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Stewart Butterfield: The Visionary Behind Flickr and Slack’s Success

Stewart Butterfield: The Visionary Behind Flickr and Slack’s Success

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Stewart Butterfield, born in 1973 in the small town of Lund, British Columbia, is a prominent figure in the tech industry. From a young age, Butterfield displayed a curiosity for technology, driven by his fascination with computers. He pursued his passion by studying philosophy at the University of Victoria, later earning a master’s degree in the same field from the University of Cambridge. Though his academic background was rooted in the humanities, Butterfield’s career trajectory was anything but traditional.

The Birth of Flickr

Stewart Butterfield: The Visionary Behind Flickr and Slack’s Success

Image Source: britannica.com

Butterfield’s first major breakthrough came in 2004 with the creation of Flickr, an online photo-sharing platform. Along with his then-wife, Caterina Fake, Butterfield initially set out to create an online game called “Game Neverending.” However, the game never took off, but they recognized the potential of a photo-sharing feature within the game. This realization led to the development of Flickr. The platform revolutionized how people shared and organized photos online, introducing features such as tagging and social networking aspects that were novel at the time. Flickr quickly gained traction, catching the attention of tech giants.

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr for approximately $25 million. The acquisition was a significant milestone in Butterfield’s career, as it not only brought financial success but also cemented his reputation as an innovative tech entrepreneur. However, despite Flickr’s success, Butterfield’s ambitions extended beyond the photo-sharing domain.

The Pivot to Slack

After his time at Yahoo, Butterfield embarked on a new venture that would again start as a game but evolve into something much larger. In 2009, he co-founded Tiny Speck, a company focused on developing the online game “Glitch.” Like his previous attempt, the game didn’t achieve the desired success. However, Butterfield and his team realized that the internal communication tool they had built for their work on Glitch was far more valuable.

This tool became the foundation for what we now know as Slack. Launched in 2013, Slack transformed workplace communication by offering an organized, intuitive, and user-friendly platform for teams to collaborate. The service quickly gained a massive user base, becoming one of the fastest-growing business applications in history. By 2019, Slack had gone public, solidifying its place as a cornerstone of modern workplace communication.

Also Read: Tadashi Yanai: From Store Cleaner to Japan’s Richest Billionaire

Legacy and Impact

Stewart Butterfield’s journey from Flickr to Slack is a testament to his ability to pivot, adapt, and innovate. His career highlights the importance of recognizing opportunities, even when they arise from apparent failures. Through his ventures, Butterfield has left a lasting impact on the tech world, revolutionizing how we interact online, both socially and professionally.

Zoom Team Chat

Zoom Chat becomes Zoom Team Chat and adds features to compete with Teams

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When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Zoom Chat was a relatively unknown startup. However, at the height of the crisis, when people stranded at home turned to video conferencing for communication, Zoom reported triple-digit sales growth. Zoom also offers Zoom Chat, a service that is somewhat comparable to Microsoft Teams and Slack. Along with a number of other useful enhancements for the collaboration software, Zoom announced a tiny modification to the product’s name, which is now Zoom Team Chat.

In an effort to compete with rivals like Microsoft’s Teams Zoom Video Communications Inc. announced on Monday that it has rebranded its chat platform and added additional functions, including third-party connectivity. To make teamwork more convenient, the updated program combines chat, third-party integrations, file sharing, video, voice, and a whiteboard in one location, according to a blog post by Zoom.

Zoom Team Chat
Image Source: businessworld.in

The
most recent updates will make it simpler to switch from a chat to a
video or phone call or to share an idea via a whiteboard. According
to experts, Zoom has added “Team” to its chat product since
consumers were confused about how the chat component in Zoom meetings
differed from the premium communication tool. This item acts as an
all-in-one platform, providing comprehensive capabilities to
encourage teamwork.

The head of product at Zoom Team Chat, Sharvari Nerurkar, claimed in a chat with The Verge that users encounter friction when they must switch between several different platforms in order to communicate with the same set of individuals. Zoom Team Chat is designed to be a single center for collaboration where you can communicate with coworkers asynchronously via text chat or in real-time via calls.

By the end of the month, Zoom hopes to roll out a few new features to improve the overall experience of actually utilizing zoom chat. The ability to share in-meeting chat directly into Zoom Team Chat is one addition that will make it simpler to read any crucial notes after the meeting has ended. If you’re having a text exchange that might benefit from a call, you may also schedule a Zoom conference directly from a Zoom Team Chat channel.

With
this update, Zoom is attempting to take a stand in a market that is
quite crowded.

Google, Slack, and Microsoft among others, are all quickly developing their own professional communication technologies to help enterprises in adapting to hybrid work environments, putting a lot of pressure on Zoom.

Although
Zoom Team Chat has been improved, it may be challenging for the
company to convince companies to switch from their current platforms
to Zoom Team Chat. As demand declines from epidemic highs, Zoom
lowered its annual revenue and profit predictions last month.

Zoom Team Chat is a feature of Zoom One, the company’s all-inclusive communication package, which also comprises Zoom Meetings with up to 300 participants, Zoom Whiteboard, and 5GB of cloud storage. Zoom’s chat product never really enjoyed the same level of attention as Zoom’s video meeting capabilities so far, but the company wants that to change through this move.

Eric Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 and released its software in 2013. Zoom’s revenue growth and the software’s perceived usability and dependability led to a $1 billion valuation for the business in 2017, establishing it as a “unicorn” company. In 2019, the company achieved profitability and successfully completed an IPO.

Slack

Slack Faces an Outage With the Start of 2021, Disrupting Thousands of Users

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Ending 2020, after the holiday week, people in the United States went on to work again on Monday. But the Monday did not go very smoothly for the office messaging company Slack, as it faced an outage on the very day.

What is Slack and Why it is used

Slack is an office messaging and communication platform, developed by an American software company Slack Technologies. The app is used for sharing information, chatting, voice and video calls, transferring documents by thousands of users and companies. It has been providing its services since 2013 and has become the first choice of many companies for establishing a private network of communication for their office staff and clients. The company has also seen a hike in the number of users during the Pandemic.

The Full-Blown Outage

Slack went down at around 10 AM ET on Monday, and the users started reporting about the problem. There were issues with sending messages, loading the channel, making calls, transferring files, and many of the users even reported that they could not log in to their slack accounts. During the outage, the calendar on Slack as well as the notifications was also not working.

Slack
Image Source: slack.com

By 10:14 AM, the company also confirmed that the app was facing some issues, and later, it also acknowledged that an outage had occurred. “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connect to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused”, the company updated, “The problem remained for about more than two hours, and after that, the platform started working fine for some of the users at about 12:20 PM. But many of the users were still facing the interruption. The company also continued to update its official Twitter account with information regarding the problem. “

All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate,” one of its tweets said.”At 3:10 PM, the company tweeted, “We’re truly sorry for the disruption today. We’ll be back with a summary of this issue.”

Cause of the Problem

In the pandemic, the companies were heavily relying on the various messaging and video conferencing apps, including Slack, Zoom, Google, etc. This might also be a reason that those platforms were facing such issues. Last year, in the mid of December, Gmail from Google also faced a similar blackout for some time, where users were continuously getting some error messages. This outage encouraged users to shift from one platform to the other so that they could complete their work on time. But since these apps recovered in a few hours, users could use them again.

The Salesforce Deal

But those issues are not permanent, as these companies are continuously working towards improving their tools for the users. Recently, the American cloud-based software company Salesforce announced to buy Slack for an amount of $27.7 billion (roughly Rs. 2,03,400 crores) and adding more features and tools to the platform. The company also revealed that it will be merging the Slack messaging technology to its platform so that users can manage the marketing and sales teams from a single platform.

Back to Normal

After the big-blown outage, reportedly, Slack is working perfectly smooth now. “Seeing improvements with error rates on our site, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack,” said a spokesperson of Slack. Though thousands of people reported the issue with the platform, the company hasn’t given any figures or number of how many users faced the disruption. 

Slack

Salesforce to acquire work-chat service app Slack for $27.7 billion

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On Tuesday both Salesforce and Slack confirmed the acquisition of the latter for $27.7 billion by the software company Salesforce. This acquisition will mark one of the biggest business deals in the software industry and also the biggest in the history of Salesforce to date. Salesforce is a cloud computing giant which after owning the new work-chat app will amplify the working connectivity globally. The company will have a better shot at giving tough competition to the tech giant Microsoft.

Salesforce was one of the earlier companies in the IT industry to sell software in the form of subscription service. This saved many small companies and individual workers the time to install the programs on PCs. But, the concept of the software subscription is not a unique idea anymore. Many companies especially the big tech giants are making such online services with lucrative packages to offer, for example, IBM and Microsoft. So, what’s Salesforce’s plan in the long run?

Slack Competing with Microsoft

Slack is an application used for messaging on a professional level. It is mostly used to enable communication among a group of people (especially workplace teams) which offers more than just one-to-one chatting service. Unfortunately with Microsoft Teams into Office 365, the demand for Slack was pulled down. In July, Slack launched a complaint against Microsoft in the European Union for illegally offering Teams in Office 365 subscription. And, customers will rather prefer a subscription where they are offered more than one service and everything is connected to ease the workflow. On top of this, some of the main products of Salesforce are in tough competition with Microsoft’s to stay afloat in the market. So, what is better than making a deal to make the company bigger and better?

Slack
Image Source: howtogeek.com

The experts can see clearly that for Salesforce the main target is to outrun Microsoft as the latter is moving far ahead of Salesforce in terms of cloud computing. Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce said that “Slack is a central nervous system for so many companies” and that “it’s a match made in heaven”. But, if it is only about outrunning Microsoft not every decision of the company might be fruitful.

The Salesforce – Slack deal

Salesforce is paying Slack $27.7 billion to close the deal. Under the agreements for this acquisition, the Slack shareholders will get $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each share of Slack. And, this calculation gives an entire value of $27.7 billion according to the November 2020 closing price of Salesforce’s common stock. March believes that this acquisition and what it will lead to will become the future of enterprise software. And, as the entire world is now getting accustomed to the work-from-home habit, the two companies might have hit the jackpot after all.

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, believes that with every passing day enterprise software is becoming the core of any organization. So, to build products and services with less complexity, more flexibility, proper alignment, and organizational agility is the main goal. He also said that he believes this is the most strategic decision in the history of software.

The current reputation of Salesforce 

It has been over two decades that Salesforce is providing computing solutions to customers around the globe. The company has achieved massive success and recently it is also expanding its business by several acquisitions. The company bought a data analytics specialist for $15.7 last year. The current market value of Salesforce is approximately $220 billion which is around seven-folds greater than it was almost a decade ago. Kate Leggett, an analyst predicts Salesforce made a very positive acquisition as Slack will be added to its software suite giving people a similar experience like Office 365. If there are no hiccups in the way, Salesforce will take full control of Slack by mid-2021.

An arsenal of perks

Though Slack is a very handy alternative for email and other online communication, it is not as popular as it was expected to be. It is used by many companies and government agencies but not a hot deal for the investors. So, by selling it to one of the leading software companies in the world, Slack just made a perfect exit embarking on a new journey. With Slack being acquired now it will have a broad customer base of the Salesforce and attract new customers as well for the company.

slack notifications

New Update of Slack Gives Users’ More Control Over Their Notifications

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Slack is a top-rated messaging application that organisations prefer due to its more professional design. A lot of companies and corporations use this messenger for internal communication. While it helps you stay connected to your employer, sometimes, the messenger intrudes your free time. Well, not anymore! Slack’s new update allows you to choose when you want to receive notifications, allowing you to free up your weekend. Here’s a quick look at how the update allows you full control over your weekends once again. 

Slack New Update

The new update allows users to set a per-day basis for their notification received, ensuring they can keep work at bay during the weekends. Most people have had to struggle with maintaining a work-life balance with the app keeping them hooked to their jobs even on the weekends. However, this new update allows you to separate your personal and work lives, by freeing up your weekend. In the past, Slack allowed users to set tags like Available and Busy to determine how they received notifications. However, these settings automatically extended to the weekends as well, meaning you received work emails and texts during your off-days. 

slack
Image Source- Slackhq.com

Weekend Fun

Users hated receiving important work texts while lazing around on the only free day they had, and the new update tries to solve this problem. It gives you back your Sundays by allowing you to set your preferences on a per-day option. That means users get to decide when they are comfortable receiving work-related messages. It will enable them to establish a no-notification policy for the weekends, or on days they have called in sick, to get some me-time for themselves.

DND Your Weekends

With the help of the new notifications settings, you can put your weekend in Slack’s Do-Not-Disturb mode. When the DND mode activates, your contacts will see a ‘z’ next to your name, indicating you do not wish to be disturbed. When you are in the DND mode, every group which mentions your name or a keyword related to you will have a red badge next to it. However, people can still ping you via Direct Message, which will lead to a notification on your device. Now that you know exactly what the new update does, here’s a look at how to fine-tune and customise the setting on your app.

Fine-Tuning Your Notifications

For the desktop app:

  1. Go to the Slack Homepage.
  2. Click on the arrow right next to the organisation’s name.
  3. Go to the Pause Notifications Tab and click on it to find a menu within it.
  4. From the menu, click on the Set a notification schedule option.
  5. On that tab, go to the Allow Notifications heading, and access the dropdown menu under it.
  6. From this menu, select the notifications setting you want – Daily, Weekdays, or Custom schedule.
  7. To fine-tune even further, you can opt for the time duration over which you want to receive notifications.

For the mobile app:

  • Go to the main toolbar on the app.
  • Click on the You Icon, and then the Notifications tab.
  • From the menu, click on Notification Schedule.
  • Next, click on Allow notifications, and then decide on the setting you want- Daily, Weekdays or Custom.

 If you want to enable push notifications, here’s how you do it.

  1. In the Slack Mobile App, go to Channel Settings, and then click on Notification Preferences.
  2. Doing so will open up the Desktop/Mobile Push Notifications tab.
  3. From the tab, select your preferred settings and click on Done.

Once you have saved your settings, it will automatically sync with your devices. Doing so will help you organise your life, and prevent work emails from getting across on the weekends. This new update allows you to stay updated on the matters that are the most important. It also helps you achieve a healthy work-life balance, and de-stress your weekends. Set up your Slack Notifications and free up your weekends for some much-needed me-time.

Slack

Slack Out with Beta Version of Major Update That Betters User-Interface

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Slack’s mobile applications are now trying to duplicate a desktop or browser experience by using a single home screen. The company is also working on improving its swipe-based navigation. However, a new update, which will roll out on an Android Beta channel, will try to do away with these cumbersome issues. The latest beta version aims to create a more straightforward and more user-friendly app that introduces significant interface changes.

New Features in the Update

Without a doubt, the most significant change the update will bring is a new navigation bar that will allow users to switch between sections. Such a bar, which will be at the bottom of the page, will enable users to move between sections without excessive swiping. Also, it makes it easier to scan through menus and read chats with ease in the beta version. The bar will also have a home screen button, which will showcase all channels on your device. When on this screen, you can swipe right to go to your other workspaces, and left, if you wish to backtrack to the last channel you visited. Near the home tab, there will be a DM tab to help you access your private message tab.

Also, the bar will have a Mentions tab that enables you to organize your activity session, which used to be hard to get to in the older versions of the app. The last tab on the right will take you to your profile, and will serve as a You tab. Furthermore, the new compose tab will help you start new chats with people via DM. These new upgrades will significantly help with improving Slack’s Android user experience. The app was notorious for burying features and limiting ease of access to vital functions via drop-down menus and options.

Easier for Users

The cluttered sidebar, which was notorious for making remote collaboration more robust, has been improved to make it easier for users to find and join new channels. Furthermore, the addition of a new drag and drop option also makes it easy to group channels and conversations into sections that can collapse when needed. Users can also easily access files, apps, reactions, and mentions from the bar perched on top of the search bar.

The new Compose DM button also makes it easier for users to draft a new message when something comes up urgently, as you get to prepare the message and then attach a recipient to it. The latest update will also make it possible for users to drag, drop, and group channels, folders, and DMs into customizable sections. However, this feature will be available only to customers who pay to use the app, and not for the freeware users.  Additionally, there will be a new lightning bolt button, which will be put next to the message field to allow users to open a new app or utility tool when required.

Current App Issues

In the current beta version, you can access the channel list via the workspace icon, which is present on the upper-left corner of the screen. Another way to do this is to swipe left, in case you do not use the new Q gesture system, which has changed the gesture system tremendously. The DM tab and workspace are buried below layers of buttons and swipes, with them coming out only after you swipe to bring it out. However, ease of use has not changed drastically when you look at Slack on iOS.

The iOS update does not have a navigation bar, though it does come with better swiping options, which allow users to access more parts of the application. Therefore, it is safe to say that the new updates will help make Slack more user-friendly and fast. Once people get used to the new interface, they will find it a lot simpler and efficient. However, we are still not sure when Slack will come out with a public and final version of this update, and whether it will carry additional changes as well.

Whatever might be the case, the changes that have been discussed by the app are welcome ones, which users will definitely appreciate and encourage! In case you want to switch to the version anyway, you can download the Beta version from the PlayStore.