Author Archives: Matt Kapko

NEW ORLEANS — As the head of product for Facebook Messenger, Stan Chudnovsky is responsible for one of the most popular consumer products in the world. And yet, despite Messenger’s 1.2 billion monthly active users, he’s convinced that the app can continue its growth and add more functions if users and business embrace the app as a channel for business-to-consumer communications.

More than 60 million businesses have a presence on Facebook and at least 20 million are active on Messenger today, but Facebook continues to develop APIs, bots and other means to expedite connections between people and business, Chudnovsky said this week at the Collision conference. “We need to make it obvious that you can make a connection between people and businesses,” he said.

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NEW ORLEANS — YouTube this week revealed a redesign of its desktop app that strips out superfluous information and makes videos the primary feature of the viewing experience. “We’re rolling out a revamped design of our desktop application,” Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, announced at the Collision conference.

The redesign, which is available for preview at youtube.com/new, will be rolled out in stages during the next few months, according to Mohan. “The design principle is very basic, it’s very simple, which is we really want the technology and everything surrounding the content to simply fade out of the way,” he said. “A lot of what might have been distracting text and things like that in the current YouTube experience fades away when you’re consuming content. It has a much lighter, ephemeral feel to it.”

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Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard doesn’t think about marketing and IT as separate functions. “We don’t have an artificial wall between these organizations,” she tells CIO.com. IT and marketing have distinct priorities within the business, but aligning their respective responsibilities around company goals leads to greater outcomes, according to Stoddard.

[ Related: CMOs will outspend CIOs on technology in 2017 ]

“We tend to place ourselves in the other person’s role and situation,” she says. “Try to put yourself in the shoes of the CMO or the CIO so you can jointly feel what the other person is going through and what their priorities are.”

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Google and Microsoft are both benefiting from solid growth in enterprise cloud services. Both companies released earnings reports this week that highlighted significant momentum in G Suite, Office Suite, respectively, and more sophisticated cloud platforms for business.

“We crossed a major milestone with more than 100 million monthly active users of Office 365 commercial,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a conference call. “Office 365 commercial seats grew 35 percent year-over-year and revenue is up 45 percent.” Microsoft also reported a 15 percent year-over-year gain in revenue from Office 365 and other consumer products. The company ended the quarter with 26.2 million Office 365 consumer subscribers.

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Linked hasn’t slowed its momentum under the ownership of Microsoft. The professional social network surpassed 500 million registered users this week, up from 467 million members as of October 2016.

The company’s growth rate has remained steady during the past year, including a quiet period after Microsoft announced plans to acquire the business last June. The $26.2 billion deal closed in late December.

LinkedIn hit the 500 million mark during a remarkably busy stretch of updates including the site’s most significant redesign to date, improvements to its premium subscription plans, messaging and the introduction of a trending storylines feed. Much of the focus of late is on improving the user experience and creating mechanisms to increase engagement among users.

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Facebook today announced that more than 14,000 organizations are using Workplace, the company’s social network for business. Workplace launched six months ago with an initial group of 1,000 companies that tested the platform during a 20-month pilot period. The company also announced a series of new integrations with third-party vendors, a new API for video production and streaming, and the introduction of bots to Groups and the Work Chat app.

[ Related: First CIO on Workplace by Facebook talks collaboration in the enterprise ]

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Facebook is introducing a free version of Workplace, the company’s social network for business, in a bid to appeal to smaller and more cost-sensitive organizations that don’t necessarily need enterprise-class services. Workplace Standard, which will initially be offered as a beta, won’t include administrative controls, some security compliance measures, monitoring tools, single sign-on or integration with third-party services, according to Facebook.

[ Related: First CIO on Workplace by Facebook talks collaboration in the enterprise ]

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