Mozilla acquires the team behind Pulse, an automated status updater for Slack
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> 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-...
That's not AI, that's a big "If" statement
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).
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.
Because otherwise Google-owned Chrome/chromium would effectively be the only browser on the market without FF.
I can’t be alone in thinking this is pretty much the _last_ thing I want from Mozilla.
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?
What does it take to make a failing corporation go broke?
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla is clearly struggling organizationally with coming up with more revenue streams and is doing this half-assedly-for-profit projects.
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?
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.
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.
You can either have a surviving Mozilla restructure itself, or a sinking ship that pleases its tiny user share of open source fanatics.
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.
That’s categorically false.
Firefox is more performant than ever.
If that's what it takes to hire a programmer in CA, then maybe Mozilla should headquarter somewhere else.
Further based on performance the Current Mozilla CEO should be paid less than the Mozilla Janitor who could probably do a better job ;)
Its not like Tim cook has to manage "shareholders expectations" or "show off the company is well off that they can pay a CEO so much".
It's one thing to implement something. It's another thing to implement it in a way that makes other people want to use it.
https://slack.com/app-pages/google-calendar
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.
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.
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 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
<edit> the other comments here are also calling this out as a hiring effort.
Not worth a mention on HN, IMO. </edit>
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.
I'm pretty sure Slack can already sync with your calendar meetings using this app if that's all you're needing https://slack.com/app-pages/google-calendar
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.
> the company had apparently garnered some fairly big-name customers, including Netflix and 1Password, with monthly premium plans starting at around $3 per user
Sounds like the want the team not the tech anyway
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33818297.
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.