Archive for the ‘Email’ Category

How much does this stuff actually help?

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

We've been so focused on some big new initiatives at ClearContext the past few months that my blogging pace has really taken a huge hit.  I have a big backlog of topics to cover, but besides a quick Thanksgiving trip have no other travel planned for a while, so hopefully will do a better job at staying on top of them over the next few weeks.  I can't believe I still haven't blogged about exciting progress being made at IORG or about various excellent presentations and discussions from Defrag.  Soon, soon, I promise!

The first topic I want to touch on is something that actually came up a few times at Defrag.  There are so many products and companies trying to tackle issues around information overload, with new companies popping up seemingly every day – especially in the email space.  However, few of these companies actually address the issue of how much their products actually help people with the real problems they face with email.  Instead, the focus is often just on cool new features and soft benefits that almost always sound good, but often don't address the huge pain that people and companies are facing with levels of email that they simply can't keep up with.

Few companies have done a good job at identifying the real problems, providing good measurement and metrics to users, and using that information to actually help users with their problems.  I'll address those three areas briefly, but they are definitely worth going into more depth in future posts.

The problems people face with email today

This is the area that is easiest to understand, and most companies in the space focus on a similar/overlapping set of issues people face, including things like:

Getting more email than they can handle
Spending too much time dealing with email
Being unable to respond to email in a timely manner
Can't find information they need in email

There are many more issues, but you get the idea.

Measurement and metrics

Here is where things start to get shakier.  Outside of some research experiements and internal corporate projects, most people and companies don't have a good understanding of the numbers that they are dealing with.  As awareness of email and information overload problems grows, questions like these are starting to get more focus:

How many emails are people getting?
How quickly are they responding?
How many responses are they able to send?
How behind are they getting with emails piling up in their inbox?

Of course, those are just a few examples of basic metrics.

How (and how much) do products help and what should people do?

OK, so we do some measurements, and guess what – people get too many emails, get way behind on responding, and can't keep stuff organized.  So now what?   This is where things get most challenging.

To really solve the biggest problems people face dealing with information, we need to help people understand which of those measurements are the key sources of their problems and show them how they can most effectively use our products and solutions to improve their performance.  And if done right, provide them a feedback loop that actually shows them measureable results illustrating their improvement over time. 

The better an understanding all of us in this industry have about the biggest problems, key measurements, and most effective solutions, the better we'll be able to serve our customers.  So over the next few weeks I'm going to spend some time asking others involved in this area what they see as the most important points in those areas and sharing their input both here and with IORG members.

Pete Warden on defining the future of email

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I recently wrote a post about the newest batch of email-related startups. Pete Warden has compiled a list of ten tools defining the future of email.  It's a worthwhile roundup to check out.

Efficiency

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

A little tour around the blog world today…

Gloom and Doom – or Capital Efficency writes Brad Feld about what most everyone in the startup world is writing about these days – bracing for tough economic times.  He references an excellent post Capital Efficiency Finds Its Moment by Fred Wilson that talks about doing a lot while staying lean and mean.

I’ll refrain from linking to the countless blog posts talking about how in times of economic turmoil companies should focus on reducing expenses, having necessary capital in place, and growing revenues.  Thanks for that newsflash, everyone!

Instead I’ll point you to Howard Lindzon’s great post Too Small To Fail. He applies that mantra to finance and startups, but I really think that can apply to so many people’s situation, whether as an individual, a startup company, or a team/group in a bigger company.  While huge macro-level stuff is going on around us, almost all of us can find ways to succeed in our little corner of the world if we are smart and nimble. 

Which brings me to Scoble’s post on The Enterprise Email Crisis.  Of course this is a major pain point!  Most of us are receiving 100 or more emails every day – and that’s after all the obvious spam is filtered out.  That’s hours a day of reading, processing, and responding to email.  As individuals and companies find themselves needing to do more with less, time and efficiency become even more critical. 

Instead of checking where the Dow is every five minutes seconds, I’m doing as much as possible to take advantage of the critical need for people to work more efficiently, especially when it comes to communication, collaboration, and email.  We’ve been working on measurable, tangible ways to help people be more productive with email at ClearContext for a while and have been looking even further into the future of solutions with colleagues at the Information Overload Research Group.  And oh yeah, discussing these problems with a bunch of smart people at Defrag (dh1 for reg discount if you decide to go!). A lot of things are going to slow down in these times, but innovation shouldn’t be one of them.

Another year, another batch of email companies

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I’ve written a bunch in the past about email innovation and what’s coming (or needs to come) next.  Problems and opportunities around email have received a lot of attention over the past year, and along with that attention has come a new crop of startups with their own take on things.  Here are a few that have recently been announced:

Gist "[connects] your inbox to the web" allowing you to "get business-critical information about key people and companies."  They sound like a more ambitious version of Xobni – both companies pull together email and other information about each of your contacts.  If Gist is successful in combining email search with web search to provide one-stop shopping for information on people and companies, it will prove to be a very useful tool.

OtherInbox is "a free email account that automatically organizes newsletters, social
networking updates, coupons and receipts from online purchases."  We’ve focused on this area a bit with ClearContext Notification Managers with a focus on "bacn" type email.  What OtherInbox really reminds me of, though, is a very focused implementation of whitelist and challenge/response systems like Boxbe and BlueBottle.  However, by focusing on one very narrow problem area, OtherInbox is able to use a very simple organizational approach. Their big challenge is obvious – getting people to sign up for yet another email account when most people have at least one webmail account in addition to a work account, while webmail providers continue to improve their spam/bacn management capabilities.

PostBox is trying something very ambitious – a whole new email client.  I’m sure PostBox has a lot more planned, but right now it seems a little underwhelming from the preview screenshots and descriptions.  Not a whole lot we haven’t seen already from existing clients and plugins.  A key feature of theirs is an attachment viewer that looks similar to what Xoopit does for GMail and we do in the ClearContext Attachment Explorer.  They also talk about web integration and organization around topics, things that Zenbe is trying to tackle with a new webmail platform.

So, a lot of evolutionary here, and not so much revolutionary.  Of this new batch of companies, I’m probably most interested in seeing what Gist does.  If they can succesfully create an automated filtrbox type service driven from my email, it’s definitely something that will be quite useful to me.

For discussion on more revolutionary approaches, come join us at the Fixing Foundational Information Channels session at Defrag (code dh1 gets you a reg discount btw).  And check out ClearContext later this week for our own take on where email is headed!

Email marketing and next-generation email apps

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

CRN reported that a recent Marshal poll showed 29% of their sample bought something from a spam email.  I’m skeptical of that number, but whatever, spam and more respectable direct email marketing aren’t going away anytime soon. 

The DMA Email Marketing Blog recently posted pondering the impact artificial intelligence and related technologies in email will have on e-mail marketing.  They reference two Outlook plugins that are giving users new ways to look at their email, Xobni and my company, ClearContext.

I think that there’s a big opportunity for next-generation email apps to not only help get rid of unwanted email marketing, but to also help highlight email marketing messages that are relevant and wanted.  ClearContext is not the only one interested in email prioritization, though we have some of the deepest experience and best understanding in the marketplace of how email prioritization impacts users in their day-to-day usage of email.  Most people don’t use prioritization as an absolute guide to how they process email, but instead as an indicator for classes and groups of emails that they want to initally focus their attention on and which ones to completely ignore.  In that first phase of email triage, smart technology can learn which classes of marketing email people actually care about.

Another advancement in email is understanding the nature of different types of emails and putting them in the appropriate context.  The inbox is one big  bucket where all email is handled the same way.  But many people don’t want to deal with marketing emails while they are focused on getting their work done.  On the other hand, they very well might want to see what discounts they have been sent from stores they frequent before doing some shopping online or heading to the mall.  That’s where features like our Notification Managers can be used to automatically send entire classes of email like retail marketing messages into a specific area, perhaps categorized by retailer. Instead of frustrating people and getting deleted or unsubscribed from, these messages can be put in a context where people can get real value from them at the appropriate time.

A couple of commenters write that email marketers can succeed by "delivering useful, targeted content and offers on a regular basis" and that "relevance will dictate if an email is read or not."  I think those comments are right on the money.  The right next-generation email technology might banish unwanted direct marketing emails, but if done right, it will also identify and help people utilize the marketing emails that are actually relevant and valuable to them.

IORG IORG IORG – conference around the corner!

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Wow.  What a month.  I can’t believe it has been almost a month since my last blog post.  Sorry about that, but between ClearContext and IORG (with a few tennis matches thrown in, some epic Wimbledon to watch, and the fourth of July!) I’ve been too swamped to even think about it.

But there’s so much to write about.  Most importantly, we’re almost ready for the IORG Conference on Tuesday, July 15.  I’m very excited about the group we have attending the conference.  The group includes some of the top minds in academic and corporate research of information overload, a lot of software execs on the leading edge of technology to combat information overload, and a number of analysts, authors, and businesspeople who are focused on studying, analyzing, and addressing the challenges of information overload faced by both individuals and corporations.

We’ll have a lot of Information Overload Research Group news in the next week or two that I can’t wait to share with you.  A lot of great people and companies are rallying around IORG – there’s no question that there’s an intense need for a group like this.  As we continue to expand our membership, we’ll be well positioned to facilitate the types of collaborations between university researchers, corporate researchers, software and other solution providers, and end-users that will lead to solutions that really work.  I can’t wait to get moving.

And the coverage about IORG continues to be great.  Here are a couple of recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal by Gordon Crovitz and USA Today Tech Blog by Jon Swartz.  Hope to meet some of you on Tuesday in New York!

Information Overload Research Group news wrapup

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Wow.  We publicly launched the Information Overload Research Group yesterday, thanks to Matt Richtel’s NYC article Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast (which was originally titled Creators of E-Mail Monster Now Try to Tame It – not sure which one I like better).  The article is currently at the top of the NYT most-emailed tech stories list, high on Techmeme, and is being blogged about all over the place.  It’s really great to see this much interest and excitement about information overload and IORG.  A lot of smart folks have given their perspective on information overload and Matt’s story.  Here’s a wrapup of a number of the blog posts:

Merlin Mann asks the question  “What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?” and provides his perspective on using email as a tool.

Beth Kanter suggests that we "Turn Off the Damn Email Software and Get Some Work Done (Or go for a walk)!" and shares a number of tips and links to numerous articles and resources on information overload.

Tony Wright worries that "the increasingly personalized infoporn delivered to us through a
broadening array of channels (like RSS, alerts, Twitter, Digg, Email,
IM, Social Networks and more) is a looming disaster."

Paul Mooney points to "Meetings about meetings, emails about phone calls, efficiency tools and
methodologies that nobody can figure out, it’s no wonder burnout is so
prevalent." as a root cause.

Henry Blodget keys in on the claim that "American workers waste $650 billion a year checking email too often."

TJ Kirchner acknowledges the problem, but cautions that companies shouldn’t "use this to
implement really stupid rules and codes of conduct that will only
reduce company moral[e]."

There were also some very good alternate perspectives/counterpoints to the article:

Stowe Boyd posts a lengthy and very insightful rebuttal/counterpoint to a number of the points raised in the NYT piece and much of the conventional wisdom around information overload. "The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the
social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which
entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on
productivity is real, but it’s not a cost: it’s an investment; and the
juice is worth the squeeze."  I think Stowe brings up a lot of very interesting and valid points that remind us that there are many moving parts in play here and the best solutions are not necessarily the most obvious ones.

Mark Evans
asks "Is Digital Productivity Dead?" and "is today’s knowledge worker
unproductive or do knowledge workers operate differently?"

And on a related note:

Maggie Jackson, the author of Distracted and a featured speaker at the IORG Conference, writes in BusinessWeek about distractions and interruptions.

Nathan Zeldes shares his observations and provides a detailed update of results from the "Quiet Time" and "No Email Day" experiments at Intel.

That should be plenty to overload you with information about information overload!

Information Overload Research Group launches

Friday, June 13th, 2008

About a year and a half ago, I participated in a workshop with about 20 other people focused on the problem of information overload.  This group included academics researching the impact and novel solutions to the problem, researchers from huge companies like Microsoft, Google, Intel, and IBM, analysts in the space, and a couple of people like me from companies working on information overload solutions.

We had a lot of great discussions, many of which really just got kicked off at the workshop.  A number of us thought that it would be worthwhile to continue these discussions across this cross-section of people doing cutting-edge work in this field.  We formed a steering committee and decided to build on the workshop and create a nonprofit organization focused on the huge and growing problem of information overload.

It took a lot of work, but after a year of meetings, discussions, and debates with an incredibly knowledgeable group of colleagues in this field, we’re now ready to officially launch the organization.  I’m really excited about the opportunities ahead of us.  Matt Richtel just wrote a great article in the New York Times that talks about the Information Overload Research Group
, some of the things we hope to accomplish, and why we think it’s so important.  A couple of my fellow IORG board members, Nathan Zeldes and Jonathan Spira, are featured prominently in the article.

Our first annual conference is going to be held in New York on July 15th.  The final agenda is still shaping up, but we already have a number of great speakers and panelists lined up, including Maggie Jackson, the author of the new book Distracted.

I’ll be writing quite a bit more both here and on the Information Overload Research Group blog over the coming weeks.  A big thanks to all of my friends at IORG who have helped make this happen.  It has been a real pleasure working with them, and I’m very excited about the future of this important organization.

The different levels of beta testers

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

We recently launched the beta program for ClearContext Personal.  I was planning to have my next blog posts here be about our product planning process and how we put together the product plans for our ClearContext Personal and Pro products, and the things we learned by first focusing on the needs of very sophisticated email power users with an incredible pain point of dealing with huge volumes of important and time-critical email.  I’ll get to those soon, but first I wanted to make some observations about our recent beta push.

When we first started ClearContext, our initial beta testers were friends and colleagues.  These people all provide valuable input, but no matter how  much you push them, they are biased towards you and often give you the benefit of the doubt – and are typically pretty forgiving in terms of the finer points of product functionality and user experience.  We still use these people as the first wave of people to give us friendly input on new stuff we are working on, but we recognize that it’s just that – friendly input.

As we’ve developed a base of customers, one big benefit is that we’ve grown an active beta group of users eager to try out new technology while it is still pretty early in development and provide feedback.  These users are quite vocal about what they want to see in the product and very active and important to us when it comes to defining the final feature set we ship with and the details of how certain features work.  Not to mention helping us find that final round of bugs to fix.  These users have been the core of our beta testing process over the past few releases and are a key part of our release process.

We utilized those two groups in testing early versions of our Personal product, including helping us make sure the product was as easy to install and use as possible.  They provided a lot of really good feedback and helped us release a great product that is getting lots of good reviews

When we opened up the beta program to a wider audience, though, we now had a new type of beta tester in the mix.  Many of these beta testers had never heard of ClearContext or anything like it and hadn’t seen any videos or tutorials on the website before installing the app.  Things like ranking your contacts based on how important they are, prioritizing and color-coding incoming email, and providing context around email such as related messages, contacts, and attachments – these were all brand new concepts to them.  We received a lot of useful feedback that was very different from any of the prior feedback when we presented the app to a large group of users who had never seen anything like this before.  One of the biggest things we learned from this process was that even for a lot of very tech-savvy email users, for them to take full advantage of some of the brand new concepts we’re introducing, they could benefit a lot from more guided setup and explanation.  So, we’re adding a lot more of that type of functionality (and a lot more of their feedback) into the product to make it easier for users to understand how best to take advantage of ClearContext – so we can help make their email experience better and reduce their stress and frustration with email.

It’s really amazing that the web provides the ability to get so much great input from such a wide range of users interested in and excited about new technology.  But that input is only really valuable if you understand the perspective of your different beta groups and really listen (and act on!) to what they are telling you.  We’re very thankful to everyone who has helped us in this process and hopefully other companies understand how valuable these people are as well, and how important it is to take full advantage of that valuable resource. 

Product launches are tiring!

Monday, May 19th, 2008

OK, I just wrote a long post over on the ClearContext company blog.  We just launched a new product that lets us serve a much broader market than we’ve been dealing with so far.  Over the next few posts here I’ll be talking about why we chose to work with the power users first in developing our products, how we put together the product plan for ClearContext Personal, and what the launch involved.  I’m exhausted and need sleep soon, though.  In the meantime, check out what TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm have to say about the launch!