Pick Up The Slack

30

October

2017

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Aside from disrupting existing industries, Information Technology establishes new ones. A story of an ambitious start up competing against the resources of tech giants for a golden mine of a market has become a cliché over the past years. However, some of the battles draw a bit more of our attention when the stakes are particularly high.

According to the latest valuation, which took place in summer of 2017, Slack, a recently appeared chat service that evolved into an agile business productivity tool, is worth USD 5.1 billion. While the top-flight investors are splashing the cash, Slack expands and serves 5 million users per day, nearly 30% of whom are paying for the subscription. At the same moment, Microsoft and other giants rub their hands and prepare to snap up the booming market.

However, the growth of the demand for a specialized and all-under-one-roof solution for corporate communications was predictable. The businesses of all sizes and many scopes are forced to constantly seek for a source to increase operational effectiveness to stay at par with the competition. Besides, IT has increased the value of intangibles like agility, quickness, adaptiveness and openness to innovation. All the factors are directly related to how flexible and fast is the communication designed within the working groups and the whole company. Therefore, a messaging platform already adopted by millions of users that is willing to transform to add maximum value to corporate clients seems like a perfect match for many industries and use cases.

While there are several alternatives on the market, such as Dropbox that provides advanced solutions for documents exchange for businesses, messaging-based platform seems like a more natural basis for a highly demanded corporate communications organizer. Minding that, Microsoft has recently introduced Teams – a direct competitor for Slack and soon we will now what the awaited competition will bring to the table.

Sources:

  • http://www.forbes.ru/tehnologii/350335-ne-prosto-messendzher-pochemu-ocenka-servisa-slack-prevysila-5-mlrd
  • http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/slack-raise-valuation/

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AI One to Watch: Matthew Zeiler

24

October

2017

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The speed with which AI has hit the trends and got whole industries reconsidering themselves, trying to predict or shape the way they inevitably will be disrupted, is amazing. The research community foresees changes of degrees comparable with the adaption of the Internet and publications that prove that idea appear frequently. At the same time, the future of AI and corresponding industry is still full of uncertainty, so there is no surprise that tech giants desperately search how they can leverage the upcoming technology by seeking for experience and special talents.

It was Summer of 2013 in New York, and Matthew Zeiler, a soon to be Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at New York University, was one of such talents. One may consider his student loans to be paid when Google, Microsoft and Apple come knocking his door and Mike Zuckerberg tries to get in touch to set a meeting. They say, “no man is an island”. Well, it seemed like something Matthew Zeiler never heard of, when instead of playing it safe and accepting one of the multiple offerings, he decided to run his own company – Clarifai.

For years since being founded, Clarifai competes with giants of tech industry and lands multinationals as Unilever, BuzzFeed, Ubisoft as clients. The AI solutions provided by the Matthew Zeiler’s startup are considered to be on par with what costed Google and Microsoft billions in acquisitions and other AI investments.  Matthew Zeiler started on his own, hosting servers in his flat and opening the platform for the third-party developers. In 2017, Clarifai employs 55 bright minds and steals some of the best Google’s people. And it is understandable.

AI is a dynamic industry, and just like IT has paved the way for some startups into global leaders, the new industry of AI is predicted to do the same. Staying agile is key and constant challenge is an important driver for an ambitious group of software engineers to lead the community to the new high-tech industry order.

Would you have the courage of Matthew to reject all the offers and start from scratch? How do you see the role of startups in modern and dynamic industries?

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