We are really excited to have been selected as one of the twenty companies in Europe to present at Plugg. We are really looking forward to presenting and meeting people from all walks of European startup life. The full list of presenting companies can be found here.
This is going to be a great conference with some of the esteemed European entrepreneurs such as Tariq Krim also speaking. The initiative of the whole conference comes from Robin Wauters and we would like to wish him all the best for the next few days as the conference day gets closer.
We will be there the evening before the conference and are looking forward to meeting you all. If you would like to plan a meeting in advance please send us a quick message or ping us via @inbox2 on Twitter or leave us a message via our Facebook Fanpage.
Delft, The Netherlands – February 23, 2010 – Inbox2, the new revolutionary email platform that allows you to plug-in all of your existing email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, AOL) or any custom IMAP/POP3 accounts, and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, Hyves) in one application, today announced the public beta launch of its free desktop client for Windows. Inbox2 collects all messages, document attachments, links and contacts from all of your existing email and social network accounts in one, convenient place; and allows you to read, reply, search and manage them without having to login to multiple accounts. Inbox2 is designed to reduce the complexity involved with the current email programs and add-ons required to fulfill the needs of today’s savvy Web2.0 professional consumers or ‘prosumers’ who typically use between five to ten different email and social network applications.
“The cost and complexity of existing email and application solutions is too high for the majority of prosumers,” states Inbox2 CEO and co-founder, Khuram Hussain. “Inbox2 provides a free, simplified desktop alternative that allows you to keep all your content from these different applications services in one place without having to login to multiple accounts. You would need to combine the capabilities of Outlook and a plug-in like Xobni in order to have even a few of the Inbox2 features.”
Inbox2 is equipped with powerful search capabilities that allow the user to search within attachments, status updates (including tweets), even when you are working offline. It also shows all your email messages and other delayed messages such as Facebook private messages and Twitter direct messages as conversation streams. The real-time streams are conveniently placed in the real-time bar at the bottom of the application where they can be viewed at anytime. You can also ‘pin’ any number of Twitter searches to this same bar to keep an eye on any topic directly from inside your email application.
Inbox2 allows the user to organize their inbox around people or content discovery, plus social and real-time channels combined with a simple, intuitive user experience.
Key features include:
The option to put either the message or the contact person as the center viewing point and centrally organize all other content or entries around it.
Simple key actions and functions involved with managing all email or messages
The ability to view other related conversations from the sender including all received and sent attachments exchanged, plus all existing profile details of the sender next to any message
Easily locate any content related to a contact
View multiple social network and email profiles of the contact in one place
Documents displayed conveniently in a separate tab for easy sorting and searching
Images displayed in a separate tab in cover flow format
Developers and other applications will be able to access the Inbox2 platform APIs to create add-ons that further enrich and expand the messaging, sharing, searching and organizing experience around email in the near future. The Inbox2 platform is ideal for developers as it has autonomous capabilities for message and content exchange that are not source dependent.
Inbox2 users can expect a number of developments in the mobile space in the coming months, in addition to even more powerful and rich features. Users will also be able to upgrade to a premium, subscription-based solution in the future that offers full synchronization of all their inbox content within the Inbox2 platforms including desktop, web and mobile.
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About Inbox2
Inbox2 is a premium connected lifestyle application that brings communication - and the people you communicate with - into a single, synchronized application that is accessible everywhere. The innovative email platform allows you to plug-in your existing email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Exchange) or any custom IMAP/POP3 accounts and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Hyves, Yammer, Twitter) in one application. Inbox2 collects all your messages, documents, links and contacts from these accounts in one convenient place and allows you to read, reply, search and be productive without having to login to multiple accounts. The Inbox2 platform is designed to reduce the complexity around the current email programs and add-ons needed to fulfill the demands of today’s savvy Web2.0 ‘prosumers’ (professional consumers). The standalone desktop version can be downloaded and used for free. The premium solution is subscription-based and offers synchronization of all your Inbox content within the Inbox2 ecosystem including web and mobile which will be added soon. Compared to Outlook-Exchange-Blackberry, the Inbox2 premium solution offers more benefits and an easy to use email experience – but at a fraction of the costs.
Founded in August 2008, Inbox2 is a privately held company based in Delft, The Netherlands. Learn more at http://www.inbox2.com.
Today we are proud to announce a couple of new features to Inbox2 Web. As always we look forward to your feedback.
Public pages
Inbox2 becomes the first email application making it possible to share anything directly from your Inbox straight to Twitter, Facebook or your public page.
If you have for instance a picture or a presentation in your mailbox, you can share it with your friends or with anyone on the web (making it findable by search engines such as Google) with just one click. Want to show somebody a picture on Skype without having to send them an email with all the extra hassle involved? Just click actions->share and Inbox2 will provide you a publicly accessible url for that picture.
All these urls will point to your public page. The url for your public page is based on your username, for example waseem.inbox2.com (replace waseem with your own username). Facebook users are recomended to go to inbox2.com while logged in to Inbox2 for Facebook to choose a username.
We have taken good case of your privacy: only the items you explicitly share are available on your public page, all other items are not visible.
A Public Page
The realtime web
So far we have limited the Inbox to email and Facebook messages and Twitter DMs and mentions, these messages are still supported in the stream; The inbox stream will remain the place for communication specifically directed at you.
Next to this we have introduced support for the realtime stream. You can view all the realtime status updates from any Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Yammer accounts that you have configured. You can also create Twitter searches and save these. As a bonus you can also do a multichannel status update.
Realtime in Inbox2
We have introduced a lot of great features in the last few months. But more importantly we are looking at the future where we will be introducing even more great stuff next to performance and stability improvements. We hope you enjoy your Inbox2 experience and provide us valuable feedback to make things even better.
We have new stuff to share with you. Namely our Facebook application has now gone live and is available for use. With the superb growth of Facebook and users increasingly spending more time in the application, Inbox2 is going to bring great value to this large community.
Inbox2 has already introduced the concept of the email activity stream several months back. Now we have implemented the stream also in Facebook, tightly integrated.
Once you perform a few small configurations steps, Facebook will notify you once you recieve a new email message, Twitter DMs & @replies or Yammer updates.
With one click you are able to view the email messages and perform all other actions which you would normally perform with your email.
This is a great convenience for Facebook users as they dont have to leave their favourite platform for checking email anymore.
You can start by using your facebook account (no Inbox2 account required if you don’t have one yet). All you need to do is the following:
1. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/emailfeed/
2. Log in if you already have an Inbox2 account.
3. Otherwise start by configuring the services that you would like to use. Inbox2 will couple these with your Facebook account so that next time you login to Facebook, all you need to do is navigate to the Inbox2 application on Facebook.
We are really excited to be nominated for the Dutch innovation awards 2009. From the 123 submissions in the category “best web concept” we have been short listed to the last five. This is great news for our users and team. Inbox2 is an innovative product which simplifies the email experience. The nomination for the Dutch innovation awards is an acknowledgement of this.
You can also help us by voting for the additional public prize. Use this link to vote. For those of you who do not speak Dutch, see the screenshot below: choose Inbox2, fill in your First & Last name and e-mail address and click on “Stem”.
The next version of the activity stream has just gone into production. Here is a quick tour of what has been added:
- There are now filters in the activity stream which allow you to view messages and attachments from several perspectives. You can filter on Read, Unread, Starred and also on the type of content such as messages, documents, images etc.
- You can update your status on Facebook, Twitter and Yammer directly from Inbox2. No more logging into Twitter just to update your status.
- If Inbox2 knows that one of your friends is also on Twitter/Facebook or Yammer, it shows the status updates from that friend directly beneath his emails in the stream.
Another major feature which has gone live is the addition of labels. It is now possible to add labels to your messages, documents and notes. From now on Inbox2 is going to be a great help in organising your Inbox because you can use labeling across all the accounts that you configure in Inbox2. Want to add labels to your Facebook or Hotmail messages? No problem.
For those of you who don’t actively work with labels we introduced starring about two weeks ago. Now you can star documents as well and easily highlight these out with the new filtering options.
We are really looking for your feedback on these features and improvements. So let us know by commenting on this blog, through Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or our feedback form in the application.
Many thanks to the people that tried Inbox2 and gave as valuable feedback to work with.
Have you ever thought about why you always have to create an email before you can add an attachment to that, even when the only thing you wanted to do was just send an attachment?
In our opinion this is a time waste, and time wasting needs to be eliminated. That is why Inbox2 now allows you to select one or more documents from your documents column and just hit the forward button.
After choosing the recipients and pressing send the documents will have been sent out without forcing you to take any extra and unnessecary steps.
So how does this work?
If the user at the receiving end is using Inbox2 he will see the documents arrive in his documents column. There will be no (empty) email message in the messages column. This is all the magic of a new and intelligent email protocol we have been cooking called ???i2mp???, which stands for Inbox2 Messaging Protocol.
If on the other hand the receiving user is using some other email application like Gmail or Outlook. He will see the familiar (but unfortunatly pointless) empty email with your documents attached to it.
The whole process of sending and sharing documents is going to be a lot easier now. No more attachments buried in messages!
We have just pushed release 0.4 of the Inbox2 web application. For us this is a major milestone and allows us to open up the beta to more users.
With the current release we have laid the foundation for the email experience of the future.Here are some of the highlights:
-Activity View – All the channels that you configure are brought together into an activity stream. The stream can be viewed from several perspectives and customized to hide/unhide people.
-Actions – Inbox2 allows you to immediately action the messages and content in the stream.In this way the stream comprises of only the messages & content which still requires your attention.
-Inbox – The Inbox contains all the messages, attachments and links extracted in column overview of Inbox2. Here easily switch channels on and off to see content from various Inboxes that you configure within Inbox2.
-Twitter DMs have now been implemented and also you will see @replies come into the stream.
-Full-redesign complete – A few weeks ago the re-design of Inbox2 was implemented we still had open items and changes from user feedback. This is now complete elevating the user experience even further.
It is now also possible to easily share with your friends on Facebook and Twitter that you are using Inbox2. In subsequent posts we will talk more about the road map for the next major releases of Inbox2.
We are really looking forward to your feedback and support.Enjoy Inbox2 and share the experience with others .
Release 48 of Inbox2 has just been pushed to production. This means we are approaching almost 50 incremental inmprovements of the web version since its first launch a few months ago. Altough each release has had countless improvements we haven’t really blogged much about these because this would result in a list of quite technical stuff such as “updated workers for better async handling of processes”, etc… you get the point.
In this release I would like to take the opportunity to point one specific improvement out since this will affect your user experience quite a bit.
In the desktop client (not yet available for the general public) we have always had synchronized scrolling. This means that every time you drag the scrollbar on the right-hand side of the applications all the columns in the inbox will scroll along synchronized.
So if you were to pull the scrollbar all the way down you see the bottom of all the 4 columns, if you scroll to the middle, you see the middle of all 4 columns, etc. In our customer tests we have found that users like this feature very much.
To achive the same effect in a web application is quite hard and simply does not provide the same experience. So instead of hacking together a solution, Dinesh (one of our talented UI engineers) came up with an alternative approach in which you as a user get to scroll each column individually with its own scrollbar instead of one scrollbar for the whole page.
The following screenshot shows this in action:
We are very curious about your thoughts on this change and whether you like it or not. You can let us know by using the feedback form inside the application or sending us an email at support@inbox2.com.
We at Inbox2 were quite excited with winning the third prize with our pitch. A number of companies presented in front of 4 member jury which consisted of:
The session was moderated by Saad Khan - CMEA Capital.
Receiving this prize was an acknowledgement of our product, team and potential. We will continue to move ahead with the same focus and energy towards our vision of improving email.
