Slack skews toward enterprise with new user groups, Nintendo's big first mobile game gets
delayed till next year, Twitch starts highlighting non-gaming livestreamers, and more.
It's Thursday, October 29th and this is Crunch Report.
Current enterprise messaging service darling Slack has gained a ton of traction in a short
amount of time - Slack says in the last month at any given time there are 1 million people
connected through the service, with 470 thousand paid team messaging through the client.
Now Slack wants to give bigger organizations more functionality through its brand new User
Groups.
This new feature is for paid plans only, and lets notifications be bundled into separate
departments, like a company's engineers, or marketing teams, or any group of people who
should get alerts at the same time.
This update adds the ability to automatically add users to a preset list of channels when
they sign on with a team for the first time for quick onboarding, too.
Admins can also map all of the active Slack user groups to Active Directory with SSO providers
like OneLogin and Ping.
This allows them to add huge groups of people into Slack in one batch.
Now, give us threaded comments and we'd really be talking.
We have plenty of cloud services that do anything from photo storage to collaborative document
editing to file sharing...
iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive... but do you just use one service for everything
you store in the cloud?
I doubt it.
Nobody does that, because there still isn't that perfect solution for everyting.
UpThere, which is A Palo Alto based company coming out of “stealth” today, has been
on the case since 2011 with a list of investors from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and
Western Digital, and founders who came from Apple Software's Engineering team, Oracle,
and Google.
Upthere wants to be your total storage solution, with their own servers.
By building a filesystem that directly writes to the cloud, UpThere want to bypass local
storage completely and build off the fact that devices are essentially always connected
to the internet and don't need their own hard drives.
UpThere is getting ready to release two apps for Mac OS, iOS, and Android, in the next
few weeks that demonstrate how the company handles photo, video, music, and documents,
with using folder hierarchy.
Nintendo's first mobile game is coming!
Except that it's just been delayed to March, 2016.
The company partnered with Japanese mobile games specialist DeNA back in March of this
year and was hoping for a release before January.
Nintendo CEO Tat-sumi Kimi-shima said during an investor meeting that more time is needed
to promote its mobile debut.... which will be....not a Mario game.
It's Mii-tomo where user-created avatars connect with each other..
free to download with in-app purchases if you actually want to have fun.
Nintendo’s share price dipped 7.5 percent right after the reveal..
Nintendo is staggeringly late to mobile gaming at this point - but Kimi-shima says five titles
are scheduled for launch in 2016.
Who will care, remains to be seen.
Twitch is making some room for the growing number of non-gaming videos on its site: creative
content, music, art, etc.
Today, the company is launching a dedicated landing page to increase video views and improve
discovery for streams that highlight painting, illustrations, songs, costumes...glass blowing...?
Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, has supported all kinds of content in the past, but it was
whatever gamers would post to their own channels, which could make it hard for others to find.
Still, the company says creative content had been growing at 40% month-over-month, with
almost 100,000 broadcasters and 2 million monthly viewers.
That's still just a fraction - Twitch has 100 million monthly visitors, 1.7 million
broadcasters, of which 12,000 are partners who make money from their channels through
ads, subscriptions, and/or merchandise.
Twitch.tv/creative's page itself is sponsored by Adobe, which posts creative content on
Twitch already.
The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted earlier today that former US government
contractor Edward Snowden should be granted asylum in Europe on the grounds that he is
a “defender of human rights.”
The vote does not actually give Snowden asylum in Europe..the member countries still need
to decide if they want to take on the resolution or not.
But this is still important...and symbolizes support for Snowden in Europe...
the resolution passed on a 324 to 271 vote.
It specifically asks EU member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden,
grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties,
in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.”
Snowden currently resides in Russia, and he recently said in an interview he'd be willing
to return to the United States, possibly even if that meant going to jail.
He faces three charges under the Espionage Act, a century old surveillance law.
The MEPs also issued a press release warning of the growing dangers mass surveillance poses
to its citizens’ human rights.
Snowden himself released certain classified documents that outlined the scope of the American
surveillance state, which has upped tensions between the EU and the US.
Parliament also is calling the European Commission to step up protections on EU citizens’ data
entering the U.S.
That’s the report for today.
I’m Sarah Lane.
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See you tomorrow!