TechCrunch
Ex-Skypers Aim To Bridge The Gap Between Email And Messaging With Launch Of Fleep
When you get pitched a new messaging startup from an Estonian team comprising a number of ex-Skype engineers, you kind of have to take notice. Launching officially today is Fleep, a web and iOS app that wants to bridge the gap between ‘reply all’-style group email and enterprise messaging/IM services.
Its premise isn’t new, of course: one way to help users achieve the holy grail of in-box zero is to try and get many of those conversations taking place outside of email in the first place. In that sense, Fleep’s immediate competitors include the likes of Yammer, HipChat, and Campfire. Or, to some extent, even Skype itself, and a plethora of other instant messaging services.
However, Fleep’s positioning is subtly different from many competing services in that it’s user-centric and doesn’t adhere to the walled garden mentality of an internal company messaging system. “We are solving for all collaborative end users everywhere, not just for big companies to use internally,” says Fleep co-founder and CEO Henn Ruukel, describing the app as designed to be open. Instead, it’s about “me and my conversations”, which could be with anybody, not just those in the same organisation as you. In fact, it’s the need to “work across company borders” that keeps people using email for group conversations, notes the startup, even though email was never really designed for that purpose.
At launch, the functionality and UX of Fleep is pretty paired down, though this might also be its upside. To start a new conversation, you click on the ‘create new’ button and enter the names of those who you want to see become part of the conversation. If they aren’t already using the app, however, you can enter their email address instead where they’ll be able to interface with the conversation via email in the usual old-skool way, although in this instance, their participation also gets pulled into Fleep for the benefit of those who are using the web or iOS app.
Conversations, which on the desktop version appear listed in a side panel a bit like an in-box, are threaded, can each have a title, and are fully searchable. So far, not wholly different to email, perhaps. It’s at this point that Fleep introduces a few tricks of its own, however. One of those is the ability to pin a message, in the form of an editable note, to the right hand panel of the app, making for a very lightweight way of extracting important or actionable information. In addition, any images or other attachments that are part of a conversation can be browsed separately via the files tab, so that it’s quick to find an important asset.
And that appears to be pretty much it, for now. However, I’d suggest that the team and its backers make this one to watch closely. As well as a number of ex-Skype engineers — along with Ruukel, Asko Oja, Erik Laansoo and Marko Kreen are ex-Skype — the other co-founders are Liis Peetermann (ex-Techstars) and Andres Järviste (ex-Fujitsu). Meanwhile, Fleep has raised €260,000 in seed funding from Skype’s founding engineers Jaan Tallinn and Priit Kasesalu.
Finally, on the positioning of Fleep, which is entering a very crowded space, Ruukel had this to say: “Unlike corporate products like Yammer, we’re not trying to sell the concept of Fleep to a CEO or CIO as a company-wide integration decision. We’re more interested in empowering end users around the world to work more efficiently, together, to get things done (while hopefully saving an inbox or two in the process).”
In other words, this appears to be a consumer-led marketing play, even if Fleep’s end goal is to help users get more work done.
Skydog's Home Networking Command And Control Router And Platform Ships To Backers, On Sale In October
The Skydog home network solution Kickstarter project we covered back in April, created by Xerox PARC spin-out company PowerCloud Systems, is shipping today to its over 1,000 backers on schedule, proving that not every Kickstarter project will be delayed and ultimately disappointing. In case you missed it the first time around, Skydog is a control freak’s dream device when it comes to home Wi-Fi networks.
Skydog allows parents to see exactly where their kids are browsing, and to limit and block access to specific sites, or even cut down net time altogether. It’s the same sort of service enterprises can and often do choose to run on their corporate networks, especially in data-sensitive environments. PowerCloud Systems has experience building those kinds of solutions, and saw an opportunity to bring the same level of control to the consumer sphere, via a combination of easy-to-setup hardware, and an easy to use cloud-based dashboard.
After delivering on its pre-orders, Skydog is looking to offer up its devices for general retail availability starting in October. People can pre-order from their official site now, with packages starting at $149 for a package that includes a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi router, as well as the mobile app and a 3-year subscription to Skydog’s cloud service, which allows access to home network control and reports from anywhere via the web.
A recent Kickstarter project, the Circle, aims to accomplish much the same thing as Skydog, but with an accessory that works with your existing router and without the subscription model. It’s very promising, but Skydog has shipped in time with their projections and has a proven record of being able to build this kind of solution, as well as satisfied beta testers, while Circle has very pleasing mobile app screens. Of the two, if you’re looking for way to clamp down on out-of-control Internet usage at home, Skydog and its October retail availability seems the surer bet.
This Week On The TC Europe Podcast: 4G In Europe, Twitter's New French Office And European Exits
It’s already the second episode of our weekly radio show! This is the TechCrunch Europe Podcast, wherein we European writers discuss tech news, as well as what’s happening in our startup scene.
This week, Apple acquired Swedish company AlgoTrim, ARM snatched Sensinode and Docomo bought Austrian e-commerce platform Fine Trade. What does it mean for European startups?
Join Natasha Lomas, Ingrid Lunden, Romain Dillet, Canadian-turned-Londoner Darrell Etherington, and honorary Euro John Biggs to comment on 4G in Europe, Twitter’s new office in France and the current trend when it comes to exits in Europe.
We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcast every Thursday.
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Intro music by Espanto.
IDC Lowers 2013 Tablet Forecast To 227M, As Phablets And Wearables Crowd Into The Market
The PC industry may be shaken up by the rapid encroachment of tablets into consumer and enterprise spending habits — a trend that’s seeing lighter devices like the iPad, as well as cheaper tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and more, eat into the marketshare of bigger and more expensive computers. But it’s all a matter of perspective: today IDC said that it’s actually lowering forecasts for tablet shipments this year and in the future.
“Growing competition”, IDC says, from smartphones with bigger screens (the recently-legitimized phablet) and wearables like smart watches, combined with a lack of exciting tablet product launches in Q2, are leading the analysts to says that there will be 227.4 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2013, down some 2 million from 229.3 million as previously estimated.
Yes, it’s not a huge drop, and you can argue that these are only estimates anyway. And it’s still some 57.7% higher than 2012 shipments. But IDC’s figures point some themes that are worth watching for: whether even less-expensive tablets are possibly still too expensive for what consumers are willing to pay; whether even tablets — in some regards pared-down in functionality from PCs — are still too over specced for what many consumers want and need; and the issue of how much of our wallet we will want to dedicate to these products, as more of them enter the market.
On the enterprise side, IDC notes that right now, in fact the tablet is pretty minor but is growing: It notes that tablet adoption in sectors like education and retail collectively accounted for 10% of all tablet sales in 2012, and that will only grow to 20% by 2017.
IDC also notes that it’s starting to see more developed markets already take their feet off the gas in terms of rapid adoption, with “maturing markets such as the U.S. now expected to cede share more rapidly to emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific.” It predicts that by 2017 there will be 407 million tablets shipped.
More immediately, competitive pressures will mean lower prices for tablets coming soon, IDC notes. “We expect average selling prices to continue to compress as more mainstream vendors utilize low-cost components to better compete with the whitebox tablet vendors that continue to enjoy widespread traction in the market despite typically offering lower-quality products and poorer customer experiences,” writes Tom Mainelli, research director for tablets.
In terms of regional activity, IDC points out that North America, Western Europe and Japan, which had traditionally been the leaders in tablet adoption, are already seeing some slow-down in sales, compared to other parts of the world. Today they account for 60.8% of the market, but that will drop to 49% by 2017, with emerging markets making up the remaining 51%. (Another proof point for why it’s so important for companies like Google, Facebook and others to build out there businesses in these markets.)
“Year-on-year growth is beginning to slow as the tablet market approaches early stages of maturity,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “Much of the long-term growth will be driven by countries like China where projected growth rates will be consistently higher than the worldwide average.”
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