Amazon goes after Hangouts and Slack with new acquisition

Amazon has reportedly made another acquisition to build up its communications service, Chime, by snagging a startup by the name of Do.com.

Chime is a part of AWS and it offers extensive videoconferencing capabilities and a cloud-based platform for organising and holding meetings.

Do.com would further bolster this real-time comms offering, as the startup’s web and mobile apps were focused on helping organise meetings, and the management of all manner of elements around them – for example prep notes, facilitating reports for non-attendees and so forth.

Note that this move was spotted by TechCrunch , and has far from been confirmed by Amazon. Indeed, Do.com has seemingly made moves to hide all the evidence that the tech site uncovered pointing to the deal.

Dos and don’ts

That includes a Do.com blog post which announced the closure of the whole service following an acquisition by an unspecified firm – in fact the entire blog site has been taken down – and various LinkedIn staff profiles that indicate Do.com employees are now working on Chime.

Plus the company’s LinkedIn entry itself, which stated: ‘Now a part of Amazon Chime.’

All those references have been removed since TechCrunch published its report and contacted Amazon for a comment, which the company declined to offer.

TechCrunch further notes that it couldn’t ever get a confirmation from Amazon about the previous acquisition of Biba for the core videoconferencing element of Chime – although that startup’s website now clearly states: ‘Biba has been replaced by Amazon Chime.’ And the site simply links through to the AWS Chime page.

So it would certainly seem that big things are planned for Chime in terms of tackling rivals like Google Hangouts, Slack or indeed Microsoft Teams – which isn't officially out yet, but launches next week – but Amazon simply doesn’t want to talk about it.

Not yet, anyway.

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