The founders of Inkling Markets, a prediction market platform and a Y Combinator alum, found that their staff needed a secure chat room every day to work together on private issues within their business but most of the collaboration apps send an email when they’re updated with a message, which while is convenient, is not necessarily secure. They also wanted an uber-simple email collaboration tool that was secure across all email clients and could be accessed from a laptop or an iPhone. The looked into Basecamp and Google Groups, but found the interface too clunky for simple email correspondence.
So they created Tgethr, a simple, easy-to-use secure, free email collaboration platform that can be used between family members or within an enterprise. All you have to do is set up a group name, i.e. “techcrunch@tgethr.com” with a distribution list of whomever you want to participate, and write to it. You can write from your own email client or from Tgethr’s interface. Tgethr will keep a private archive of everything you write on the web. You can cc: or bcc: to it, tag your correspondence, search for emails and keywords, and it’s secure with both ssl and email encryption. And the interface is sort of like a chat room.
Nathan Kontny, co-founder of Inkling Markets, says that the tool is aimed to be the anti-fancy email collaboration app. Most importantly, Kontny, says was to build in security capabilities so both email and web traffic would be encrypted and users could feel better about sharing sensitive information – something that is missing in other collaboration solutions. Ideal users could be project teams, families, friends, and clubs, or enterprises whose staff work remotely. Startups which have launched similar applications include Cc:Betty (which we wrote about here) and FamSpam.
Is it really that hard to follow a chat with few friends or colleagues via email? To me Gmail solves this problem in a simple manner with conversation view on emails, hence the reason we’ve switched from Outlook to Google Apps for our 3 offices.
To me this seems like another case of build the product then find the pain point – just like CC:Betty which takes you out of your inbox or email client to read email – which breaks your thought processes and takes time.
google wave
Look at Colayer
colayer.com
Sakaal times on Colyer and Google Wave:
http://www.saka...evelops-fu.html
Interview with Markus Hegi:
http://blog.int...it-markus-hegi/
More links: colayer.com/PAGE_googlewave
Google Wave.
great mind
yeah – hivemind
Funny, i use omegle.com for all of my enterprise chat needs,
also,
google wave
The email encryption feature seems to be a good idea.
It’s interesting to see how much innovation is happening on the margins of the core webmail services. I can see a practical use for Tgethr in a lot of small companies.
We use Email Center Pro (www.emailcenterpro.com), which is a more robust web app for team collaboration, sharing and assigning emails, adding internal notes to threads, etc. But it is definitely more focused on customer service email than internal collaboration.
Yawn.
google wave
Does anybody truly buy this contrived pr pitch about how they needed an internal tool, blah, blah– sounds like their old product never took off so they changed course and are trying something else. Why spend time creating these contrived pr stories and just say, hey that didn’t work so we think this is a bigger problem to solve for, here is what we built, and here is why we think its different from google wave, etc.
Agreed
Yikes, I haven’t been called a liar since maybe first grade. Seriously, I’m not maybe who you think I am
Agreed, this story sounds like a repeat, “we needed something so we built it”. I didn’t make it sound like a Summer blockbuster. I just wrote it up how it went down, and told Leena the same thing.
I didn’t mean to give the impression that our “old product” never took off. We’ve been earning a living for 3.5 years on our prediction market product without raising any investment capital (apart from our seed money from Ycombinator that was spent on rent and food in 3 months) and continue to do so. I’m not sure I do self-promotion right, it feels like bragging, but I think our client list (http://inklingm...m/homes/company) speaks pretty well that our Inkling has and is doing pretty well for itself. And we continue to improve it every day.
The inspiration for tgethr came from a lot of places that I’ll probably share even more about soon. One of which was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and his reference of the town of Rosetto. The story of Rosetto got me in huge way. I felt I should be communicating with my friends and family so much more than I was with 140 char Tweets and my random missives on Tumblr.
On top of that we brought in a kick ass fellow to the Inkling team (Javan Makhmali) around Oct 2008, and we found ourselves (this includes Adam, my cofounder) wanting to include him in more and more email communications regarding support, customer conversations, ideas being thrown around, etc. We also started using Tender (http://tenderapp.com) and Hoptoad (http://hoptaodapp.com) and found the need for private discussions around the information coming from those great tools as well.
So I spent a great deal of time scouring for tools that would fit our needs. We wanted dead simple stuff. But we NEED security because of the nature of that “old product”. We aren’t comfortable sending a lot of communication we have about our business around on tools that are going to just shoot the messages around over unencrypted email. Anyways, failing to find a tool that fit us, we took a crack at seeing if we could make something secure and that we’d get into a groove with. We abandon complicated tools very quickly.
So far so good. We like using it a ton. I’ve got 18 of my own groups goin.
I have parts of my family talking now over email who usually only talk to each other once every other year, because tgethr doesn’t force them to learn something new. And most importantly, I have this safe way to send encrypted messages to my team at Inkling that I can find later, or easily find conversations Inkling is having with our prediction market customers that I would like to be aware of.
I have a hard time comparing it with Google Wave, because I haven’t used it, it’s just on a video. It looks like it’s got a lot of stuff which is going to be great for some folks. But from the looks of it so far, it’s got a ton of things I don’t need or want. I know I’m really not going to want people to see me type (I like to edit). And can I use Mail.app with it using encrypted messages? No idea.
Tgethr isn’t going to be for everyone. But we as a small business that worries about things like SSL and wants simple things, we like it a lot.
I love the mindless “google wave” posts – if you’d think about it just for a second or take 2 minutes to actually look at their web site, it’s clear these guys built this not as a wave copycat but as something simpler. Beyond techcrunch-ville there are still lots and lots of people who live in email which is purely where this product seems to be focused on. I know plenty of people who use freaking sharepoint or ning just to put together a simple distro list and have some basic discussion. Talk about overhead.
Another free service. What’s the business model?
Selling nude photos of your mom.
Sorry, couldn’t resist
Wow, that’s a neat tool that looks like it will simplify collaboration for many companies and groups.
well the encryption thing looks good, but i wonder what will happen to this after Google Wave comes along. And charging for this service seems a pretty crappy idea.
the server are placed in the US. I mean thinking about sending business information over the net through a free service sounds smart but it is the rigth way. Just thinking about the discussions around blackberry, google and co …
..but google wave is coming, so what on earth is the point? how exactly is it different AND better?
How is this different from a mailing list with an archive online?
Hi – I am on a team developing a simple collaboration site called Wiggio (www.wiggio.com). If anyone’s tried Tgethr, I’d love to hear how you think it compares. dana@wiggio.com
yammer on crack
I’ve used tgethr for about a week now. I had a lot of questions about it BEFORE I actually used it… what about this? what about that? Then I tried it (anyone can; the lowest level is free)… and, you know what? It just works — simply and securely.
And that’s the thing… an elegantly designed tool to do a job that needs to be done. Bottle openers anyone?
Thanks, Inkling.
I for one think it is a good idea. The great majority of people still rely on email for collaboration. Many of them discover that this is a total mess and try to migrate, but typically, the entry barrier of web based tools are just too high, as people are used to emails. This is when Get Tgethr (and similar services) come into play..
2nd paragraph: “i.e.” should be “e.g.”
Basic stuff.
Thanks for the post very interesting and found it very useful!