Stories by Matt Weinberger

Yahoo is a weird company in a weird place.

Today, Salesforce goes all-in on its vision of shiny, responsive, fast apps for every business with the launch of Heroku Enterprise, which takes the core platform-as-a-service and adds more features to make it accessible to the enterprise. 

Slack has a very simple concept that resonates with many: IRC for the enterprise, with hooks between the chat app and just about any external service you can imagine. We already knew it was hot.

Urban commuting pretty much sucks, no matter where you go: No matter the promise of high-speed trains, light rail and efficient bus routes, public transit always ends up feeling like the crammed-in people-mover tubes from Futurama.

Hoping to leapfrog what it sees as the last hurdle to enterprise cloud adoption, cloud storage company Box has announced Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM), which is designed to allow customers to keep control over their encryption keys (and thus, the data stored in the public cloud) without sacrificing easy user experience.

<a href="http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/19/google-spacex-internet-plans/?ncid=rss_truncated">SpaceX</a>, Facebook, <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2871304/security0/virgin-galactic-wants-to-launch-2-400-comm-satellites-to-offer-ubiquitous-broadband.html">Virgin Galactic</a> and Google have all announced major initiatives that would help connect the world -- especially developing nations -- to the Internet. But the next thing in worldwide connectivity isn't going to be in underground cables, so much as it will be over your head. It starts with satellites, but it gets a lot weirder. 

When the brand-new UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay in San Francisco opened on Sunday, patients werebe greeted by staffers that more strongly resemble R2-D2 than the cast of Scrubs.

If you tuned into <a href="http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/parks-and-recreation-gryzzlboxsave-jjs-214445">Parks And Recreation Tuesday night</a>, you were treated to an episode where social media startup Gryzzl attempts to win over the hearts and minds of its  new neighbors in the fictional town of Pawnee with boxes full of gifts, delivered via Amazon-esque drones.

Slack, the IRC-for-enterprise company that's become one of those storied few to achieve a $1 billion valuation in its first year, has bought screen-sharing collaboration startup Screenhero with an eye toward adding valuable new communications capabilities to its software.

Cloud sync-and-share company Dropbox, never one to shy away from an acquisition, has snapped up startup Pixelapse, which provides a GitHub-like version control service for "tens of thousands" of visual designers. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

It all started at the Linux.conf.au Conference, when Nebula developer (and former colleague) Matthew Garrett kicked off a post-keynote Q&A session with Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds by asking about his often-abrasive, super-aggressive tone on official mailing lists.

Ask any IT administrator about Microsoft's licensing setup and they'll hurl up a string of four-letter words that would incur an FCC fine if delivered on television. In a world where everyone wants to use everything -- especially Microsoft Office -- on tablets, phones, and oh yeah, computers, Microsoft's customary one-license-per-device model means death by a thousand cuts for most enterprises. 

Dropbox continues to build its business away from sync-and-share cloud storage with the overnight acquisition of CloudOn, an Israeli startup that offers a "simple and beautiful" mobile document creation and editing tool, to quote Dropbox's marketing spin.

Slack, the startup that bills itself as IRC for the enterprise, has been on something of a winning streak lately.

If you want to try out Google's Project Ara modular smartphone, start booking your flights to Puerto Rico: The island protectorate will be the location of the Project Ara "Market Pilot," where Google plans to sell an early version of the hardware from converted food trucks during the third quarter of this year.