| Google made a bunch of announcements at its Cloud Next conference, like the fact that it's turning Hangouts into two products. Also, Airbnb raised a giant funding round. That and more in The Daily Crunch for March 10, 2017. 1. Google goes after Slack and splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet Google is dividing Hangouts into two different products — Hangouts Chat, which is a team communication service in the style of Slack, and Hangouts Meet, which is focused on video and audio communication. Google's Scott Johnston told us to think of them as "two app entry points, but they are the same family." The announcement was made at the Google Cloud Next conference. My colleague Ron Miller used the occasion to examine the company's broader cloud strategy and the way it's pitching itself as a more open alternative to market leaders like Amazon. 
2. Airbnb closes $1B round at $31B valuation, profitable as of 2H 2016, no plans for IPO Airbnb's Series F funding now totals more than $1 billion — which includes the $555 million that was disclosed last year. TechCrunch has confirmed that the company is now valued at close to $31 billion, and that it turned profitable for the second half of 2016. Our source also says Airbnb has "no plans to go public anytime soon." 3. Snap opens second Spectacles pop-up shop in Venice, LA Snap's first pop-up Spectacles store, in New York City, closed last month. Now the next one has opened on the Venice boardwalk, near the company's Los Angeles headquarters. Spectacles are also sold online, though Snap says it's not yet earning meaningful revenue from hardware. 4. NASA's interplanetary radar spots tiny derelict satellite in forgotten lunar orbit Sadly, it's not an alien spacecraft — it's one of India's. Still, it's an impressive effort by JPL to use a pair of large antennas to blast microwaves at areas near the Moon where it expected a pair of dead satellites would be. This could make it easier to find, and even recover, spacecraft in the future. 5. Oculus CTO John Carmack is suing ZeniMax for $22.5 million The legal battle between Facebook-owned Oculus and ZeniMax Media is opening on another front. A jury recently awarded ZeniMax $500 million, after ZeniMax accused Oculus of stealing trade secrets. Now Oculus CTO/video game legend John Carmack (whose company id Software was acquired by ZeniMax) is suing his former employer for earnings he says are still owed from the id acquisition. 6. Chowbotics raises $5 million for salad-making robots named Sally, of course Chowbotics "food service robots" are designed to prepare food in restaurants, cafeterias, hotels and food courts. The flagship product is a robot that uses 20 different food canisters to prepare 1,000 different types of salad. Businesses like the Bay Area Italian restaurant Mamma Mia's, the coworking space Galvanize and the corporate cafeteria at H-E-B Grocery Co. will be testing this robot in the spring. | 
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