Slack off Amazon's shopping list?: Last month, Bloomberg reported that Amazon was contemplating an acquisition of group messaging platform Slack for up to $9 billion. Now the wire service is back with a new report, also citing anonymous sources, stating that Slack is raising a $250 million funding round, and that acquisition talks "have cooled in recent weeks."
POV: While Slack has five million daily active users, it only launched its enterprise edition in January. But Slack maintains that it has brought a mature initial product to market that's ready to serve large companies at scale. Slack integrates with Microsoft's Office platform but also competes with Redmond's Teams product. Would it make sense as part of Amazon? Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky explores that question right here.
Whitman taking the wheel at Uber?: From the "didn't see that one coming" department, Bloomberg is also reporting that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise chief Meg Whitman is on the short list of candidates to fill the empty CEO slot at embattled ridesharing company Uber. An HPE spokesman told Bloomberg that Whitman is "fully committed to HPE and plans to stay with the company until her work is done."
POV: Whitman would be an ideal CEO for Uber on a number of fronts. She's a highly seasoned and senior tech executive who has led major corporate transitions, namely the 2015 split of HP into two separate companies. (However, opinions vary greatly on how well that transition has gone.) Whitman is also politically well-connected, something Uber needs as it fights regulatory battles.
In addition, Whitman is a woman. Uber founder Travis Kalanick stepped down earlier this year, with the final straw being revelations about a pervasively sexist environment at the company. Whitman is respected for far more than her gender, of course, but Uber's pledge to change its culture would carry more weight with somebody of her stature at the helm.
Will Whitman go? The HPE spokesman's quote really doesn't rule anything out. Committments don't have to last forever and Whitman may have already decided her "work is done" there. She has also chosen this week to announce her departure from HP's board of directors.
Facebook adds more business features to Messenger: Chatbots are becoming table stakes for any company's sales, marketing and support business, particularly in the B2C arena. To that end, Facebook is adding a series of new features to its Messenger Platform focused on delivering more useful and intelligent chatbots. Here are the key details from a Facebook blog post announcing Messenger 2.1:
Built-in NLP to enhance automated conversations: This is a simple way for developers to incorporate NLP into their bots. When Built-in NLP is enabled it automatically detects meaning and information in the text of messages that a user sends, before it gets passed to the bot. This first version can detect the following entities: hello, bye, thanks, date & time, location, amount of money, phone number, email and a URL. This is the first step in bringing NLP capabilities to all developers, enabling brands to scale their experiences on Messenger.
Other important new features include improved support for payments, additional "call to action" buttons—including Shop Now and Get Support—developers can use on pages. Facebook's blog post goes into more detail.
POV: Facebook is still in the early stages of monetizing Messenger, currently serving up ads to small numbers of users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's Q2 earnings call this week. There's a longer-term strategy in place, he added:
The biggest strategic thing that we really need to do in messaging right now is make it so that people organically interact with businesses and that that is a good interaction both for people and for the businesses.
If you're a business and you have a higher ROI for interacting with a person in your messaging thread than you do on the mobile web or trying to get them to install an app, then that creates this positive feedback loop, where you're going to point your ads towards the Messenger thread. You're going to invest more of your engineering resources in building out the content and experience on the Messenger thread.
POV: Zuckerberg and other executives fielded a slew of questions from analysts about Messenger monetization on the call. Again and again, they painted a similar response: Facebook will take its time figuring out how to make money on Messenger while also pleasing users in the process. It's a good way to go but how Facebook executes the strategy will be something to watch.
Adobe adds more AI to Target: We hear the phrase a lot—mass personalization at scale. That's what Adobe is attempting to deliver with an update to Target, the ad-targeting engine derived from the acquistion of Omniture. For one thing, brands will now be able to add their own algorithms and data models to Target. Adobe is also integrating Target with its Sensei machine learning and AI framework.
What kind of personalization? Adobe's announcement gives the example of a hotel chain using Target to deliver offers to reward members based on the fact it knows the customer has a track record of traveling to warm places.
POV: "Marketers have been challenged with segmentation and the one-click personalization with be a welcomed feature," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou.
Legacy watch: Mega-bucks government IT system holding data hostage: A $364 million computer system that is supposed to run Rhode Island public assistance services is unable to furnish federally-mandated quality control reports for its food stamp program. While it's just a threat for now, the feds say continued noncompliance could lead to "suspensions/disallowance" of federal dollars, as the Providence Journal-Bulletin reports.
Specifically, the system can't separate out food stamp information from other public-assistance data. It was launched last year despite protests from federal officials that it wasn't ready—calls that were apparently all too prescient. Other hiccups with the system have led to what was at one point a backlong of 14,000 pending applications for benefits.
POV: System failures and government IT projects unfortunately are phrases often said in the same sentence. This is the largest IT project in the state's history and to say its rollout wasn't executed well is an understatement. The question now is how quickly the state can stabilize it, and just as importantly, determine accountability for its shortcomings.
