A new app directory will help users find integrations If there’s any company that’s been virtually synonymous with growth over the past year or so, it’s Slack, and now the team-software vendor is taking a big step to make sure that momentum continues. The company has established an $80 million fund to provide early-stage investments to companies building for the Slack platform, with a particular focus on apps that are designed to be “Slack-first” as well as enterprise tools that are making Slack integration a core part of their offering. “We’re deeply committed to supporting a diverse and valuable ecosystem of third-party apps and making them easy to discover,” said April Underwood, Slack’s head of platform. Toward that second goal, Slack also debuted a new App Directory listing approved integrations. There are 150 apps available in the directory today — including offerings from services such as Dropbox and Twitter — and as new ones emerge, they’ll be visible there as well. Also on Tuesday Slack introduced platform updates including Botkit — an open source framework for building bots and other Slack integrations — as well as several API updates and an AWS Lambda blueprint integration. Not long after Slack joined the widely hyped “unicorn club” last year, its valuation rose to $2.8 billion. The company now boasts 2 million daily active users of its team-communication software, including 570,000 paid seats — up significantly just since August, when the numbers were 1.1 million and 300,000, respectively. The company’s API ecosystem is a widely considered a core part of its increasing popularity. Launched in 2014, Slack’s enterprise software as a service (SaaS) offers real-time messaging, archiving and search. There’s a free “lite” version of its software as well as a fully featured version starting at $6.67 per user per month. An enterprise plan is expected early next year with features such as federation across multiple teams with a unified team directory and unified security, data retention and compliance policies. The new fund is backed by Slack in partnership with Accel; Andreessen Horowitz; Index Ventures; Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers; Spark Growth; and Social Capital. Related content analysis Kyndryl bolsters its Bridge infrastructure services Kyndryl is using AI to expand its integration services for on-premise and cloud environments, adding to its range of security, mainframe modernization, and AI-readiness services. By Michael Cooney May 14, 2024 7 mins Cloud Computing Networking how-to Compressing files using the zip command on Linux The zip command lets you compress files to preserve them or back them up, and you can require a password to extract the contents of a zip file. By Sandra Henry-Stocker May 13, 2024 4 mins Linux news High-bandwidth memory nearly sold out until 2026 While it might be tempting to blame Nvidia for the shortage of HBM, it’s not alone in driving high-performance computing and demand for the memory HPC requires. By Andy Patrizio May 13, 2024 3 mins CPUs and Processors High-Performance Computing Data Center opinion NSA, FBI warn of email spoofing threat Email spoofing is acknowledged by experts as a very credible threat. By Sandra Henry-Stocker May 13, 2024 3 mins Linux PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe