Kik has launched its own chatbot shop, further opening the floodgates to users who want to engage with messaging apps from brands and publishers arriving on the Canadian messaging platform. Starting today, Kik's Bot Shop will begin allowing users to download bots for entertainment, customer service and shopping.

The VW, Ashley Madison and FIFA scandals are only the tip of the iceberg. Many brands have been losing the trust of their fans and consumers through questionable behaviors like dishonesty and slave labor. Consumers are showing that bottom line and brand morality are no longer mutually exclusive.

So, Medium is a platform after all. The following publications are also on their way to Medium: Time Inc.’s Money and Fortune Medium-native offshoots, The Hairpin, Women and Hollywood, Go Into the Story (by Scott Myers), Dangerous Minds, War Is Boring, and The Evergreen Review.

With more people getting news on their mobiles, the Times is part of a new publisher focus on alerts to drive traffic back to their apps. For publishers that have spent big money on mobile apps, the challenge now is not just getting people to download it but getting them to use it — and that’s where the push notification comes in.

By February of 2014, WhatsApp had reached about 450 million users, and Facebook shelled out $19 billion to acquire the startup, with its staff of only 50 people. Since then, with only a slight expansion of staff, WhatsApp has come to serve more than a billion people across the globe.

Beyond integration, Modo CEO Bruce Parker indicates that the Modo payments hub also stands to enable some other efficiencies resulting in cost savings for companies that use it. According to Parker, in all financial systems there are always anomaly transactions that take place. This can happen whenever connecting systems temporarily get out of sync. These anomaly transactions need to be handled by human beings.

Twitter will probably package the games alongside a live feed of curated tweets and stream all of it on its site and mobile app, the person said. Other web sites will also be able to embed Twitter’s live stream, which gives the company and the NFL a much wider digital reach than the 66 million Americans who currently use the service. They will also be broadcast on NBC, CBS and the NFL Network, the NFL said in a statement Tuesday.

With Google streaming apps to your phone and Apple nudging developers to store parts of their apps in the cloud, we may have just entered the beginning of a future where installation becomes obsolete and the border between “website” and “native app” is blurred. This is a future without apps. And it’s wonderful.

Snapchat’s Discover section is mostly populated by content from publishers like Mashable, BuzzFeed and Vice, which have taken to creating original fare for the channel. In October, Sony Pictures released a paid channel to promote the James Bond installment “Spectre,” making it the first brand to purchase the property on Snapchat.

Publishers adopted Slack to cut down on email and open up communication, but many are now finding that Slack can also enable forms of publishing. Slack’s real-time nature has made it a viable way for publishers to keep track of breaking-news stories, for example, while other publishers are finding that Slack can be a viable alternative to run-of-the-mill live-blogging software.