True Ventures portfolio company, Howdy.ai, a software automation platform which strives to be your digital coworker, yesterday released Botkit, an opensource framework for developing bots focused on Slack. Howdy is also part of the new Slack App marketplace.

My two cents, this is a pretty big deal because “bots” will become the key way many Internet services will work with each other and humans. It is part of the evolving software stack in an always-on world.

Slack, which as 2 million daily active users has now started a new $80 million fund to jumpstart its app ecosystem. More informaiton at  VentureBeat, ReadWrite, Wired, The Register & Techmeme.