Mozilla Acquires Team Behind Pulse, an Automated Status Updater for Slack

Firefox developer Mozilla is making a rare foray into the world of mergers and acquisitions, with news that it has snapped up recently-shuttered California-based productivity startup Pulse. From a report: Terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but the deal is tantamount to an "acqui-hire," with Mozilla looking to deploy the Pulse team across an array of machine learning (ML) projects. "We're acquiring Pulse for the incredible team they have built," Mozilla chief product officer Steve Teixeira told TechCrunch. "As we look to continue to improve user experiences across all of our products, ML will be a core part of that."

Founded out of Menlo Park in 2019, 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.

A 3rd party Slack just for Slack notifications?

[echo123]

...and what does FireFox have to do with Slack notifications? As a Firefox user, why would I care? As a Slack user, should I base all my Slack stuff in FireFox tabs?

Inquiring minds want to know. (Disclaimer: I am a FireFox fanboi, and I still don't understand what's happening here).

Perhaps the final paragraph is the buried lead:

“In building Pulse, we enabled a variety of machine learning experiences to make distributed teams feel more connected,” Singh noted. “Finding ways to use AI and machine learning to simplify tasks for users is our passion.”

Re:

[EvilSS]

Not buried, literally in the first sentence of the quoted section: "... the deal is tantamount to an "acqui-hire," with Mozilla looking to deploy the Pulse team across an array of machine learning (ML) projects."

Re:

[drinkypoo]

As a person, you should avoid Slack if you can.

But they are apparently interested in the people more than the product.