Daily Pulse: Microsoft Passed on Slack, Brazil Goes Nuts, Costco Raises the Minimum

Uninterested @here: Microsoft considered buying privately-held enterprise messaging darling Slack for $8 billion, TechCrunch has heard, but evidently decided instead to beef up Skype to compete for office video conferencing. “... co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella were among those unconvinced by the idea” of acquiring the unicorn, write Jon Russell and Ingrid Lunden. Slack announced this week it was testing voice and video chat.

Brazilian Blowout: In a fast-moving drama that played out on live Brazil TV for most of the day, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was briefly detained for questioning in massive bribery investigation involving oil giant Petrobas. “I fear nothing,” Lula, who left office in 2011, said after his release. There was rioting in the streets, and the car taking him home from interrogation was tracked by heli-cam the entire way. As reported by Senior Editor Rodrigo Brancatelli, Lula’s questioning “happened almost in the same breath as authorities reported a 3.8% plunge in 2015 gross domestic product, the worst decline in 25 years. As a consequence, Brazil’s stocks led world gains and the Real rallied as traders bet that a change in government may be closer than ever after months of political gridlock,” Brancatelli says. “Basically, today could be the most important day for the republic in the past two decades.”

Fade to Something: Meerkat is easing out of the live video streaming game. It’s not clear what the pivot will be, writes Kurt Wagner at re/code> — ”It sounds more akin to Google Hangouts or Skype, with a priority on smaller, group video chats with people you know versus strangers tuning in,” he says. But Meerkat’s existential problem was clear days after it launched last year at SXSW, and it’s challenge is easy to understand: It was hard “finding people willing to broadcast with any consistency.”

Curtain Up: AMC Entertainment bought Carmike Cinemas for $1.1 billion to become the largest theater chain in the US: 8,380 screens in over 600 theaters. AMC is owned by Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda, which is owned by the nation’s richest man: Wang Jianlin. China tycoons have been on a US buying spree for “Hollywood studios, gaming companies, and digital-effects studios,” writes Heather Timmons of Quartz.

Pay Up: Costco, the nation’s second-largest retailer, is raising its minimum wage by $1.50 to at least $13 an hour. It’s unclear how many of the big box retailer’s 117,000 workers will be affected, but minimum boosts tend to lift all boats — Costco’s highest-paid workers are also getting a 2.5% raise from their current $22.50 hourly wage. It’s a sign the labor market is tightening, and Costco is catching up: Walmart has raised its minimum to $10 this year.

Today in the Presidential Politics: To nobody's surprise, Dr. Ben Carson formally dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign.

Cover Art: People walk through the new partially opened World Trade Center Transportation Hub after nearly 12 years of construction on March 3, 2016. The grand structure was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava at a cost of $4 billion in public money, almost $2 billion over budget. The hub offers connections to the PATH train connecting New York City and New Jersey.

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What you may have missed — and really should read:

• Tech is disrupting even Mom-and-Pop pizzerias.
• Healthcare systems operate totally in the dark.
• How Netflix rewired our brains.

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Missed the last update? Catch up: US Unemployment is Low but Fewer People are Changing Jobs, Herbalife Fudged its Numbers, China to Lay Off Millions

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