Slack passes 3 million daily active users, 930K paid seats

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Slack announced that its team communication app is seeing continued growth, with more than 3 million (weekday) daily active users. This is up 1 million from just six months ago. What's more, the company now has 930,000 paid seats which is also a 31 percent increase from February when it reported 675,000 paid seats.

Alongside this news, Slack has also hired former Salesforce senior vice president for commercial sales in the Asia Pacific region Robert Frati as its vice president of sales, which is noteworthy since the company claims 77 of the Fortune 100 companies use its product.

The addition of someone skilled in dealing with corporations could be perceived as a major push to bring the communication app into more businesses beyond just startups and other collaborative environments. And as Frati has specialized in the Asia Pacific region, perhaps also establish more partnerships with companies in that part of the world?

Slack has been on a growth spurt over the past few months, adding more than 1 million daily active users practically every six months just within the last year. In June, the company counted 1 million DAU and then doubled it in December before hitting the 3 million mark today. It also shared that more than 2 million users are connected to Slack's communication app “simultaneously” meaning that at any given moment, most of its users are all interfacing with each other on the platform.

While a reason for the increased usage hasn't been officially released, it could be because of the new integrations and developer platform Slack has created, easier integrations with third-party apps, the spotlight on bots, or perhaps those funny commercials that the company is airing.

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Facebook's Windows 10 app will soon let you broadcast live video from your desktop

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Windows 10 users will soon be able to broadcast live on Facebook right from their PCs. The social networking company has begun rolling out the Facebook Live feature for its universal Windows 10 app. This marks the first time Facebook's livestreaming technology has become available on the desktop.

Spotted by WinBeta, the Facebook Live feature does exactly what people have been doing on mobile: broadcasting live from their tablets or PCs. Its inclusion perhaps isn't that surprising as the promise of a universal Windows 10 app is that it can work across many devices, so if you have livestreaming in one app, it'll work on other gadgets and computers with the operating system installed.

Since its release in August, creating broadcasts in Facebook Live was only possible on the company's mobile apps. Now you'll be able to do that right from the desktop. And while this is a first for Facebook, it follows along a pattern started at the F8 conference when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg introduced an API that enables developers to integrate their products and services within Facebook Live. Some current partners include Mevo from Tastemade, Vidpresso, DJI Robotics, and Cape.

At March's Build conference, Microsoft executive vice president for Windows and Devices group Terry Myerson announced Facebook was investing more in universal Windows 10 apps, such as launching not only its core service, but also Instagram and Messenger. Adding livestreaming is an icing on the cake.

There's no word about whether Facebook Live on the desktop will extend to Macs or Chrome OS in the near future, but it's something we shouldn't put past Facebook.

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Twitch now has its own tool for making clips from game livestreams

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Streamers will now have an easier time showing off their greatest moments.

Twitch is introducing Clips today, which will enable users to easily create and share 30 second snippets from their recorded broadcasts. Twitch has more than 100 million viewers a month (easily making it the leader in the game-streaming market), and over 1.7 million people have used the site broadcast. New features like this can help the streaming site continue to grow.

Previoulsy, users would have to use editing software outside of Twitch, like Adobe Premier or Final Cut Pro, to create clips. Other streaming sites, like Forge, already enable users to share small highlights of their gameplay. Forge, however, has its own video capture tool that works with its site and clip-maker. Twitch still requires players to use outside recorders like Xsplit. Footage from a program like Xsplit is then broadcast live on Twitch, and those broadcasts then become saved on the site as recordings. You view those recordings to make clips.

Above: Making a clip in Twitch.

Image Credit: Twitch

“Our community loves connecting with each other, which is why the product teams have been focusing on a lot of cool social features, such as Friends, Channel Feed, Whispers, and Party Chat,” said Noreen McInnis, the product marketing manager at Twitch, in a press release sent to GamesBeat. “Clips now joins the list as an easy-to-use tool that lets community members share their favorite broadcast moments, whether it be an incredible play, a hilarious sound byte, or a jump scare reaction. If it happens on Twitch, you can Clip it.”

To use the new feature, you'll just have to click a button when playing a video. Twitch will then create a clip using the 25 seconds before and 5 seconds after the current spot. All clips will link back to the original broadcast they were taken from, and they'll also featured the Twitch ID of whoever captured the video.

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How to Do Your First Facebook Live Broadcast

You may have heard about Facebook's new free, live streaming app, Facebook Live! If you don't already love it, you are probably at least curious about what it is, how to use it and wondering if it can help you grow your business (Answer: YES! please) You are hearing story after story of businesses doing […]

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How to Use Facebook Live

  Facebook Live, Facebook's relatively new (and FREE!) live streaming app, is all the chatter these days! But how to use Facebook Live is one of the most asked questions I get these days. It won't be long before everybody with a Facebook profile and/or fan page will have, and be able to use it so knowing […]

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Foursquare's Marsbot will tell you where to eat or drink before you ask

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Foursquare is getting into the bot game with the launch of its Marsbot project. This standalone app promises to deliver recommendations on places you can go to eat or drink by text “before you think to ask for it.” The service is available for those on iOS and based in New York City and San Francisco, although when we tried to download it just now, the App Store said it wasn't accessible in our market.

Although it's a bot, Foursquare said that Marsbot isn't a chatbot like what you'd see with Poncho, 1-800 Flowers, and others that you access within Facebook Messenger. It's less conversational and more predictive. The company said that it uses your location and travel patterns to provide suggestions on where you can go next.

When you first begin, you'll be able to establish your preferences, such as whether you're a vegetarian or if you have any special things that Marsbot should know about, such as top tastes, frequently visited places, and more.

Right now Marsbot only focuses on places to eat and drink, but it's likely that its location intelligence could expand to other areas such as shopping, places to see, and accommodations. This isn't a service to help you get your laundry done or summon an Uber. It's to help make decisions about finding sustenance so you'll perhaps explore new places or find the perfect spot for noms.

Foursquare product manager Marissa Chacko cautioned that it's a work in progress and not everyone will have immediate access. “While we are iterating, fixing bugs and improving the experience, we'll be slowly letting people in from the waitlist. It'll take time for Marsbot to learn about you and for us to refine how it all works. So please be patient. No one said inventing the future would be easy,” she wrote in a blog post.

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Facebook says trending topics has no 'systematic political bias', ends reliance on 'media 1k' list

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Facebook has submitted a response to U.S. Senator John Thune around an inquiry Congress has over allegations the social networking company may be exhibiting political bias with its Trending Topics. In a follow up letter to the chairman of the Senate commerce committee, company general counsel Colin Stretch explained that Facebook found “no systematic political bias,” but will be making changes to its policy.

Improvements with Trending Topics include scrubbing the so-called “Media 1K” list, which is a list of RSS feeds Facebook uses to supplement its algorithm that pulls in potential trending topics, as well as the top-10 list of news outlets. Stretch wrote that the company will “no longer rely on lists of external websites and news outlets to identify, validate, or assess the importance of particular topics.”

Facebook will also remove the ability for people to assign an “importance level” to topics based on its prominence within the top-10 list of news outlets.

Other updates include clearing up terminology within Facebook's Guidelines to ensure people understand them better, providing additional training to all reviewers to re-emphasize that content decisions aren't to be made based on politics or ideology, and adding more controls and oversight.

These changes all emerged from an investigation by Gawker earlier this month that alleged Facebook were routinely suppressing conservative news. The company denied the claims and it raised the ire of conservatives which prompted Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to meet with some members, including TV personality Glenn Beck, last week.

Members of Congress expressed outrage over this issue, which resulted in Sen. Thune's inquiry. Facebook said that it immediately launched an investigation over the Trending Topic controversy saying that it spoke with current reviewers, their supervisors, a “cross-section of former reviewers”, its contractors, and its policies to understand if “anyone working on the product acted in ways that are inconsistent with our policies and mission.”

While Stretch claimed there wasn't any “systematic political bias,” he acknowledged that there was no way to discount the possibility of “isolated improper actions or unintentional bias in the implementation of our guidelines or policies.”

You can read Facebook's entire 12-page response to Senator Thune here.

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