MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, A Next-Generation Email Platform
Founded by Dropbox and MIT alums, a new startup called Inbox is launching out of stealth today, hoping to power the next generation of email applications. Similar to the newly launched Gmail API, Inbox offers a more modern way to build apps that access end users’ inboxes. But instead of being limited to Gmail, it also works with Yahoo, Microsoft Exchange and others, the company says.
In addition, jabs the company’s website, “Inbox is an email company. Google is an advertising company. This product is our focus, and will not be ‘discontinued’ unexpectedly.”Burn!
Google made waves with the announcement of a new “Gmail API” at its Google I/O developer conference earlier this month, which offers developers who build email applications new tools to access messages, threads, labels and other parts of the Gmail inbox without requiring full inbox access. The idea is to reduce the reliance on older protocols, like IMAP, when apps don’t have to work as an email client, but are rather focusing on a specific feature set – like snoozing messages, or only sending emails on behalf of an end user, for example.
Similarly, the idea with Inbox is to offer an upgrade of sorts from the “archaic protocols and formats” that developers would otherwise have to learn today in order to work with email. However, it supports a wider range of developers, from those who only need a simple feature to those who want to build full-fledged email clients for end users.
The company was co-founded by MIT alums Michael Grinich, previously an engineer at Dropbox and designer Nest, and Christine Spang, an early Linux kernel engineer at Ksplice (acquired by Oracle). The core team at Inbox also includes several other MIT alums, plus those with experience from Google and Firebase, as well as two graduates from the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at MIT CSAIL, which spun out Meraki (acquired by Cisco).
“I actually wrote my thesis at MIT on email tools, and discovered how difficult it was to add features to email apps,” explains Grinich of how Inbox came to be. “One big issue was the underlying plumbing – IMAP, MIME, character encodings, etc. – which is what Inbox fixes for developers.”
But the larger goal with Inbox is not just to offer a suite of developer tools, but to create a new email standard. That means, Grinich says, the company has to provide the fundamental infrastructure as an open source package.
“The sync engine is available for free on GitHub, and we welcome discussion and pull requests,” he says. Currently the open source sync engine works with Gmail and Yahoo mail, with plans to expand soon to all IMAP providers. Meanwhile, enterprise users on Microsoft Exchange can request access to the Inbox Developer program, which supports ActiveSync, and is now in private beta.
There are a handful of apps on Inbox already, including a few demos on GitHub using the Inbox SDKs (JavaScript or iOS). With the Inbox API, developers can access REST endpoints for retrieving, modifying and sending email, as well as building custom filters, accessing attachments, creating drafts and more. Grinich also points out that developers can build using the Inbox APIs for free without sending email data to a third-party.
Today, developers can download the Inbox engine, sync an account, and begin building on top of the platform in a local development environment. In the future, however, the company will release a hosted version of Inbox that will allow developers to create applications without needing to also scale their own infrastructures.
San Francisco-based Inbox is backed by Fuel Capital, SV Angel, CrunchFund (disclosure: TechCrunch’s founder also founded CrunchFund), Data Collective, Betaworks, and others, but funding details are not disclosed.
Source: TechCrunch
Will Facebook Go Out With A Bang?
I’ve seen the future of Facebook, and it is… Yahoo!
Between 1994–2000, Yahoo! dominated the consumer Internet industry and much of the world’s attention. The company’s exclamation mark (sometimes called a “bang”) cast a long, purple-hued shadow across the globe, as users flocked to its ever-expanding array of services, and online and offline companies of all sizes threw money at it (almost literally) to gain prominent visibility among its massive, segmentable audience. Yahoo!’s page views rocketed; revenue rocketed; profits rocketed; stock price rocketed; market capitalization rocketed. Yahoo!, it seemed, could do no wrong.
Then, the world changed. Radically.
What Happened To Yahoo!
Consumer behavior shifted, with individuals the world over flirting with, and then devoting themselves to, myriad other online services. The business cycle changed and companies chose/were forced to reduce or eliminate their online advertising budgets. Then, when Internet advertising budgets returned a few years later, business behavior adjusted again, with marketers broadly diversifying their spend across the Web (following those same migrating users). And, perhaps most significantly and most representative of both of the previous issues, Google emerged, presenting consumers with a slate of invaluable (and competitive) services and companies with a nearly perfect mechanism/venue through which to market their offerings.
Needless-to-say, the 2000–2013 period has not been nearly so kind to the purple giant-of-yesterday — not to its metrics, its business, its stock or its market capitalization.
Throughout its rollercoaster-of-a-life, however, Yahoo! has remained shockingly static at its core, with a (still) massive, segmentable audience consuming an enormous volume of free content and services, surrounded by advertisements of all shapes and sizes. That those content/service offerings now include Fantasy Football and photos from Flickr, rather than, say, news and NASDAQ quotes, is nice, but irrelevant, as is the fact that the company now offers rich media and video ads, as opposed to just sponsorships and banners.
Those are incremental changes to the story — variations on the theme; because, the fact of the matter is that — apart from its early days of minimal competition and “easy money” — Yahoo! has struggled mightily to engage its users in fundamentally new ways; unlock the true value of its global user base for its advertising clients; and, bring to market any lasting innovation that even hints at shaking the status quo all over again.
In not so subtle ways, this reminds me of Facebook. A lot.
What Facebook Is Doing
Like Yahoo! in its early phase, Facebook hit the ball out of the park from the outset, and, it seems, hasn’t yet stopped running the bases. From the ivy covered confines of Harvard University, Zuckerberg & Co. now attracts more than one billion users to its site globally; has enabled hundreds of billions of friend connections; sees hundreds of millions of photos uploaded daily; and, generates several billion dollars of revenue annually. Not bad for its first nine years, right?
And yet, since its astounding opening act, Facebook has bestowed upon us:
- Gifting – blah.
- News Feed algorithm changes – yawn.
- Suggested Posts – meh.
- Messaging – join the club.
- Sponsored Stories – ummm.
- Graph Search – niche.
- Poking (again) – ha.
- Timeline – zzzzz.
- News Feed design changes – argh.
What’s next, a new color scheme? A new font?
What Could Happen To Facebook
Suffice it to say, the company is not exactly setting the world on fire with these efforts; more importantly, these are not (individually or collectively) doing much (if anything) to materially enhance Facebook’s relationship with its users; substantively increase the level of dependency felt by its advertising clients; and/or fundamentally alter the trajectory of its franchise or business. Said differently, where is Facebook’s second act, like Android (acquired, transformed and massively scaled by Google) or iPad? Where is its money-printing AdWords product? Where is its PayPal (acquired, and massively scaled by eBay)? Where its its quantum leap forward? Where is its disruptive force?
None of this is to suggest that Facebook has, in any way, “failed;” nor is it meant to take anything away from the extraordinary space that Facebook has carved out for itself in our collective universe. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that Facebook is necessarily destined to follow in the path of Yahoo! (after all, it would be damned near impossible to repeat all of those mistakes).
That said, it is, hopefully, a wake-up call, because — at least to this observer — the company and its business seem far too focused on tweaking the edges of its past creation(s) instead of changing the world all over again for both its users and advertisers. And that, as history might suggest, is a very risky path to enduring success on the Web.
Beware the “!,” Facebook. Beware the “!”!
Source: ReadWrite
- Published in Blog, Social Media