• Slack Technologies, a fast-growing startup trying to wean businesses off email by hooking employees on its more informal messaging service, is now hoping to snare the world’s biggest companies as customers.
On Tuesday, the company unveiled a new feature intended to let workers in different departments communicate more easily with each other. The new option, called “Enterprise Grid,” is Slack’s latest step toward its ambitious goal of making life at work “simpler, more pleasant and more productive.”
In contrast to traditional email, Slack works more like a social network, allowing employees to share their thoughts, updates, web links and documents in channels that can be viewed on a personal computer or smartphone.
• Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co.’s third-quarter profit more than doubled from a year earlier on healthy sales of Pokemon game software, the company said Tuesday.
Nintendo, which makes Super Mario games and will start selling the Switch console March 3, reported a better-than-expected October-December profit of 64.7 billion yen ($569 million), up from 29.1 billion yen in the same period of 2015.
Kyoto-based Nintendo raised its full year profit forecast to 90 billion yen ($792 million) from an earlier 50 billion yen ($440 million).
That would mark a more than five-fold increase from what it earned the previous fiscal year.
It kept its sales forecast unchanged at 470 billion yen ($4.1 billion). Nintendo’s quarterly sales slipped 21 percent to 174.3 billion yen ($1.5 billion).
• Robots about the size of a beer cooler could soon be rolling down Virginia sidewalks to deliver sandwiches, groceries or packages.
Supporters say proposed legislation to allow the robots would make the state the first in the nation to regulate such devices.
State lawmakers partnered with European company Starship Technologies on bills allowing Virginia cities to join two others in the U.S. and many across Europe where the company is testing its largely autonomous earthbound robots.
Much like other tech companies’ attempts at airborne drone deliveries, Starship aims to revolutionise the way people get their parcels.
Representatives from the company visited Richmond recently for a demonstration.
With six wheels, a top that swings open and a flag for visibility, Starship’s compact “personal delivery devices” are designed to carry goods within a 2- to 3-mile radius.
They can hold up to 22 pounds, or about three shopping bags’
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