“Music is always fleeting. Bands break up, artists retire, sometimes with dignity and sometimes in disgrace. The string of reunions this past year has only shown that temporality of music.” Some get back together for the fans. Some because they “miss playing with the guys.”1 Whatever their reasons, we’ve all felt the excitement when our favorite band from the 80s or 90s [or whatever decade!] got back together, even if it was temporarily for a reunion tour.

In 2015, LayerVault, which created version-control software for developers, shut down. Despite appearing, externally at least, to be a healthy startup, the company struggled to find product-market fit and had to close as a result. When LayerVault failed, Kelly Sutton, co-founder of the startup, took stock of what went wrong and what the company might have done differently. One issue that stood out was that they didn’t define and track startup metrics.

Wow! Yesterday the EU published the Digital Markets Act, a legislative proposal seeking to protect the fundamental rights of users in the digital world. This proposal has the potential to be a major catalyst for the emergence of a unifying communications layer for the open web. Indeed the Digital Markets Act is pushing interoperability between messaging apps, which is a major win for consumers.

Considering leaving Slack’s silo for a more open and secure world? We hear you! Element Matrix Services (EMS), the high-performance Matrix hosting solution from Element, is releasing a new service to help organisations migrate from Slack to Element; the Slack Migration Wizard.

The COVID pandemic has pushed many companies to quickly digitize operations in order to support decentralized teams. Unfortunately, in the rush to provide these systems, many soon discovered that that ease of use, compatibility, and efficiency can come at a heavy cybersecurity cost.

The relationships with IT has historically been driven by top-down decisions about which technology teams can (or must) use. However, in this age of remote work, it’s crucial that employees have the technology they need to collaborate and execute from anywhere in the world. To discover what works in this new world of collaborative IT, we spoke to three experts at Distributed 2020: Chet Mandair, CIO of Guidewire; Gopi Parampalli, VP of IT at EA; and Keith Pemberton, Sr.

We’ve all been there. You’ve prepared for an amazing meeting with Miro. The ice-breaker was selectively chosen to get everyone engaged from the start. Each frame was created with painstaking attention. The breakouts organized for maximum collaboration. The board is a work of art fit for a Miroverse template. As you kick things off, you get a chat message asking for the link to the board. Another asking for access because they can view but not edit.

One of the most important things to understand about a digital transformation is that ultimately, you’re talking about exactly that: a transformation from where you are today to where you hope to be tomorrow. In order to get to that point, companies have to be willing to change. Not just for the sake of it, but because it makes the most sense at this particular moment given everything that you’ve set yourself up to accomplish.