Slack, the current darling of organizations in need of a flexible individual-and-group messaging service, has bought a small video conferencing company named Screenhero. The acquisition will lead to an eventual integration of Screenhero's voice and video conferencing features and screensharing support to Slack's 365,000-and-growing daily users.
Both Slack and Screenhero are small organizations — with the latter's 6 employees are all joining Slack, which will bump up their total headcount to just over 100. The addition of voice and video greatly expands Slack's capability, which heretofore has been limited to just text chat and file sharing.
Understandably, the folks at Slack are excited:
Basically, the integrated Slack + Screenhero experience is going to be incredible. We are giddy with excitement about the possibilities and positive you will love it.
We use Slack at Mobile Nations and it's proven to be an incredibly useful tool for us, with full mobile support, apps for our computers, guest accounts, and at least integration into Skype. Adding voice and video might just change up our workflow a bit and put other companies like Microsoft, GoToMeeting, and even Google — maybe we won't have to have so many running at once after the integration's complete.
Slack's offered no distinct timetable for when we can expect to see Screenhero's features integrated, saying only that we can expect to see it happening over "the coming months" and that all of Screenhero's features will make the jump, "along with many new ones."
Source: Slack
