17 ms·
Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack
- luckylion 4y agoIt appears that "Pulse" is https://getpulse.team/ https://getpulse.team/, a company that automated Slack status updates.
- ss108 4y ago
- aliqot 4y agoJust do the moves that got you to the dance please.
- dmix 4y agoTechcrunch has more information on what Pulse is: > Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack > Pulse in its initial guise was a “virtual office” platform called Loop Team, but after honing the idea for a couple of years it pivoted and rebranded last November. Pulse, essentially, was an automated status-updating tool that used signals based on pre-configured integrations and preferences set by the user. > For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/mozilla-acquires-the-team-behind-pulse-an-automated-status-update-tool-for-slack/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/01/mozilla-acquires-the-team-...
- BitwiseFool 4y agoAs far as Slack statuses go, I only check if it is Green, Red, or Do Not Disturb. I have never actually read someone's status message, much less used it as a birthday indicator.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoThis plus the palm tree and sick emojis are the only things I care about. In the latter cases I'll just not even send the message.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI'm not saying it is totally pointless, some teams might like this. But I just don't see how such a product could be a viable business for how little value it seems to actually provide.
- snotrockets 4y agoKinda smell like the reason Google bought Blogger. Cheaper to buy the company than the product.
- stvnbn 4y ago> For example, users could synchronize Pulse with their calendar and Slack, setting rules to stipulate what their status and corresponding emoji should be based on keywords in their calendar event title. If their schedule for a particular time says “hair appointment” from 12-1pm, then the person’s Slack status update might display a scissors emoji alongside the word “haircut.” Or, it might say “birthday” alongside a cake emoji if that’s what is in their calendar. That's not AI, that's a big "If" statement
- rusticpenn 4y agoAI is basically a big set of if statements if you think about it.
- forgetfulness 4y agoFrom the blurb it looks like an acquihire to bring Product Managers that employ Machine Learning and are experienced with recommendation engines. The "making the world a better place" boilerplate is just damage control for the reputational cost of doing this altogether, and making a risky bet with regards to the bottom line.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoAcquirire: a neologism which describes the process of acquiring a company primarily to recruit its employees, rather than to gain control of its products or services.
- thundergolfer 4y agoAcquihire
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoDamnit, ty
- denton-scratch 4y agoSo why does Mozilla need a handful of AI nerds? Haven't they got enough already?
- forgetfulness 4y agoI guess the idea is that these are "product people", that may manage teams to come up with new products using AI in making them. Mozilla is clearly struggling organizationally with coming up with more revenue streams and is doing this half-assedly-for-profit projects.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- v3ss0n 4y agoBut why ..
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoAm I the only one that thinks anyone could hack up something like that in a few hours tops? I mean I can't because I'm lazy and don't do anything with my slack status to begin with, but still.
- inanutshellus 4y agoYeah ...maybe... we're missing something, or maybe they just wanted to hire the 3 guys in the company and called it an acquisition? <edit> the other comments here are also calling this out as a hiring effort. Not worth a mention on HN, IMO. </edit>
- yamtaddle 4y agoBlog post says it's an acqui-hire and they want that company's ethical AI team (why did a status-update-bot company have an ethical AI team?!) to work on... Pocket, of all things. Yeesh.
- luckylion 4y agoMay Pocket will soon offer to set your Slack status based on what you're reading. You know, things you need an ethical AI team for.
- projektfu 4y agoIt needs to figure out the productive spin on your slacking off and update your status accordingly.
- skorpeon87 4y agoBoth the Pulse and Pocket acquisitions look like corrupt favors done by Mozilla executives for their friends, so it makes sense to lump both together.
- guessmyname 4y agoYes, anyone can build that. They did and got acquired. Lesson for everyone out there: build your ideas, unless you want other people to take the credit.
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoAt first I thought this was the internal survey tool or product for surveying employee satisfaction metrics. Anyone familiar with this btw?
- lexicality 4y agoI wonder how many developer layoffs they could have avoided by not buying yet another company unrelated to the browser market. Then again I'm not a Mozilla executive with an average salary >$200k a year so what do I know.
- paxys 4y agoAre you implying that $200K is a crazy high salary for Mozilla's CEO?
- fs111 4y agoIn many parts of the world that is a pretty good salary
- paxys 4y agoMozilla isn't headquartered in those parts of the world but in Mountain View, CA. $200K is less than what a 22 year old software engineer right out of college makes over there.
- thexumaker 4y ago200k maybe with inflated RSU packages lol. 150k base is about the best you’re gonna get even with a masters.
- MollyRealized 4y agoI am not trying to be quippy here, but why does Mozilla need a chief executive officer? as someone who's never been amongst the leadership roles of a company but witnessed the legal structure of plenty of such companies, I'm not sure I understand why it needs one, given what it is and what it does.
- dvngnt_ 4y agobecause they're a company
- pmontra 4y agoAnything to do with the recent activities on the calendar tool of Thunderbird?
- rubyist5eva 4y agoCan Mozilla use machine learning to make a competitive browser? Can they use machine learning to figure out why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
- yamtaddle 4y ago> Can Mozilla use machine learning to make a competitive browser? We'll never find out, since it looks like they're gonna have them work on Pocket. Presumably to make it worse by making it more algorithm-fed.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoIs pocket actually profitable I don’t even know a single user of it, let alone a Firefox user
- yamtaddle 4y agoI don't know any Pocket users either, but then again I don't know any Firefox users at all these days. Brave seems to have much better traction among the sorts who were, until recently, Firefox fans. I ditched FF on all my serious-business machines because it ate battery on my Macbook(s) and had some persistent-across-versions lack of UI polish that started bothering me after I'd seen the same things done right. Still use it on my Windows gaming/piracy/nothing-serious machine (which has no battery to preserve) since Safari won't run there, but if someone came in and swapped it with almost anything except Chrome or Edge, I'd likely not bother to change it back. And I was one of those people installing it on every person's machine who'd let me, before it was even called Firefox.
- wussboy 4y agoI am so done with algorithms.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoFirefox, the sites you can’t see!
- mattw2121 4y agoI am, self admittedly, completely out of touch with the start up culture. I work outside of it and have no experience in it. I simply can't understand how Pulse has raised 4.7 million dollars to create automated slack status updates. Even more, I can't understand why Pulse has made three acquisitions earlier this year, with that 4.7 million dollars, in order to accomplish that goal.
- arglebargle123 4y agoPlaying growth and acquisition games to massage metrics and make the company look better to VCs or private equity most likely.
- freefaler 4y agoCheap capital and VC funds employees that are compensated on how many investments they've made. (or they're penalized for not allocating the fund under management) Sometimes it's best to check the incentives to understand why people behive in a non-logical way. Also can be a sneaky way to steal some money from the company, by acquiring something meaningless. I've heard about 2 such cases.
- snotrockets 4y agoThey didn't. Or rather, they probably didn't raise those $4.7m to create automated Slack updates, but to solve a problem they think enough future customer are (or would be) having. You have to distinguish deliverable (software) from product (problem-solving offering).
- cheeseblubber 4y agoMost companies have humble beginnings and it is difficult to tell which companies will be giant. A air bed and breakfast where strangers stay in your home sounded ridiculous 10 years ago. Or a company that live stream's the life of a single person 24/7 (Justin.tv/Twitch.tv) also seemed ridiculous to be a billion dollar company.
- SahAssar 4y ago> A air bed and breakfast where strangers stay in your home sounded ridiculous 10 years ago No, couchsurfing (the site) had already proven the market for staying in other peoples homes and airbnb was similar but with payment. > live stream's the life of a single person 24/7 IIRC justin.tv did not take in funding until they were already building a platform for others to livestream on. Their funding was not for just justins stream.
- Phracture 4y agoRead this as "Mozilla have acquired a pulse" and assumed some sort of drastic changes.
- subjectsigma 4y agoI did the same thing, my first thought was "Ah, finally" and then I read the article :(
- orls 4y ago> our efforts in applied ethical machine learning, as we invest to make Mozilla products more personal I can’t be alone in thinking this is pretty much the _last_ thing I want from Mozilla.
- Yuyudo_Comiketo 4y agoWe're two now here. I don't feel anything personal towards inanimate things like software and corporations, even less so do I want them to treat me personally. For I know that all such plausible pretensions are in fact nothing but mercenary. Mozilla, why won't you ask your users if they need your products to be personal?
- denton-scratch 4y agoListen to the echoing silence from Mozilla; the users built them, but they don't talk to the users. Not even on the bugtrackers. They're a bit like FIFA, or the International Olympic Committee - they've discovered that they're totally immune to criticism, so they get more and more bold. What does it take to make a failing corporation go broke?
- nibbleshifter 4y agoI just want their fucking products to work reliably, not be "more personal"
- trs8080 4y agoAgree, but this announcement kinda makes me think they're working on either money-making enterprise tools a la Teams/Slack/etc OR maybe even exploring ML recommendation engines as an entrypoint to creating their own search engine. Definitely not their core competency but they've been having to get creative with their offerings/business because honestly making incremental improvements to a browser with 3% market share isn't going to get them the userbase they need to fund their efforts.
- martin_a 4y ago> to enhance our machine learning capabilities, including personalization, in Pocket, a fantastic product that has only just scratched the surface of its ultimate potential. Does anybody even use Pocket? (yes, probably, of course) Do you need ML in that? Personalized recommendations? What is the potential? Becoming Google News but from Mozilla? Do they even care about Firefox anymore?
- Sakos 4y agoI use Pocket and I like the article recommendations. I've found some interesting article through it. I'd be happy if they continue to improve that. It means I won't have to turn to sites like Google News or even Reddit.
- monodot 4y agoAgree, the Pocket recommendations on Firefox’s New Tab page are good and have helped me discover new websites outside my usual bubble.
- huggingmouth 4y agoWell I hope for Mozilla's sake that you two are representative of Mozilla's current and target userbase because their market share indicates otherwise.
- denton-scratch 4y agoThey're not representative; I don't think anyone uses Pocket, except (maybe) those two people, even after ten years of aggressive pushing. And they don't ever let up with that pushing. Mozilla evidently doesn't care about Firefox's plumetting user base. I assume they're investing the Google dollars in other companies, unrelated to browsers.
- Sakos 4y ago> I don't think anyone uses Pocket, except (maybe) those two people Sorry, where do you get off being such a douchebag? You do realize Pocket existed before Mozilla bought it, right? I started using it back when it was still ReadItLater and it's an incredibly useful service. It's a decent way to collect interesting sites for later reading, as if tons of people on HN don't use various methods to do the same damn thing, but somehow it's suddenly bad because Mozilla owns it? Get lost. At least when Mozilla buys a service, they continue it and improve it over time, instead of what everybody else does like Microsoft, Google, or whoever else, where they sunset whatever service or project it is and move the developers into other teams. Like, jesus fucking christ. Everybody else is doing wildly anti-competitive behavior, but here's Mozilla actually doing something decent, but fuck 'em right? We want tech companies to swallow smaller companies and extinguish them entirely. That's what we're all about in the tech industry.
- pjmlp 4y agoHow will it help to increase the current 3% market share?
- willcipriano 4y agoMarket share? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-sure-this-will-help-us-sell-more-burgers https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-sure-this-will-help-u...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- computerfriend 4y agoWatching Mozilla making decisions is incredibly depressing. I still love Firefox, but it is clear that the browser wars are going extremely badly for Mozilla. And yet they do things like buy a Slack status updater company instead of not firing their core developers.
- zx8080 4y agoMozilla is fueled by mostly Google money. So it's like a pet company, existing only to protect them from the DoJ Antitrust / FTC. Because otherwise Google-owned Chrome/chromium would effectively be the only browser on the market without FF.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoStop branching out. Firefox is the product that matters.
- Y_Y 4y agoCan we crowd-fund a campaign to buy Firefox and let the Mozilla Corp focus on whatever the shit it thinks its core competency is? I want the people that thought that what they really really was another Pocket to be liberated from the burden of that legacy browser that they have to think about sometimes.
- Apocryphon 4y ago… it’s open source, you can just fork it.
- denton-scratch 4y agoI've heard that it's a total stinker to build.
- Y_Y 4y agoI actually have, and a decent job of this has been done by Iceweasel, but forks aren't allowed to use the branding, let alone the official websites and update mechanism etc. Also, buying would be just as much about taking control from them as it would be about gaining control. I don't like incompatibilities, but I really hate when extraneous shit gets added to my browser along with the security updates and bugfixes.
- vdchuyen 4y ago
- jemmyw 4y agoI think it's too late but I'd love to see it happen and would donate. Mozilla had one job: keep Firefox going as long and as sustainably as possible. And they've utterly failed in my eyes. I'm sure they don't see it that way. But, they could have had a well paid engineering group, a small marketing group and invested all the rest of the cash they got over the years from Google to support themselves for a really long time. No ridiculous purchases, no stupid products, no executive pay packages. They've been searching for profit they didn't need, they could have just sat on their endowment. They effectively killed their golden goose, a lovely goose that everyone else wanted to pet.
- ghostly_s 4y agoWell I'm excited to hear any attention is going to be paid to Pocket, although it sounds like they're just looking at the recommendation feature which I care not one whit about. Please, please, improve article recognition + rendering. As near as I can tell the product has sat entirely stagnant since acquisition, yet they continue to push it's subscription.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y agoLeft for https://app.wallabag.it https://app.wallabag.it, couldn't be happier.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoTo those wondering why they’re doing everything except work on Firefox, it’s because they can’t. The writings been on the wall for years. I give them another 10 years of Firefox. You can either have a surviving Mozilla restructure itself, or a sinking ship that pleases its tiny user share of open source fanatics.