When you simply state the idea of having one place where all forms of contact – email,Facebook, Twitter, text and others – end up in one place for reading and responding to, it soundsan eminently sensible thing to do.
But there’s a pretty good reason nobody’s managed to pull this off, and all the more reasonthat NZ-originated, globally-created Unified Inbox is ever so slowly bringing its product to market.
“It’s an incredibly hard thing to do,” says UiB founder and CEO Toby Ruckert, whoseinternational team first set out four years ago to create such a beast.
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“There’s a huge amount of functionality and product layers that has tobe built in,” especially so that different channels can be opened and responded to in otherchannels. Think answering a Facebook query while within a mobile phone email application forexample.
“At this stage we’ve written 1.6 million lines of code, which in total are equivalent to 25man years of development,” Ruckert says.
Dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s of UiB is one reason the privately fundedventure has kept its head down, only late last year releasing a free beta version for self-selectingpotential and real users to help iron out bugs.
That soft launch has been extremely useful he says, and as well as soon looking for publicfunding through the issue of convertible notes (prior to seeking Series A funding within the nextyear), UiB will be launched as a paid for item in the next couple of months.
UiB also has more than 2000 signed up customers from 72 countries, and has been deep indiscussions with channel partners such as ISP’s (internet service providers), telcos, shoppingcart/e-commerce service providers and others about integrating it into their systems.
Unified Inbox comes at a time where the ‘pain’ of reading and responding to all the differentforms of communications available to people is reaching ever higher proportions Ruckert says.
He quotes a study showing interruptions from communications costs U.S.A productivity $900 billiona year.
“If someone is working and thinking productively, and they’re interrupted to check say anemail, it takes them 10 minutes to get back to the same level, the same train of thought,” hesays.
“Unified Inbox can enable its user to have no one, or five only say, be able tointerrupt.”
UiB’s most valuable feature in a sense is its ability to address ‘overload’, and usersbeing able to “communicate in their own time whenever they feel ready for it.”
The start of UiB’s global charge will also be spearheaded when Ruckert speaks at June
The company’s reputational stock also received a recent boost with the announcement that it hadachieved #11 in the USA Business Insider 2012 Startup Competition. Over 200 companies put theirnames up for consideration in this annual event.
After years of lying low and writing those 1.6m lines of code, Ruckert and UiB can see somelight, and hopefully much revenue, at the end of the tunnel.
At a time where