Friday, March 21, 2014
How Tipbit Is Bringing Context And Intelligence To Your Mobile Email
For most companies, email is and continues to be the lifeblood of communications for their employees. However, in recent years, that email is increasingly being read and used on a user's smartphone, tablet, or mobile device--which has some big limitations. Bellevue, Washington-based Tipbit (www.tipbit.com) is looking to bring context and automation to that mobile email--not to mention connections into things like Evernote, Dropbox, Salesforce.com, and other tools--to make mobile email far more powerful for business users. We caught up with Gord Mangione, Tipbit founder and CEO--who once headed up Microsoft's Exchange business--to talk about how the startup is looking to revolutionize mobile email. The firm recently raised a round from Ignition Partners.
What is Tipbit?
Gord Mangione: When we were first formulating Tipbit, I looked back at my career, and tried to figure out what I really enjoyed doing, and where I had the biggest impact on consumer use of technology. I've been fortunate to be able to run billion dollar businesses like Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, was as Xensource when Citrix bought the company, which is now the underpinning of all the large cloud providers. Amazon Web Services is based on the technology we built, as is Rackspace with their OpenStack technology, and so on. Looking at the problems and opportunities where I have had the most impact, I look back to my days at Exchange. In the late 90's, email was on everyon's desktop, and you were getting 300 to 400 emails a day, and using tools to manage that. It changed the way that businesses operate, and it also created a nightmare for everyone.
I said, for my next run, I should go and address that problem, which is how to make people more productive and more responsive, by delivering information they need, at a time they receive that email. We want to change how people communicate. I think we're at an interesting time in this industry. There's a confluence of trends and capabilities, which make this a unique opportunity to go after this space.
Really quickly, the fact that emails are now, for a vast majority, read on mobile devices, is fantastic. But, there are limitations of those devices, compared with your desktop where you have a large screen monitor, a mouse or a trackpad, and multiple displays, the ability cut and paste. We've traded that off for the convenience of having something in our hands. The cost of storage in the cloud has plummeted, from the pricing perspective, and there's some largesse going on in the space, which is allowing some disruption to take place that hadn't yet taken place. That's what led to Tipbit. We really want to help create a personal search engine, which will led you find, amongst all of your sources of information, the most relevant content. We decided to go after email first, because it's the most, mission critical application on your desktop and your phone, and it's the most burdensome one to deal with.
There's a lot of email apps out there. How are you different from what's out there?
Gord Mangione: First and foremost, it's more than consumers. We're going after businesses. With that in mind, we're supporting Microsoft Exchange and the protocols associated with that server offering. There are over 360 million paying customers using Exchange every single day, and it's underserved on the Apple platform. We wanted to bring our unique technology out on that platform. We're also supporting Gmail, Yahoo, and all of the IMAP providers. How we differentiate, is we are allowing you to create your own, personal index. It's more than just an email client. With your permission and acknowledgement, we index your information, and work for you in the background, to help you create your own data and your own index. We make that available to you in an application you use every day, to proactively deliver contextual information. In this case, it's in the context of your mail content. As a scenario, we let you swipe a calendar request, and we'll show you other emails from the person, we show you their profile on LinkedIn, we show what that person is tweeting about, and tell you the people who you know in common from Facebook. It shows you where you had intersections in the past. That briefing is not only for your calendar, but also for email message you happen to be reading.
Users typically use the default apps installed on those phones from day one. How do you get them to load your app and use you?
Gord Mangione: That's a great question. You're absolutely right. Our biggest competition is getting people to transition from the mail clients they are getting by default on the platform they are using. What I can tell you, is that for the customer, this is very relevant. We've gone though and talked to our most active customers, trying to figure out what to do in our road map and for future features, and they tell us that our LinkedIn integration is indispensable, as is the ability to look up people in the context of an email, and see who you know in common, learn more about their career, and get the next level of dive into Twitter. It lets them see a 360 degree view of their email, so they can respond as quickly as possible. The other thing we found, is that people typically triage their email while on a mobile device. You will delay actions on things that you can't respond to, until you get back to your desk. How I know we are successful is when we allow them to respond to their mailbox on their mobile device, without waiting to get back to their desktop.
That's why it's important to interact with tools like Salesforce, Evernote, Dropbox, and other services, so that they can have one-tap saving of email, and be able to collaborate with employees, partners, and others really quickly with those platforms. We want emails to become a core document type on those collaboration platforms. For example, people really like Evernote, which does an amazing job with web clipping technology, allowing them to save docs to the service. They have a rabid following of loyal customers. Email is one of the document types they support, and it's super simple for people to contribute emails into those collaboration platforms using our app. Of course, there's also simple stuff we do, such as turning an email thread into a calendar request. You can single tap on a menu in our software, and convert an email directly into a calendar item, and send out a request in contest of that calendar, and even preserving things like the subject line. We're really in the business of trying to automate and make your life simpler on your mobile device.
You do have quite a bit of third party service integration out of the gate. How did you come up with that?
Gord Mangione: We wanted to be a mobile first company, and looked at all of the technology out there. Mobile everything is exploding, and that's where the leading edge customers are. However, we made the very conscious decision early on in this, that we would have no creepiness. We are asking people to share some of their most precious information--their emails, documents in Dropbox, stuff in Evernote--and we wanted to make a strong statement that we're never going to put an ad in your face, we're never going to sell your data to third parties, and we're not even going to aggregate your data to third parties. It's your data, it's for your use, and only for you use. Over time, we will develop products and services that businesses will want to pay for.
It's very similar to how Evernote went to market. If you listen to Phil Libin talk about Evernote, it's a first party company. It's a product you wan tto purchase. Most of the functionality they will have to give away for free to have people use it, but most recently, they have businesses wanting to offer it to employees to hook up their line of business data to their systems. A great example for us is we've had a lot of requests from our customers on Salesforce integration. We want to show now only LinkedIn, not only Twitte,r and not only Facebook, and emails exchanged or the last time you met, we want to show you the opportunities you have in Salesforce with those customers, show the support issues they may be having, and provide deeper integration with your line of business, whether that's through SaaS, or on-premise integration. We really want to give you a 360 degree view of a person or upcoming meeting, where they're headed, and even the most recent revenue coming in from their company.
What will the new funding go towards?
Gord Mangione: Our main thing, is we are going to hire engineers to complete our roadmap and respond to our customers and develop new capabilities. We want to add features inside the product. Paul and I are actively engaged on how to get as many customers using our software as possible. Everything we have in our product today is available for free, and because of that, there's a little bit of operations cost to keep our customers up and running. That's the main tenets of what we want to accomplish with this round.
Thanks!