I interviewed Jim Patterson, CEO Cotap @Launch 2014. Its basically like WhatsApp. Its a free app & you sign up with your company email address. It automatically groups everyone who works together by company email domain. So you get added to your company directory & you be able to send your fellow workers text messages without having to swap phone numbers. Jim was @Yammer for about 4 1/2 years & they were acquired by Microsoft & this idea was his original vision. A lot of people who work in the front line like baristas, retail shop attendants are not given company equipment to communicate but most have smart phones in their pockets. So they are targeting companies who have those kinds of work forces to connect everyone in an organization. Not just knowledge workers but all workers. Yammer & Microsoft was much more desktop or app centric to much more focused on mobile. Being 22 employees its really easy for them to focus on what is the most important thing that they all should be working on. They raised $15.5m & just closed their B round.
Microsoft
Tim Draper, DFJ: Disruption & Female Startups
Video interview with Tim Draper, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. His original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and YahooMail, and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. On behalf of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tim serves on the boards of Glam, Kyte.tv, Meebo, ShareThis, SocialText, Wigix and DFJ Plug ‘N Play companies. Previous successes include: Skype (EBAY), Overture.com (YHOO), Baidu (BIDU), Parametric Technology (PMTC), Hotmail (MSFT), PLX Technologies (PLXT), Preview Travel (TVLY), Digidesign (AVID), and others. You can find Tim @ his blog The Riskmaster & Twitter @TimDraper