> 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.
> 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.
I don't think that's been true for at least the past 10 years. I don't see how anything related to deep learning can be described as "if statements" imo.
As 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.
I'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.
I 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.
Cheap 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.
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).
Most 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.
> 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.
Watching 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.
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?
Listen 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?
Agree, 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.
Can 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.
I 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.
I 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.
From 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.
Acquirire: 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.
> 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?
I 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.
Well I hope for Mozilla's sake that you two are representative of Mozilla's current and target userbase because their market share indicates otherwise.
They'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.
> 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.
I'm entitled to express a (hyperbolic) opinion without receiving personal abuse. FWIW, I haven't ever met anyone that uses it. And yet for years, it's been taking up screen real-estate, and nagging me to sign up. If anything's douchie, it's that.
And yes, I've been using Firefox long enough to know that Pocket was an acquisition.
You're right, sorry. That may have been a bit too much.
I don't agree that nobody uses it. A brief google search tells me that millions of people do use it and the surely inaccurate analytics sites I took a look at show millions of views a month. I disagree with a lot of what Mozilla does, but much of that involves the decisions they make directly affecting Firefox or projects like FirefoxOS or other weird stabs into the dark. Expanding available features for users is something I consider a good thing, that includes providing a decent VPN/proxy service and integrating Pocket.
Mozilla does a lot of things wrong, but imo, Pocket isn't one of them. In fact, if it provides a viable alternative to things like Google News, I see that as a net benefit for all of us.
Well 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.
To 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.
I 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.
Don't worry, I'm sure they're gonna make it related to the browser market by trying to push it on Firefox users. In case it was truly an acqui-hire, I suppose those devs are worth a lot more than the Mozilla devs they let go? Or maybe it was just nepotism.
Mozilla Corporation — who basically just do Firefox — is a separate entity from the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Corporation gets commercial investment to pay Firefox developers, so that the Mozilla Foundation doesn't need to pay or invest in it for it to do its thing.
This fire-wall (heh) ensures that Mozilla Foundation can never be said to be being influenced by corporate interests. All the corporate money stays inside Mozilla Corporation, i.e. inside Firefox.
I'm not sure how this makes anything better. The flagship product - Firefox - still depends on the outside money. Surely, the Foundation on top of it doesn't, but who cares about that?
Mozilla 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.
I 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.
Am 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.
It’s another thing to implement something that is, in fact, trivial to make, because there are lots and lots of calendar-to-Slack integrations that update your status to show you’re in a meeting.
This is not robust cross-platform syncing of huge files on flaky networks. This is looking for the the word "dog" in your calendar and changing the emoji to a dog.
Well, you can just push it at users for ten years solid, like they've been doing with Pocket.
It strikes me that there's a positive correlation between executive pay, and the user-hostility of the resulting product. Firefox (and derivatives) is my daily driver, but I despise the company that makes it. They made their name by being a lightweight, standards-compliant fast browser. I don't know how the company became such a pile of sh*, but I find it credible that excessive executive pay has more than a little to do with it.
That is actually half of an ignorance dichotomy, the other half is the guy who refers to The Dropbox Comment in all situations, as if there are not projects that could be hacked into a product a short period of time.
Perhaps there are. But I think the one of the many lessons of The Dropbox Comment is that nobody cares about any of these projects until they actually are turned into a product. Many of the ideas behind some very successful services are shockingly simple, in a "I could have built that!" sort of way. But I didn't, they did, and that's why Dropbox printed money.
It was a comment that demonstrated being out of touch at the end of the day. HN lives in this bubble of tech enthusiasts where people are a lot more forgiving of poor polish and poor UX because they know and care how things work.
Outside this bubble, rsync and git and cron are not solutions to syncing your files across devices. Outside this bubble, people just want a solution to the problem, not a box of parts to construct their own solution to the problem from 2nd principles.
…Also, people tend to want this inside the bubble too :-)
The difference is the Dropbox comment is expecting every user to reimplement a complicated recreation of the service.
The user you replied to is (I assume) suggesting someone else can make a recreation of the service and give it away. i.e. not suggesting everyone hack together their own implementation
Blog 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.
Nah, it's easy enough. I've got a thing that sets my Slack status to whatever my Everhour timer is named when I start one. It unsets the status when I stop the timer.
I've got mine set up in make.com but you could use Zapier or probably any other automation tool that supports triggering on your timer status. Chucked it together in 5 min or so.
Of course this Pulse probably does a bit more than that (cue dropbox comment), but that's all I wanted.
Yes, 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.
Am I the only one that thinks anyone could hack up something like that in a few hours tops?
Like most apps 95% of it is probably trivial, and then there's that 5% where you spend almost all of your time. In this case it's probably the integrations with other services and making a system that enables users to glue them together with rules in an intuitive way. That is not simple, especially if you're trying to work with lots of third parties rather than just the big ones.
You probably could hack together a working app in very short amount of time, but that's true of everything. Making it robust, secure, user-friendly, and maintainable is where the value lies, and that takes time.
There's usually more to a business than just the software:
> the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user
There are always people who write that about anything here. Sometimes there is some hidden, no obvious complexity. Probably it would be best to ask Discord developers for estimate, their extended presence is similar.
I 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.
> 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-...