Shared Inbox Front Pulls $3.1 Million To Optimize Your Email Workflow
Front is the front desk of your company. Whenever someone sends an email to your contact@, jobs@ or support@ email addresses, the email will appear in your team member’s Front accounts. Then, instead of forwarding the email, creating group emails and forgetting to CC someone, it works like a modern task manager. You can assign an email to someone, comment, get notifications and more. The startup just raised $3.1 million from a great group of SaaS investors.
VC firms BOLDStart, Point Nine Capital and Caffeinated Capital invested with a long list of angel investors, such as Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Kevin Hale and Aaron Harris from Y Combinator, Kissmetrics’ Hiten Shah, Echosign’s Jason Lemkin, Slow Ventures’ Dave Morin, Elad Gil, Geoff Ralston, Jeff Bonforte and Gmail creator Paul Buchheit.
Coming out of French startup studio eFounders, Front later participated in Y Combinator’s latest batch. Given today’s list of investors, it is safe to say that the company impressed Y Combinator’s partners.
As I wrote in my initial profile of the company, Front is a feature-packed layer on top of your emails. It’s all about becoming more efficient when it comes to sending out emails, tweets and text messages.
“It’s like a multiplayer version of Gmail,” co-founder and CTO Laurent Perrin wrote. It can become a lightweight support platform if you don’t want to switch to a full-fledged Zendesk instance. The service costs $9 per user per month, unless you receive fewer than 200 messages per month.
Co-founders Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin are now based in San Francisco with the rest of the team in France. Front is seeing significant growth right now, with an average revenue growth rate between 10 and 15 percent per week for the last three months.
For companies who receive a ton of emails, I believe that Front could quickly become one of these indispensable tools like Slack and a task manager. With today’s funding round, the company will have enough capital to make sure that this actually becomes true.
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Google Launches Drive For EducationWith Unlimited Storage
Students whose school use Google Apps for Education will soon be able to store as many files in their Google Drive folders as they like.
Earlier this year, Google launched Drive for Work, its premium $10/month version of Google Drive with unlimited storage and a couple of additional enterprise features. Today, the company announced that is bringing unlimited storage to Google Apps for Education soon, too, with the launch of Drive for Education.
Individual files can measure up to 5TB, which should be more than enough for most legitimate use cases.
Just like the rest of the Google Apps for Education suite, Drive for Education is available free of charge for all non-profit educational institutions (and there are no ads either). As a Google spokesperson told me, Drive for Education will automatically become available to all Google Apps for Education users over the coming weeks. This is a slow rollout, however, and it will be a few weeks before it reaches all users.
Before the end of the year, Google will also bring free access to Google Apps Vault, its compliance solution for businesses that need to be able to archive emails and chats, for example, to educational users. Enhanced Auditing support, too, is on the road map for educational institutions, but the company didn’t say when exactly that will become available.
Until now, Google Apps for Education users “only” got 30GB of free space for their accounts. That, too, was probably enough for most students, but the price of storage is quickly trending to zero anyway, so Google likely believes that the potential cost of offering unlimited storage — students will likely find some creative uses for all of this storage space, after all — outweighs the benefits of getting these students hooked into the Google ecosystem and cloud storage services early on. Today’s Google Drive for Education users, after all, will likely want to use Drive for Work once they graduate and that starts at $10/month.
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Hipcamp Cooks Up $2M Seed To Get People Camping
In today’s connected world, with phones ringing and buzzing and emails constantly flowing in, unplugging and getting back into nature for a few days each year should be a required activity. Turns out, however, that finding a campsite based on any specific search criteria is a horrible process.
That’s where Hipcamp comes in. The company has just raised a $2 million seed round led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Slow Ventures, with participation from Sam Shank, Gregg Brockway, AngelList’s Syndicate Fund and Maiden Lane Ventures.
Hipcamp is the first comprehensive search platform for campsites, letting users search based on amenities (like picnic tables, running water, rv hookup, etc), features (caves, oceans, lakes) and activities (biking, surfing, boating).
“Camping was always a part of my life growing up,” said Hipcamp cofounder Alyssa Ravasio. “A few years ago, when I tried to plan a camping trip on my own for the first time for New Years Eve, it was absurdly difficult to find a campsite with an ocean view to watch the sunrise. Before you can search anything, you have to choose which government agency you want to camp with, then search Flickr photos and Yelp reviews to find out details. I knew I could solve this problem.”
By manually scraping publicly availably info from government and park websites, Hipcamp has created the first searchable, comprehensive database of campsites.
Right now, the service is only available in California, but the company plans on meeting expressed demand in New York and Texas soon. The new funding will obviously go toward expansion, as well as another obstacle.
Right now, the federal government has a contract with a single software company for all camping bookings across the nation. The contract is due to expire and be re-drafted by the Department of the Interior (very soon), with a push from companies like Hipcamp to include an open API in the contract, to break open the monopoly and let an ecosystem bloom around camping bookings.
“It’s our number one request from users, to be able to book directly on the website, and we’re working on it,” said Ravasio. “This is part of why we were so excited to have OATV lead the round. Tim O’Reilly has so much experience working with the government and we need that to push this piece of the business through.”
But either way, the site is fully functional as a search tool and gives complete information for more than 16k campsites, including updated availability information on a per-night basis.
If you want to learn more about Hipcamp, check out the website here.
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Parrot’s New Zik 2.0 Headphones Are Perfect For Hipsters
Parrot is better-known for its drones, but the company just announced brand new high-end headphones, the Zik 2.0. They are colorful, feature-packed and different. You can tweak sound settings for each and every different song so that they sound closer to the perfect sound for your ears. In other words, it’s a hipster’s dream.
Like its predecessor, the Zik 2.0 is a Bluetooth pair of headphones with active noise cancellation. This time, the Zik is a bit lighter and has more features.
On the right ear cup, you will be able to control your music with a swipe of a finger. Swipe right to skip to the next track, swipe up to raise the volume, etc. You can pair your phone with NFC, and plug an audio cable to get better battery life.
The rest happens on the phone. Thanks to a companion app, you can mess with the equalizer, control how much of the street noise you want to hear and create a concert hall effect, which recreates the acoustic of… a concert hall.
All of these settings can be tweaked and saved for individual songs. You could spend hours optimizing your settings for a long audio playlist.
That’s why I’m probably not the right customer for these headphones. When I’m looking for a good pair of headphones, I want something that sounds as much as possible like the original record. I don’t want to change the tone of the song to something completely different.
Listening to music is mostly a passive activity for me. I pick an album or playlist, hit play and move along to do something else. Having to fiddle with the settings all the time sounds tiring. The Zik 1 had good reviews when it comes to sounds quality, and I’m sure that this one will also perform well. But I don’t want to pay more for features I won’t use.
Yet, it’s interesting that Parrot is trying something different. When you can’t compete with well-established brands and come from a very different industry, you need to differentiate yourself. These features are the same reasons why some people still like to buy and use film cameras, vinyls and fixie bikes.
It takes time to get used to these objects and get the most out of them. It’s a tradeoff. You give up on convenience for an improved end result. Moreover, you enjoy the process of looking for this improved end result.
The Zik 2.0 will be available in November, and we will have a full review for the release. They will cost $399 — this hefty price tag is hard to swallow. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re in the market for these kind of headphones. It looks more like an experience than a product.
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Matchstick and Mozilla take on Chromecast with Firefox OS dongle, launch Kickstarter to drive down $25 price
Matchstick today announced its open-source take on the Chromecast: a $25 Firefox OS-powered HDMI dongle. The streaming Internet and media stick will be available first through Kickstarter, in the hopes to drive down the price tag.
Jack Chang, Matchstick General Manager in the US, described the device to me as “essentially an open Chromecast.” He explained that while the MSRP is $25 (Google’s Chromecast retails for $35), the Kickstarter campaign is offering a regular price of $18, and an early bird price of $12.
The startup has set a goal of raising $100,000. The full breakdown is as follows (free shipping in the US, and an additional $5 for international):
- Pledge $2 or more: This is a donation to help support the open hardware and open software platform.
- Pledge $12 or more: The first 500 units will ship at this price.
- Pledge $18 or more: This is the price for everyone else during the Kickstarter campaign.
- Pledge $24 or more: 250 developer units will be available in prototype. This includes access to all SDKs and APIs, and developer support from the Matchstick team.
- Pledge $34 or more: This is the price for two Matchsticks.
- Pledge $160 or more: 10 Matchsticks. US shipping is still free but international shipping cost $10.
- Pledge $10,000 or more: Four Matchsticks and a bunch of Matchstick swag. Oh, and a trip for you and a guest to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Monday the 5th to Thursday the 8th) including a stay at the Venetian, passes to the show, $200 daily spending money, dinner with the team, and a show one night.
The CES option will naturally occur in January. Matchstick hopes to get the device into developer hands in November, while everyone else is being promised a February release.
Because the Matchstick runs Firefox OS, Mozilla is playing a big role in its debut. It is part of the company’s plan to push the operating system onto more than just smartphones, namely tablets and TVs too.
The two companies share the same vision: the first streaming stick “free of any walled garden ecosystem.” That means the constraints of Google Play don’t exist.
That being said, Matchstick and Mozilla need developers to create apps, from video to games, for the living room. As such, there is a developer site, a full API library, as well as example sender and receiver apps.
The sender APIs let developers build Android or iOS apps (or edit their existing apps) that can discover a Matchstick device and communicate with a receiver app. Chang told me there are no plans to support Windows Phone or BlackBerry sender apps, but the architecture is there, so it’s certainly a possibility. Firefox OS sender apps, however, are coming.
Here are how sender apps will typically work:
- Scan for Matchstick: The sender app searches for Matchstick devices residing in the same Wi-Fi network as the sender device. The scanning reveals a friendly display name, model and manufacturer, icon, and the device’s IP address. Presented with a list, a user may then select a target device from all those discovered.
- Connect to Matchstick: Both TLS and NON-TLS communication between sender and receiver are supported.
- Launch Receiver App: The sender initiates a negotiation with the target device, launching a receiver app either with the URL of a HTML5 receiver app, or even a Chromecast App ID.
- Establish Message Channels: With the receiver app now launched, Matchstick establishes message channels between the sender and receiver. In addition to a media control channel common to all Matchstick and Chromecast apps, any number of application-specific channels can also be established.
Since this is Firefox OS, receiver apps are a combination of HTML5, CSS and Javascript. They are packaged into a certified “receiver container” that works only on Firefox OS. Apps will be distributed via the Matchstick app store, but developers will be free to put the apps wherever else they’d like as well.
Mozilla is also planning to host an invitation-only Firefox OS App Workshop for Matchstick in San Francisco on November 18; if you’re interested, you can sign up here. Both companies are promising additional developer events around the world.
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Barry Bonds Discovers Glassing
Urban Dictionary might be adding a new definition to the word “glassing.” Former Major League Baseball left fielder Barry Bonds sent out a tweet and an Instagram of himself sporting a pair of Google glasses yesterday while looking off into the distance and holding a cup of coffee. The message starts with “I’m glassing.”
However, Bond’s tweet is not an official endorsement for Google. It seems to actually be a shout out to his friend and UX/UI designer Anthony Phills. Phills had posted an earlier tweet of a picture of him taking a picture of Barry Bonds taking a picture (we’re getting meta here) of him via Google Glass. Phills had previously mentioned in several tweets while on a recent trip to the Bay that he was “glassing.”
Glassing is now a term starting to pop up in the twittershpere in reference to actions taken while using the Google device. There’s even a Twitter profile called @iamglassing…though it’s mostly retweets of Phills tweets with reference to the term.
Bonds is new to this whole social media thing. He sent his first tweet out this Sept 3 and joined Instagram just a week and a half ago. He seems to have the hashtag concept down, though. Bonds notably added #onlyinthebay as a possible reference to both his friend’s sudden love affair with the phenom of “glassing” and the popular appearance of such head gear in Silicon Valley.
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