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Gary Edwards

Facebook Messenger: inside Mark Zuckerberg's app for everything (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...inside-facebook-messenger

Messaging Conversation Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • It's the job of Marcus, a gently spoken 42-year-old French-born fintech guy, to turn a proprietary messaging app into this all-encompassing platform - essentially, an operating system on which third-party apps, and entire businesses, can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem. The Chinese have already shown what's possible: social media giant Tencent enables 600 million people each month to book taxis, check in for flights, play games, buy cinema tickets, manage banking, reserve doctors' appointments, donate to charity and video-conference all without leaving Weixin, the Chinese version of its WeChat app.
  • "The messaging era is definitely now," Marcus says. "It's the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone. Some people were surprised when I joined Facebook, but it's because I believe that messaging is the next big platform. In terms of time spent, attention, retention - this is where it's happening. And it's a once in a generation opportunity to build it." Or, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a public Q&A last November, "Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking."
  • Some questioned why the company was competing with its own acquisition, WhatsApp, bought two months earlier for what was then $19 billion (£12.5bn). But over the next year, as WhatsApp remained lean, Messengerfunctionality kept growing - video and voice calls, peer-to-peer payments, location-sharing - even as its use was made independent of a Facebook account.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Messenger Platform." Messenger would be opened to outside developers - initially 40 pre-selected partners, including ESPN, Giphy, Boostr, Dubsmash and Talking Tom - to build new "tools for expression" that would let users create and share content inside the app.
  • But Messenger would also, he revealed, let users communicate with businesses just as if they were friends - through simple conversation threads that would let them "make a reservation, buy something, change shipping information…"
  • There are lots of different ways that people want to share and communicate. In a lot of countries, as much as 99 per cent of the people online will use SMS or send text messages - with people sending 15-20 messages or more every single day."
  • Zuckerberg continues, explains the continuous iterations designed to let Messenger"enable you to express yourself in new ways": photo and video messaging; stickers to help you easily display emotions; geolocation to let you find your friends; Messenger for business; and peer-to-peer payments. Now the Messenger Platform would let people "use creative new apps to have richer conversations". "We expect these improvements to continue making Messenger a more useful and engaging experience for people."
  • People send 30 billion daily messages on WhatsApp alone, according to the company - compared with 20 billion daily SMS messages. Even smaller apps such as Telegram are claiming ten billion daily deliveries.
  • And when people are inside messaging apps, they're not encountering web ads or discovering retailers or interacting with an existing social network.
  • "Facebook, Amazon and Google are all threatened by the way the operating-system owner has control on mobile," says Benedict Evans, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who writes widely on the mobile ecosystem. "It's why the Kindle Fire exists. It's too late for Facebook or Amazon to create an operating system, so Facebook is thinking, how do we create our own layer on that power structure? So it's trying to create its own runtime withMessenger. It's about attention or engagement: do we become commoditised as just another messaging app, or do we do something more profound? T
  • service discovery: you put stuff inside a messaging app, so you have social as part of discovery
  • Can you turn this into a discovery acquisition channel, which is what Facebook on the desktop became?" 
  • WithMessenger, everything you can do is based on the thread, the relationship. We want to push that further."
  • Transforming interactions with businesses represents "the first baby steps in a series of millions of steps," Marcus says. "Even calling a restaurant is complicated - but when it comes to calling an airline to change a booking, it ranks with a visit to the dentist - it's painful and nobody wants to do it. And email is completely broken. Look at the traditional e-commerce journey: you go to a website. You have to create an account - that's one email. You add something to your shopping cart and check out - that's another email. The package ships - that's another email. When it arrives, that's another. That's four emails that are distinct threads that are not canonical. And the only thing you can do for interactions inside an email is click on a link and go to a website, where you have to re-authenticate. It's painful on desktop, it's impossible on mobile. That's why, for the majority of online retailers, north of 60 per cent of their website traffic is mobile - but only ten to 12 per cent of checkouts are mobile. And mobile traffic will continue increasing.
  • So the thought is, what would those interactions look like if the web and desktop had never existed?"
  • Messenger's answer is to enable businesses and customers to communicate through conversation threads that its 14-person product team calls "interactive bubbles"
  • Once you interact with a business, you open a thread that will stay forever. You never lose context, and the business never loses context about who you are and your past purchases. It removes all the friction."
  • "There are certain conversations that can be handled by an AI quickly and easily - forms don't work on the mobile web, free search is hard," Chudnovsky says. "AI can solve those pain points for you. You'll say, 'I want the cheapest flights from New York to San Francisco, what are the options?' And if you're not satisfied with the results, you can get a human to help. If we do this right, it becomes your primary interface for getting your tasks done. That sucks in a pretty big part of intent."
  • When you're a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising, it's just a better business," he says.
  • "eBay takes a cut of every transaction and listing; Alibaba does all that for free, and makes money from advertising. Alibaba is bigger than eBay and Amazon combined, and is growing much faster. We take the same approach.
  • We want the maximum number of transactions on the platform, while enabling the best possible mobile experience for commerce. The margins on payments aren't that high, and we want the broadest reach. Businesses will want to pay to be featured or promoted - which is a bigger opportunity for us."
  • Julien Codorniou
  • Codorniou, 37, now Facebook's director of global platform partnerships, runs teams in London, Singapore and the US who have brought in the initial Messenger partners such as Everlane, Boostr and YPlan.
  • Michael Preysman, Everlane's CEO and founder, sees value in "a more human one-on-one dialogue that you can track over time, unlike email, which goes into black holes.
  • Marcus reflects on the hours we spend interacting with businesses. "If you can reduce that time and increase delight, if we can increase the fidelity of the conversations with those you care about, then Messenger will be a very important part of your life."
  • "What's happening in Asia is an inspiration - and not only WeChat," says Chudnovsky, "but that's more about proof of what's possible. It's proof that everything starts from a conversation.
  • The trouble with platforms is that they, rather than the businesses built on top, set the rules.
  • Zynga was once the world's biggest social-gaming company; then Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to limit how it could promote its games. Yet Facebook's reach is hard to ignore: last year, the company says it drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile, and more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps were shared on Facebook's platform.
  • And yet… the platform's interests will not always align with those of the third-party businesses that rely upon it. Marcus dismisses the risk. "Every business is building on top of other platforms, whether iOS or Android,"
  • It's owning the existing identification platform that gives Facebook a distinct edge.
  • "Plugging in GIF-makers into Messenger - OK, that's interesting. But turning it into a universal notification platform for the web - that's much more interesting
  • We live in a world shaped by the web on mobile, but web is a desktop, not a personal experience. We see the world as people-based. If we can recreate that, it reinvents mobile interactions from the ground up."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    ""As Messenger has grown, we think this service has the potential to help people express themselves in new ways, to connect hundreds of millions of new people, and to become a communication tool for the world," Zuckerberg told 2,000 developers at his company's F8 conference in San Francisco in March, as he announced that Messenger was becoming so much more than just an app. "Helping people communicate more naturally with businesses will improve, I think, almost every person's life because it's something everyone does.""
Gary Edwards

Uh Oh Google Hangouts, Slack Is Adding Video - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...hangouts-slack-is-adding-video

Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Now Here’s the Twist There is a technology that is getting disrupted but it is not another real-time messaging app. Instead it is traditional telephony.
  • The survey unearthed that an eye-popping 71 percent of small-to-medium will not invest in another phone system at all or will not increase their investment in these systems, in large part because of real-time instant messaging and video conferencing applications.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16
     
    "It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."
Gary Edwards

Apple vs. Google and Facebook messaging - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/and-facebook-messaging-2015-12

Messaging ChatBots ChatOps

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Or look at the fact that you can call a Lyft car from Slack, or an Uber from Atlassian's HipChat, without ever leaving a chat window. The idea is pretty straightforward: People like to chat and don't like leaving chat to open another app. Put the app in the chat, and you get the best of all possible worlds. It's a proven concept in Japan. There, the mega-popular messaging app Line is so successful that it was able to introduce mobile payments and taxi services of its own right next to the main chat functions.
  • Once you get or buy an app for Facebook Messenger — or Slack or whatever Google once — you have it anywhere on any device. Same for Slack or HipChat.
  • You don't even have to install these apps, really. Since they live in your chat app, installing Facebook Messenger more or less automatically installs your apps, too. They'll work the same way on every device you own, and every device you ever will own, as long as it runs Messenger.
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16
     
    "There's a quiet revolution going on in messaging. Companies like Facebook, Google, Atlassian, and Slack are expanding their messaging apps beyond merely sending text, video, and audio and into something a little bit more like an operating system. On Tuesday, for example, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is working on a new chat app that will let developers build apps that plug right into an instant-messaging window by way of a simple text interface. It sounds like a competitor to the Facebook "M" project, a virtual assistant that aims to help you do everything from shopping to making restaurant reservations, right from within Facebook Messenger. Right now, at the tail end of 2015, these souped-up chat apps look like an interesting trend. Some tech types call it ChatOps. But if I were Apple, I would be losing a lot of sleep over the rise of the smarter messaging app."
Gary Edwards

Native Documents Viewer-Editor-PDF Converter - 0 views

intern.nativedocuments.com/365

ND native-documents native-Office-docuemnts workflows conversation-capture

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Feb 16
     
    Native Documents on line view-edit-pdf converter. Drag and drop a native Office document to view and edit. And convert that ND to PDF. This Web Service also demonstrates ND deep messaging. EX: Drag and drop a native Office document and the browser will open the document for viewing and editing. Highlight a section of the document that you want to discuss. The URL will reflect this highlight. Copy the URL and paste into another app such as Slack, and slack will display the highlighted text as a message. The reason this deep messaging is significant is that ND captures the moment of conversation and records the action. The basic idea behing deep messaging is that the conversations that surround in-process documents is logged with the document. When these in-process documents are loaded into worklow WORD processors, the conversations appear in the "documents" comments, with each comment connected to the relevant highlighted portion. Very cool! Very productive.
Gary Edwards

Everyone wants to reinvent email, workflow: Here's what we really need | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...flow-heres-what-we-really-need

email-productivity workflow Cloud-Productivity-Platform collaboration docflow-conversation

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up.
  • We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up and actually talk.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "In recent weeks, email and other collaboration and workflow tools are being re-imagined with new interfaces, social components, integrated video conferencing and easy swipes to dismiss messages. To wit: IBM launched  its Verse effort with a snazzy interface that combines, social, email, analytics and mobile nicely. Google floated Inbox , an app designed to help you manage your email better. For the most part, it's effective. Cisco's Project Squared is an app that runs on its collaboration cloud and integrates video conferencing, messaging and other tools. Facebook is pondering Facebook at Work with a news feed and doc sharing. We could go on, but the list of tech vendors trying to deliver a workflow leapfrog is long. And we're not even counting efforts by Workday, Salesforce and others to include collaboration with core business functions. WHAT'S HOT ON ZDNET Windows 10: You've got questions, I've got answers Windows 10 ​How to use Google's new My Account, the one-stop control center for all of its services Security Apple Watch or Android Wear? Neither. Why smartwatches aren't ready for prime time Mobility The tech of Computex 2015 in pictures Hardware Here's where all these efforts fall flat: These products are all pitched as magic bullets to simplify your work life, but in reality are just another item to sell or keep current customers in the fold. Another reality: These applications are trying to tackle human issues with collaboration and communications. Tech isn't going to fix those communication quirks or cure humans' need to try and keep up. We don't need another tool. We need less of them. We don't need another app to aggregate tech functions. We need to simplify tech functions starting with a bunch of check boxes marked delete. We don't need technology to help us communicate. We need to be taught how to communicate. And we sure don't need more messaging. We need to turn our damn phones off so maybe we can really get some work done or look up a
Gary Edwards

Dan Grover | Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps. - 0 views

dangrover.com/...bots-wont-replace-apps.html

Messaging Notification WeChat

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The key wins for WeChat in the above interaction (compared to a native app) largely came from steamlining away app installation, login, payment, and notifications, optimizations having nothing to do with the conversational metaphor in its UI.
  • Indeed, the cornerstone of whole experience is effectively a common, semi-hierarchical stream of messages, notifications, and news with a consistent set of controls for handling them. It’s no stretch to see WeChat and its ilk not as SMS replacements but as nascent visions of a mobile OS whose UI paradigm is, rather than rigidly app-centric, thread-centric (and not, strictly speaking, conversation-centric).
  • This term – “app” – is rather old, yet only entered common parlance with the proliferation of smartphones. This is no coincidence. The app paradigm introduced on smartphone OSes circa 2007 was a radical improvement over what we’d had on the desktop. For the first time, software was easy to install, even easier to delete, and was guaranteed to not totally screw with your system (due to sandboxing/permissions models).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Though some apps indeed are mini-desktop apps that make full use of the supercomputer I carry in my pocket, well over half fall into another category. These apps are just a vessel for a steady stream of news, notifications, messages, and other timely info ultimately residing in a backend service somewhere. They don’t really do much on their own. It’s much like how a tortilla chip’s main value is not so much in its appeal as a chip but as a cheese and chili delivery mechanism.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16
     
    "A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION I don't know about you, but here's what I want to see happen. I want the first tab of my OS's home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app's inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I'll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I'll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos. The next time I'm back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday's4 and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight. As a user, I want my apps - whether they're native or web-based pseudo-apps - to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles. I don't actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these pr
Gary Edwards

Amazon acquired patents, employees from Biba, reportedly plans new video chat service |... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...justin-biba-amazon-video

Amazon-video-conferencing communications Cloud-communications

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Nov 16
     
    "Amazon's purchases of Twitch and Elemental Technologies appear to be only two parts of a bigger strategy at the company to move deeper into video services through acquisition. Last year, the marketplace and cloud computing giant also quietly acquired a startup out of San Francisco called Biba Systems, which develops and operates video messaging apps aimed at business users. Sources say that Amazon has been working on its own video messaging service, which it plans to unveil during its re:Invent AWS conference later this month. News of Amazon's possible purchase of Biba Systems first surfaced last week, when GeekWire found some Delaware filings that spoke of a merger with an entity called "Justin Acquisition" in September 2015. There was no direct mention of Amazon in the Justin Acquisition document, but the filing included the name of a paralegal employed at the time by Amazon. Amazon never responded to our request (or GeekWire's, it seems) for comment on the story. So we decided to do some digging of our own. We discovered some direct links between Biba and Amazon that point to both Biba's technology and employees now being part of Amazon. We found that Biba had filed and received two patents, one related to video conferencing, and another related to audio streaming. Both of these patents transferred their ownership to Amazon Technologies in the last two months. Furthermore, we've been able to trace active Amazon work email addresses to current Biba employees. (We are not publishing those here.) "
Gary Edwards

Evernote founder Phil Libin creating incubator for bots - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ting-incubator-for-bots-2016-3

Phil-Libin Evernote Bots Conversational-UI

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16
     
    "he's found the most exciting thing he's seen since the iPhone emerged: bots. Specifically, chat bots that interact intelligently with people as they use apps, providing useful information before they even know they want it. "In 2007, I had this vision when I first touched my very first iPhone where I kind of understood what the next five years would bring, and I haven't had that kind of clarity since," he told us in a conversation at Y Combinator's demo day on Tuesday. "And now, I have the same kind of feeling about bots, about conversational UIs." Bots are at the heart of how Facebook, Apple, Google, and smaller companies like Atlassian and Slack are transforming how messaging works. These leaders are beyond sending simple text messages, and evolving chat into a whole tech platform almost like an operating system, where others can plug their own apps in and create entirely new functions."
Gary Edwards

Email took an almighty beating this week, but it's far from dead | VentureBeat | Apps |... - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...his-week-but-its-far-from-dead

eMail Messaging

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Yesterday, email-killing team-collaboration upstart Slack nabbed another $200 million in funding, valuing the company at $3.8 billion. But perhaps more importantly, Slack now claims 2.7 million daily active users, up from 2.3 million just last month, with big-brand customers including CenturyLink, CBS, Dow Jones, Harvard University, Samsung, the U.S. State Department, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
  • Fast-forward six years and you could now say that SMS is also on the way out, replaced by a plethora of Internet-based messaging services. But Sandberg had a point — looking at the methods of communication that permeate the lives of young people gives the biggest clue as to where we’re heading. But it will be a gradual process guided by the demographics of people who use a given service; Uber may be phasing out email completely, but that’s because the majority of its users — in the U.S. at least — are under the age of 35 according to recent reports. But an airline such as KLM will have customers spanning all age groups, so it would be less likely to switch off telephone or email support quite so quickly.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Apr 16
     
    "While 2016 is shaping up to be the year virtual reality and the Internet of Things went mainstream, it could also go down in history as the year email's much-touted demise cranked into overdrive. At least, if this week's events are anything to go by. With the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, and a myriad of communication conduits springing up over the past decade, there's little question that people use email less than they once did for personal communications, and when you swing the demographic dial down to teenagers, the shift is even more pronounced. But email has remained in rude health despite the rise in mobile messaging, and this has been in no small part due to businesses - within companies, between companies, and between companies and customers. But things are changing."
Gary Edwards

Office 2016: Reinventing productivity and business processes - The Official Microsoft Blog - 0 views

blogs.microsoft.com/...ctivity-and-business-processes

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Third, productivity requires a rich service spanning all your work and work artifacts (documents, communications, and business process events and tasks). It is no longer bound to any single application. It’s a service that leverages the cumulative intelligence and knowledge you and your organization need to drive productivity.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 25 Sep 15
       
      This statement misses an important point. Productivity demands "focus". Spreading the artifacts of productivity across the broad spectrum of communications, messaging, conferencing, scheduling and documents is anything but productive. Take eMail for example. It's a great messaging and communications platform, but it takes the focus away fromt he workflow and puts into a forced focus on a broader messaging flow. If conversations are focused on the documents in a workflow, and the workflow is tracked and managed by document, the focus remains exactly where it should be - ON THE DOCUMENTS! Things like eMail, collaborative editing and comments, real time messaging, phone calls and scheduling, are critical to capturing the conversation, but they need to be tied to the document in question and the overall activity of the workflow. Keep the focus on the documents; keep the conversation surrounding the documents with the documents; and the focus will be exactly where it needs to be! Use the notification systems to notify workers of what is happening with each document, and keep them aware of how the workflow is progressing.
  • Mobility. Conversations. Intelligence.
  • Its entrepreneurs see Office as a universal language for their company to fuel collaboration with their team across a range of devices and for data-driven decisions about their inventory as they ship more than 10,000 designer dresses every hour.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Our ambition to reinvent productivity includes reinventing business process. In the past, these processes were rigid, imposed and inflexible. Office and Microsoft Dynamics are changing the game with solutions that make business processes a catalyst to organizational productivity.
  • striving to build a new productivity and business process system that any organization can use to harness the power of human networks, respond to business events in real time, and find and share data insights as businesses create more information than they can consume.
Gary Edwards

Problems with Slack - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/it-completely-heres-why-2016-3

slack

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Slack, you’re asking for A LOT of my time I may have been fooling myself when we were still in the honeymoon phase, but when there was all the talk of you killing email, I have to admit I thought it was the email problem you were attacking, not just the emailplatform. Which is to say, I thought you were providing some relief from the torrential influx of messages, alerts, and notifications I was receiving on a daily basis. “Me + Slack = Fewer distractions and more productivity,” I thought at the time. I have to say, though, that I’ve since found it to be the opposite. Like, WAY the opposite. With you in my life, I’ve received exponentially more messages than I ever have before. And while it’s been awesome to have such a connection with you, it has been absolutely brutal on my productivity.
  • You’re splitting my attention into a thousand tiny pieces While it’s true that email was (and, despite your valiant efforts, still very much is) a barely-manageable firehose of to-do list items controlled by strangers, one of the few things that it did have going for it was that at least everything was in one place. Trying to keep up with the manifold follow-up tasks from the manifold conversations in your manifold teams and channels requires a Skynet-like metapresence that is simply beyond me. With you, the firehose problem has become a hydra-headed monster.
  • You’re actually making it HARDER to have a conversation Back before we met, I had two primary modes of digitally communicating with people: Real TimeSome of the digital platforms I used were inherently “real time” (phone, Skype, IRC, Google Hangouts, etc.), where there was a built-in expectation of an immediate, rapid-fire conversation wherein everyone involved was more or less fully-present and participating. AsynchronousConversely, there were other platforms that were inherently asynchronous(email, voicemail, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc.), where there was no expectation of an immediate response, and people tended to send cogent feedback in their own time. Then you came along, and rocked everyone’s world by introducing a conversational melting pot that is neither fully real time, nor fully asynchronous. You’re somewhere in between: You’re asynchronish. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • You’re turning my workdays into one long Franken-meeting I think you and I can both agree that meetings are kind of the worst. And, on the surface, you do totally obviate the need for a ton of them. I can definitely think of many times in which a quick Slack whip-around has saved me from all kinds of interpersonal tedium. So thank you for that. However, I’m wondering what the cost of it is. Specifically, I wonder if conducting business in an asynchronish environment simply turns every minute into an opportunity for conversation, essentially “meeting-izing” the entire workday. All-day meetings every day of the week are substantially more “meetings” than the ones you’re saving me from.
  • Lastly, you’re a bit on the possessive side I will put this simply, Slack: not unlike Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, I wish I knew how to quit you. When I started feeling like our relationship was getting to be just a little too much, I decided to take a few days off. That was never a problem when I was with email — I’d just fire up a vacation autoresponder and be on my merry way. With you, though, there’s apparently no option for deescalating our relationship outside of a few hours in “Do Not Disturb” mode. This means there’s no bigger-picture safety valve to make sure we’re not about to drive off a cliff hand-in-hand, like a socio-digital Thelma & Louise.
  • I’m sorry, but I need my space Maybe you will say I’m afraid of commitment, but I’m just not interested in a relationship that seems to want to swallow up more and more of my time and attention, and demand that more and more of my interactions with other people go through you first.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Mar 16
     
    "Hey there, Slack. This won't be easy, but it's for the best. As you and I both know, things started out so wonderfully. Me with my exploding inbox, you with your (very sexy) ambition to make email obsolete. Only, I don't know if we're so good for each other, after all. Or, more to the point, I don't know if firing up a relationship with you ever really fixed what was broken in my other one to begin with. Everyone knows email and I had our issues. Email started as a frisky exploration into a whole new world and quickly escalated to a scale beyond anyone's expectations. Next thing I knew, email and I had not only put a ring on it, we'd bought a minivan and moved into a little place in the suburbs. Was it rushed? Sure. I think if we'd known just how big the relationship was going to become, email and I would have set things up very differently from the start. Still, a commitment's a commitment, and we'd settled into a routine we could at least call our own. Then, out of nowhere, here you come riding into my life like a goddamned Clint Eastwood straight out of Bridges of Madison County. The personality! The colors! You were all promises, rose petals, and sex appeal. And SO much more responsive to my needs. Soon, we were messaging every day. It wasn't long until it was hard to think of a time I'd ever gotten things done without you. "
Gary Edwards

Addappt makes your address book smart | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...s-your-address-book-smart.html

Contact-Management

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • How it worksWhen you install the addappt app on your device and verify your email ID, the app stores your profile information on its server. You profile includes only that information that you added to your own profile, including phone numbers, email IDs, physical address, social network. And you can selectively make any property private at anytime. The second step is to get your friends on addappt. You can send invites to your friends and when they join addappt their profile is uploaded to the sever. The app automatically helps people connect using the verified email or verified mobile so all your friends need to do is download addappt and make sure they have one of your emails or mobile. Resources White Paper CloudFlare Advanced DDoS Protection White Paper Don't Let Your Security Strategy Become Irrelevant See All Go Now the magic begins. Addappt will sync your profile with your friends' address books and vice versa. Now when you change anything in your profile on your own phone, it will sync those changes in your friends' address books. No need to send bulk emails or messages. This puts you in control of your information. You determine which is the preferred phone number to or email address to reach you at. Ane addappt also remembers the number you called last and will automatically dial it. Since often we have different channels of communicating with different folks, the app also remembers how you communicated last with someone (i.e., it "adapts" to you).
  • Cool featuresOne feature that is extremely important from a privacy point of view is that addappt uploads only the profile that you added in your address book, stuff like your phone number, email ID, LinkedIn profile, physical address -- whatever you choose and nothing else. No contacts from your address book are uploaded to the sever. Also, and very importantly, your connections never see your other connections and you can’t see theirs. It is all private. I recently discovered another interesting feature of addappt when I was travelling to India and had a local number there. Previously I would have to bulk email hundreds of people in my address book to give them my new, temporary number, only to change it again 4 weeks later. With addappt, I updated my profile and added the temporary local number and, boom,  everyone who was connected with me via addappt had my new local number instantly. When I came back to the U.S., I removed the temporary number from my profile and it automatically removed it from my friends’ address books. And unlike some popular social networking sites, if you quit addappt, your contacts will remain on your device. What you will lose is the ability to keep syncing your contacts. That’s it.
  • New featuresAddappt recently introduced Widgets so your favorite contacts are now available on iOS and Android from anywhere on the phone and you don’t have to open the app. They require no setting and they are live since addappt remembers how you communicated last. They reorder, get removed or added just as within the app. You can also message your friends with one “tapp.” On iOS, you can email URLs from your browser to yourself using the action extension. You can group  contacts very easily and then send a group email, group chat or a group “tapp". Addappt’s  one "tapp" messaging is also available on the Apple Watch. Addappt makes it much easier to share your contact info with people you meet at conferences, for example with a feature called Share My Info.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 May 16
     
    " remember the days before smartphones when managing your contact list was a herculean task. I used to maintain a notebook where I would add phone numbers, email IDs and physical addresses. But people change their contact info all the time and it was close to impossible to keep up. Download the April 2016 Digital Magazine Inside: How companies are making wearables work, why CIOs aren't ready for container tech & much more! READ NOW When we moved to smartphones, the physical address book was gone and along with it the crossed out or hastily erased names and numbers, but the challenges of staying updated remained. I had been looking for a solution where some magical app will keep my address book updated and keep my friends and colleagues informed of my latest contact details without having to send spam mails to everyone I could remember. Then I found addappt, a new way to make your addressbook as smart as is your smartphone. I spoke with addappt founder Mrinal Desai to learn about his background, how the app came to be and how it works. Desai was a very early LinkedIn employee (employee number 15, to be precise). He was LinkedIn's first business development manager. "LinkedIn is basically who I am offline. I build relationships over years and years and I believe that is the way to live life, based on very full and enriching relationships." said Desai. The problem Desai is trying to solve with addappt twofold: On one hand the onus is on the person who is moving to inform "everyone" about the move and send them updated information. On the other hand, you have to keep your address book updated every time someone changes contact info. There were two constantly moving goal posts to chase. "It started getting harder and harder, so for me to get the latest information. One, I have to depend on you, hopefully that you will remember to email me or all your friends in a mass spam-ish way, if you will. Then, I go take it in and I have to remember to now update some
Gary Edwards

Startup Quip takes on the big boys with revamped mobile word processing app - FierceMob... - 0 views

www.fiercemobileit.com/...2014-05-30

Quip Office-365 Office-Productivity Mobile-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • In an AppStorm review of Quip 1.0, Oliver de Looze writes: "Due to the built-in messaging system, there's no need to save your documents and email them, or even share them outside the app itself. This is where Quip sets itself apart from its competitors such as Google Docs or iWork for iCloud."
  • he upgrade to Quip 2.0 adds the ability to publish documents and share them with colleagues who don't have the Quip app installed, and a full-text search system that works on all devices, the company explained on a blog.
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Apr 16
     
    "Startup Quip is taking on big boys Microsoft, Apple and Google with a revamped Web and mobile word processing app called Quip 2.0 that provides users with new publishing and search capabilities. Quip 1.0 launched last July and is now used by over 5,000 companies, including Path, Taser, Zomato and Facebook, for whom Quip leader Bret Taylor used to serve as chief technology officer. Quip 1.0 includes a word processor and built-in messaging capability."
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | 'Work Processing' and the decline of the (Wordish) Document - 0 views

gigaom.com/...work-processing

Work-Processing Documents Visual-Productivity Cloud-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Chat-centric work management, as typified by Slack-style work chat, is getting a tremendous surge in attention recently, and is the now dominant form of message-centric work technology, edging out follow-centric work media solutions (like Yammer, Jive, and IBM Connections).
  • Workforce communications — relying on a more top-down messaging approach for the mobile workforce — is enjoying a great surge in adoption, but is principally oriented toward the ‘hardwork’ done by workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction, and away from the ‘softwork’ done by office workers. This class of tool is all about mobile messaging. (Note: we are planning a market narrative about this hot area.)
  • Today’s Special Advertisement Today, I saw that David Byttow’s Bold — a new work processing app — has entered a private beta, with features that line it up in direct competition with Google Docs and the others mentioned above. Bold raised a round of $1 million from Index Ventures in January 2016. Advertisement The competition is hotting up.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Work Processing Will Be The New Normal Advertisement What I anticipate is the convergence on a work processing paradigm, with at least these features: Advertisement Work processing ‘docs’ will exist as online assemblages, and not as ‘files’. As a result they will be principally shared through links, access rights, or web publishing, and not as attachments, files, or PDFs, except when exported by necessity. Work processing apps will incorporate some metaphors from word processing like styling text, manipulating various sorts of lists, sections, headings, and so on. Work processing will continue the notions of sharing and co-editing from early pioneers (Google Docs in particular), like edit-oriented comments, sharing through access-control links, and so on. Work processing will lift ideas from work chat tools, such as bots, commands, and @mentions. Work processing will adopt some principles from task management, namely tasks and related metadata, which can be embedded within work processing content, added in comments or other annotations, or appended to ‘docs’ or doc elements by participants through work chat-style bot or chat communications.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jun 16
     
    "I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise startups to bet on in 2016 - Business Insider Deutschland - 0 views

www.businessinsider.de/tups-to-bet-on-in-2016-2015-11

Startups

shared by Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Docusign: replacing paper signaturesDocuSignDocuSign CEO Keith Krach. Company name: DocusignHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $508.1 million in 14 rounds Anytime your company’s name becomes a verb, it means you’ve made it. That’s the case with Docusign, whose name is almost used as a verb in the digital-document area ("just Docusign it"). Docusign offers a simple and secure way to sign documents online, allowing businesses to approve transactions on the go. It's used across many different industries, from real estate and auto insurance to technology and travel services. Investors have been lining up to throw money at this company, investing almost $400 million in just the last two years.
  • Zuora is a cloud service that specializes in subscription billing.
  • Tenable offers something called "continuous threat monitoring"
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Slack took Silicon Valley’s startup scene by storm, reaching a whopping $2.8 billion valuation in less than two years.
  • Its work-communication app isn’t just for messaging coworkers — it can do a lot of different things, from getting automatic Twitter notifications to calling a Lyft cab or looking up restaurants nearby.
  • Spark is a way to sift through massive amounts of data really fast. It can be used with a popular way to store all that data, Hadoop, but increasingly, Spark is being used on its own as an alternative to Hadoop.
  • Checkmarx helps software programmers check their apps for security holes.
  • Illumio is offers a security product that protects apps inside the data center even after a hacker breaks into the network.
  • MuleSoft offers technology that makes it easier for enterprise applications to talk to each other and share data.
  • Blue Jeans is becoming a household name in the enterprise videoconferencing scene. It created a cloud service that lets different people on different online video services, like Google Hangouts and Skype, talk to each other. It also has its own browser-based service, and recently expanded to broadcasting services too.
  • Qualtrics offers a service for doing sophisticated online employee or customer surveys. The company has been on fire lately, raising all of its $220 million in venture funding over the past three years
  • Insidesales is making life easy for a lot of salespeople. It can predict the best time and person to contact before making a sales call, using machine-learning and data intelligence.
  • Tanium impressed Sinofsky because it detects when hackers are attacking as the hack is occurring, instead of what usually happens, finding out after-the-fact.
  • Optimizely didn’t invent A/B testing, the standard technique in which two different versions of the same product are tested in the market — it just made it easier for everyone to do it.
  • Xamarin offers tools for writing enterprise mobile apps and has exploded in the past year.
  • CloudFlare is a web-performance and security company that serves as a “digital bouncer” for millions of websites around the world. Its technology filters the web traffic before it reaches its customers’ websites, and sends it on the most efficient route to help websites run faster. The company claims its service handles nearly 5% of all web traffic.
  • GainSight has won the respect of Silicon Valley investors by making a solution to help enterprises keep track of their customers — and help make sure they stay loyal. Customers like HP, Workday, and Adobe all use Gainsight to manage their customer contracts, helping divisions like product development, sales, and marketing all better understand just who's buying their stuff.
  • Adaptive Insights is quickly rising through the ranks in the corporate-performance management (CPM) market, where software is used to improve budgeting, forecasting, and other financial activities. In a nutshell, it’s trying to replace a lot of the work Excel spreadsheets used to do in the past for finance people.
  • Bracket offers software that lets enterprises securely run apps and data on multiple clouds, with a minimum of management hassles.
  • Enterprises are racing to ditch their data centers and use more clouds and there are a lot of clouds to choose from. Some want to mix and match and Bracket helps them do it.
  • While he was an engineer at Facebook, Avinash Lakshman created Apache Cassandra, a "big data" database originally built to handle Facebook’s Inbox Search feature.
  • Lakshman went on to found Hedvig, which offers software that makes all of a company's computer-storage systems act like one really big, really fast hard disk.
  • open-source project called Kafka, which quickly became a popular technology used by many big internet companies: Yahoo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many others.
  • left LinkedIn to launch Confluent, which provides a commercial version of Kafka.
  • created some of Facebook's most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.
  • With this startup, their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: Analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.
  • If you’ve ever used Uber before, chances are you’ve used Twilio’s service. Same goes for apps like Lyft, Airbnb, and Match.com. That's because these apps are plugging into Twilio’s service that helps provide communications features like text messages, phone calls, and video chat. So the Uber text message you get is powered by Twilio's service.
  • Twilio has become a top choice for developers looking to add communications features to their apps. More than 700,000 developers have used Twilio’s platform so far, the company says.
  • For small and midsize businesses that hire workers and contractors overseas, Payoneer solves a big problem. It lets them make and receive cross-border payments in other currencies. Payoneer has racked up a user base of millions of businesses and professionals in more than 200 countries, it says.
  • Stack Exchange, founded in 2008, has grown from its modest roots as a question-and-answer site for programmers into a network that provides expert help and advice to over 26 million programmers every month, at all skill levels.
  • SimilarWeb seemed to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago to become a star in the web- and mobile-app-analysis world.
  • Mesosphere offers what it calls a Data Center Operating System (DCOS). It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.
  • AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily lets business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel,
  • Tableau Software, or Microstrategy with the data stored in Hadoop. 
  • Gary Edwards on 31 Jan 16
     
    "The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."
Gary Edwards

Windows 10 Mobile: Will it play in the enterprise? | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...it-play-in-the-enterprise.html

Windows-10 Blackberry business-focused-Cloud-Services

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • To start with, there's one key feature that differentiates Windows 10 Mobile from other mobile operating systems: The ability to unlock a series of additional enterprise functions when connected to an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) suite.
  • Microsoft recently made available an XML file which converts the standard version of Windows 10 Mobile into Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise when deployed onto a device. There's no need to install a new OS --just deliver the file, reboot and you're ready to go.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16
     
    "You used to see it anywhere business workers congregated: the BlackBerry. Some of them are still out there -- secure messaging devices that can be centrally managed; the heart of the business mobile fleet. But the day of the BlackBerry is over and something new is needed -- a mobile operating system that is built for work as well as personal use. Microsoft's latest phone OS is trying to make a play for the enterprise high ground, with a mix of its Windows 10 Mobile platform, a new application development model and a suite of business-focused cloud services. But how well does it fit the needs of today's companies?"
Gary Edwards

How to Build a Strategic Narrative - HBR - 0 views

hbr.org/...to-build-a-strategic-narrative

Narrative HBR

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • You want to know what inspires them, what they are like to work with, and whether they can be counted on. You want to get a sense for them as a person.
  • The context of the narrative must be a human, not an institutional, relationship. People want to get a sense for your company as if it were a person. Human relationships require reciprocity and authenticity. The narrative should say who you are, not just what you do.
  • Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One function of the strategic narrative is to explain how the purpose will be fulfilled.
  • The second function of the narrative is to explain the roles necessary to fulfill the shared purpose.
  • To find your brand DNA, go back to the original vision and ethos of your founder(s). Walmart’s value proposition is everyday low prices. It’s by no means unique among retailers. But Walmart’s shared purpose is not about lowering prices, but raising the quality of life. When he founded the company, Sam Walton said, “If we work together, we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone.” Other retailers can match Walmart’s strategy, but not its narrative.
  • Losing the narrative Most companies don’t have a powerful narrative. They are missing the human connection, lack a shared purpose, or are out of alignment with their brand DNA. But the opposite can also be true. Some companies have a powerful narrative and then lose it. Starbucks is one such cautionary tale.
  • In his book Onward, Schultz reveals that Starbucks lost its narrative while he was away. Schultz writes: “Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition. Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee.”
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16
     
    "It's a common refrain in executive suites these days: "We need a new narrative." It's not enough any more to say "we make widgets." With changes happening so quickly from so many directions - competition, regulation, technology, talent, customer behavior - it's easy for one's story to become generic or outdated. You want a story that inspires employees, excites partners, attracts customers, and engages influencers. A story that is concise but comprehensive. Specific but with room to grow. One that defines the company's vision, communicates the strategy, and embodies the culture. The natural step is to give the assignment to an agency. Most branding firms will come back with a tagline and positioning statement. Most advertising agencies with creative treatments and marketing campaigns. Most PR firms with messaging and communication plans. These are useful tactics but aren't the kind of strategic narrative you are looking for. A strategic narrative is a special kind of story. It says who you are as a company. Where you've been, where you are, and where you are going. How you believe value is created and what you value in relationships. It explains why you exist and what makes you unique. This doesn't come out of the usual competitive landscape, customer interviews, and whiteboard sessions. It takes a different approach and a shift in thinking led by the leadership team. "
Gary Edwards

Office 365's corporate takeover is imminent | InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...rate-takeover-is-imminent.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Apr 16
     
    "For the past two years, I've been doing a road show about Office 365 with Mimecast to businesses of all shapes and sizes in America and Britain. At the beginning of the show, when I asked the audience, "Who of you has moved or is looking to move to Office 365?" not one hand went up. Fast-forward to a week ago, and more than half the hands went up when I asked the same question. This shift is happening much faster than I would have predicted. [ Considering the move to Office 365? Take these crucial steps before, during, and after for a successful migration. | The InfoWorld review: Office 365 fails at collaboration | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with the Enterprise Windows blog and Windows newsletter. ] There is no doubt that the driving force behind this shift is Office 365's Exchange Online component. I hear that rationale from everyone I talk to. And it's not only the people I talk to: A recent Gartner survey showed Exchange was overwhelmingly cited as the reason to move to Office 365. Oddly enough, OneDrive for Business was the second motivator, but it was also one of the biggest disappointments thus far. Why? Because, as my colleague Galen Gruman has shown, OneDrive for Business works only partially. Some organizations are motivated by Office 365's preconfigured SharePoint Online to assist with document collaboration and workflow, though the on-premises SharePoint remains much more capable. Skype for Business is making headway for instant messaging and conferencing as well, though it continues to be iffy in multiplatform environments. Then there are the productivity apps -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- which Microsoft has made work well not only in Windows but also in iOS, in Android, and in OS X. Keep in mind that none of this means Office 365 has triumphed over Microsoft's on-premises services. On-premises Exchange -- IT's biggest reason to adopt Office 365 -- is still the leading email server by far. But over the next year or so, we will see
Gary Edwards

What's Wrong with Social Collaboration Tools? Everything - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...on-tools-everything-028737.php

Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Apr 15
     
    "Several forces are at work in the "social collaboration" tool marketplace that are creating great turbulence.  It's fairly well-known that businesses face a systemic issue with adoption of social collaboration tools. These tools (also called enterprise social networks, or social business) share some common design motifs, like activity streams, project or group workspaces, file sharing, user profiles, and various communication mechanisms such as direct messages, @mentions and so on. But what isn't generally acknowledged is that business productivity was much higher in the years preceding the emergence of Web 2.0 social collaboration tools. This means that Web 1.0 era tools - like instant messenger and the much maligned email - may have offered more oomph, at least when compared with pre-Web techniques like fax, phone calls and inter-office mail."
Gary Edwards

Microsoft's Latest Buy, Acompli, is a Great Email App | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-app-is-a-worthy-download.html

Microsoft Acompli Office-Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Dec 14
     
    "Microsoft this week announced it had acquired Acompli, an email and calendar integration app for Android and iOS. Re/code reports that Microsoft paid "north of $200 million," a far cry from Facebook's nearly $19 billion buyout of messaging app WhatsApp. Still, Microsoft's acquisition raises two questions (at least) for mobile users: 1) With approximately 10 zillion email apps available today, why Acompli? And 2), is the free app worth a download? According to a Microsoft blog post, Acompli "provides innovative ways to focus on what's important in your inbox, to schedule meetings, and work with attachments and files. Users love how it connects to all email services and provides a single place to manage email with a focus on getting things done." Let's parse that paragraph to help determine if Acompli is worth a look."
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