, also aren&t directly flowing through Alexa, but Alexaexistence helps to boost them.

Amazonnew Whole Foods/Alexa integration will also capitalize on the more common behavior of list-making, rather than direct check out and purchase.

Amazon declined to say which other markets would receive Whole Foods grocery pickup next, how many it expects to support by year-end, or what factors itconsidering as to where to roll out next. It would only say that it will reach more customers this year.

However, as the grocery pickup and delivery services expand, customers can find out if itarrived in their area by saying, &Alexa, shop Whole Foods Market.&

Slack — the app that lets coworkers and others in professional circles chat with each other and call in data from hundreds of integrated apps in the name of getting more work done (or at least procrastinating in an entertaining way) — has been on a growth tear in the last few years, most recently passing 8 million daily active users, 3 million of them paying. Now, the company is planning to capitalise on that with some more funding.

TechCrunch has learned that Slack is raising another round, this time in the region of $400 million or possibly more, with a post-money valuation of at least $7 billion— adding a whopping $2 billion on top of the companylast valuation in September 2017, when SoftBank led a $250 million round at a $5.1 billion valuation.

We&ve heard from multiple sources that a new investor, General Atlantic, is leading this round, with possibly another new backer, Dragoneer, also in the mix. Itnot clear which other investors might be involved; the company counts no less than 41 other backers on its cap table already, according to PitchBook. (You might even saySeveral People Are Funding…) We also don&t know whether this round has closed.

At $400 million, this would make it Slackbiggest round to date. That size underscores a few different things.

First, it points to the existing opportunity in enterprise messaging. Consumerisation has taken hold, and apps that let users easily start and carry on a mix of serious and diverting conversations, infused with GIFs or whatever data they might need from other applications, are vying to replace other ways that people communicate in the workplace, such as email, phone conferences and in-person chats, even when people are in the same vicinity as each other. With consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp topping 1.5 billion users, thereplenty of room for enterprise messaging to grow.

Second, the round and valuation emphasize Slackposition as a leader in this area. While there were other enterprise social networking apps in existence before Slack first launched in 2013— Yammer, Hipchat and Socialcast among them — nothing had struck a chord quite as Slack did. &Things have been going crazy&, was how co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield described it to me when Slack exited beta: teams trialling it were seeing usage from &every single team member, every day.&

That growth pace has continued. Today, the company counts 70,000 paid teams including Capital One, eBay, IBM, 21st Century Fox, and 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies among its bigger users; and with customers in 100 countries, half of its DAUs are outside North America (UK, Japan, Germany, France and India are its biggest international markets).

But thirdly — and this could be key when considering how this funding will be used — Slack is not the only game in town.

Software giant Microsoft has launched Teams, and social networking behemoth Facebook has Workplace. Using their respective dominance in enterprise software and social mechanics, these two have stolen a march on picking up some key customer wins among businesses that have opted for products that are more natural fits with what their employees were already using. Microsoft reported 200,000 paying organizations earlier this year, and Facebook has snagged some very large customers likeWalmart.

Slackbottom-up distribution strategy could give it an edge against these larger companies and their broader but more complex products. The lightweight nature of Slackmessaging-first approach allows it more easily be inserted into a companyoffice stack. Nearly every type of employee needs office messaging, creating potential for Slack to serve as an identity layer for enterprise software. Itown Slack Fund invests in potential companies that plug in, as the company hopes to build an ecosystem of partners that can fill in missing functionality.

AUSTIN, TX & MARCH 15: Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack speaks onstage at ‘Stewart Butterfield in Conversation with Farhad Manjoo& during the 2016 SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival at Austin Convention Center on March 15, 2016 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Mindy Best/Getty Images for SXSW)

Alongside dozens of other, smaller rivals offering comparative mixes of tools, itno surprise that last month Slack tightened up its bootlaces to take on the role of consolidator, snapping up IP and shutting down Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian, with the latter taking a stake in Slack as part of the deal.

Slack, which has a relatively modest 1,000+ employees, has ruled out an IPO this year, so this latest round will help it shore up cash in the meantime to continue growing, and competing.

Contacted for this story, Slack said that it does not comment on rumors or speculation.

[Heavy sigh]

Twitter is doing that thing again. That thing where it stands by an incoherent policy choice that is only consistent with its long historical record of inconsistency.

Late Tuesday, Twitter Jack Dorsey took to the platform to defend his companychoice to keep manic conspiracy theorist and hatemonger Alex Jones and his Infowars empire alive and tweeting.

Last week, that choice wouldn&t have turned heads, but after a kind of sudden and inexplicable sea change from all of the other major social platforms over the weekend, Twitter stands alone. To be fair, those social platforms didn&t really assert their own decisions to oust Jones — Apple led the pack, kicking him out of its Podcasts app, and the rest — Facebook, Spotify and YouTube, most notably — meekly followed suit.

Prior to its new statements, Twitter justified its decision to not ban Jones first by telling journalists like us that Jones didn&t actually violate Twitterterms of servicebecause most of his abuse and hateful conduct, two violations that might get him banished, live one click away, outside the platform.

The same could be said for most of the hateful drivel that came from the infamous account of the now-banned MiloYiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos was eventually booted from Twitter for violating the platformperiodically enforced prohibition against&the targeted abuse or harassment of others.& Jones is known for commanding a similarly hateful online loser army, though in his case they mostly spend their time harassing the parents of Sandy Hook victims rather than black actresses. Twitterpoint is that this kind of harassment needs to actually take place on its platformto get a user kicked off, which in a world in which Twitter policy was uniformly enforced (i.e. a world in which Twitter dedicated sufficient resources to the problem) that would at least be a consistent policy.

Instead of articulating that policy in a clear, decisive way, Twitter said some unnecessarily defensive things that kind of miss the point via an @jack tweetstorm and a tepid blog posttouting the companyvague new commitment to &healthy public conversation.&

If you didn&t read either, you&re not missing anything. Herean excerpt from the blog post:

&Our policies and enforcement options evolve continuously to address emerging behaviors online and we sometimes come across instances where someone is reported for an incident that took place prior to that behavior being prohibited. In those instances, we will generally require the individual to delete the Tweet that violates the new rules but we won&t generally take other enforcement action against them (e.g. suspension). This is reflective of the fact that the Twitter Rules are a living document. We continue to expand and update both them and our enforcement options to respond to the changing contours of online conversation. This is how we make Twitter better for everyone.&

Great, crystal clear. Right If it isn&t herea taste of Dorseynew tweetstorm:

Herethe gist:

Alex Jones and Infowars didn&t break any of Twitterrules. Twitter is very bad at explaining its choices and trying to get better, maybe. Twitter won&t follow other platforms for policy enforcement decisions like this because it thinks that sets a bad precedent. Twitter doesn&t want to become a platform &constructed by [its creators&] personal views& (this delusion of neutrality bit is where he really started losing us).

Dorsey finishes with a fairly infuriating assertion that journalists should shoulder all of the work of addressing hatespeech and generally horrific content that leads to real-life harassment, itnot really Twitterproblem. Believe us, we&re working on it!!

&Accounts like Jones& can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so itcritical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.&

To the bit about journalists, all we can say is: Twitter, just own your shit.

Even for those of us concerned about the precedents set by some of techoccasional lopsided gestures toward limiting the myriad horrors on the extremely totally neutral platforms that definitely in no way make tech companies publishers, Dorseycomments suck. Sure, the whole thing about staying consistent sounds okay at first, but Twitter is the platform most infamous for its totally uneven enforcement around harassment and hate speech and the one that leaves its users most vulnerable. If the company is truly making an effort to be less terrible at explaining its decisions — and we&re skeptical about that too — this is prettyinauspicious start.

Added to this, former Twitter VP of comms Emily Horne responded to Dorsey with some notable points, including a claim that Twitter has already begun taking into account user behavior offline. That makes the lack of action against Jones all the more baffling.