Technology

As Slack tries to graduate beyond a Silicon Valley darling tothe go-to communications platform within a company, ithad 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 thattied 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, Slackplatform has grown to include more than 200,000 developers, and therestill 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.

&Theresuch 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 theremore 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 italso working on what itcalling 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 fromJira, 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. Thathelped 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. Atlassianopened up its communications platform Stride todevelopers in February this year. Microsoft, toocontinues 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.

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. Itan 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. Italso 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.

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 round, 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 peoplelife 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 Rositawhere Horner, a former ad exec, learned of Palexperience 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 Visionsubscriber 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.&