Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Snap, the makers of Snapchat, has faced at least some of the pressures that come with being a publicly traded company for a full month now and it’s already showing signs of change. On Friday, the company enabled a new search function that allows you to search through public posts, or Stories. In its pursuit of more eyeballs and longer sessions in the app, Snap is evolving and embracing features that run counter to its traditional user experience and more closely mirror those of its competitors.

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Within the span of five weeks, Facebook has copied a format pioneered by Snapchat and introduced it to all three of its most widely used apps: WhatsApp, Messenger and the primary Facebook mobile app. “Stories,” a tool that lets you share photos and videos in a feed that “disappears” after 24 hours, came to Instagram in August and started rolling out to Facebook proper this week. With short-lived media promoted and featured prominently across the company’s entire family of mobile apps, the Snapification of Facebook is now complete.

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CIOs and IT managers are increasingly adopting Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite for collaboration, productivity and messaging. These cloud-based productivity suites are expanding, gaining new feature sets and new apps for enterprise users. Earlier this month, both Google and Microsoft introduced chat-based collaboration apps to reposition for competition in this fast evolving and hotly contested space.

Microsoft’s Teams, which has been in beta since November, was released for general availability for Office 365 customers. And Google introduced a rebuilt Hangouts, which has been split into two apps — Hangouts Chat for chat-based communications and Hangouts Meet for audio and video conferencing.

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LinkedIn is taking a more forceful approach to news curation. The company today is releasing a “trending storylines” feed that lives alongside your personally curated feeds to showcase news articles and related posts personalized based on your interests and profession.

The experience is like the trending topics Facebook surfaces for its users. The trending storylines are determined by a mix of algorithms and human curation from LinkedIn’s editorial team. When you are in the trending storylines tab, you can also follow new people and topics to improve your primary feed.

LinkedIn

Apple this week is releasing its most affordable iPad to date. The refreshed 9.7-inch iPad, which packs a Retina screen and Apple’s A9 chip in a device that effectively replaces the iPad Air 2, is priced at $329 with 32GB of storage.

The $70 price drop makes the entry-level iPad more competitive, particularly among schools that can now snag the tablet for under $300 at educational pricing. Businesses that are motivated by price and don’t require more advanced features in the iPad Pro will also be giving the iPad another look as a result of these changes, according to Avi Greengart, research director at GlobalData.

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Bijan Sabet is a venture capitalist with a golden touch. His wins are as legendary as the consumer and social tech companies he helped grow into the juggernauts they are today. Spark Capital, the Boston-based firm he cofounded and where he serves as general partner, has invested in more than 100 companies to date, including Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus and Foursquare.

Christopher Michel

SAN FRANCISCO — Google this week made good on its plan to reposition Hangouts for the enterprise by splitting the almost four-year-old service into two separate apps. A video conferencing app, Hangouts Meet and team messaging app Hangouts Chat will serve as the enterprise equivalent to Google’s Allo and Duo apps for consumers.

Meet, which aims to minimize meeting friction by simplifying the entry point for audio and video conferences, is widely available now. Hangouts Chat, which is competing more directly with Slack and Microsoft Teams, is currently in beta in Google’s early adopter program.

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The head of SAP’s developer initiative with Apple has high aspirations for the partnership and the impact it will have on enterprise mobility. “I believe what’s going to happen with the release of the SDK, and the continued innovation and investment, is that we’re going to create a new enterprise iOS developer,” says Rick Knowles, senior vice president and general manager of the Apple partnership at SAP.

“It’s a rare developer that exists, but now we’re going to formalize this role and I believe we’re going to grow a new development community around iOS specifically in the enterprise,” Knowles says.

Apple goes straight to developers via SAP

SAP represents the first of Apple’s enterprise partnerships that bring tools directly to developers. Both companies want to simplify the process for developers to integrate their apps with SAP’s massive backend systems of transactional data. The goal, through the release of an SDK and API library, is to transform the amount of information developers can use and call upon in their apps.

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