Posted by David Towert on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 @ 02:09 AM
As the DOW gave up almost 7% in a single day today, I began wondering what the implications of a global financial melt-down would mean to small businesses like ours. We solve real email management problems for professionals and businesses, not consumers. Does that shield us from tightening purse strings or make things worse?
The optimist in me says that because we improve productivity at a very low cost, our products and services will be even more in demand than before. If the effects of the economic climate lead to higher unemployment and mass layoffs, I imagine those fighting to keep their jobs will want to stand out from others. One way to do that is to be more productive, make fewer mistakes, and produce higher quality work by leveraging other people's knowledge. Taglocity 2.0 is a tool that provides these benefits to individuals.
But this goes beyond individuals. Corporations will need to compete even more fiercely in the changing global landscape. We developed Taglocity Groups to improve overall corporate performance, not just by improving the productivity of one person and their inbox at a time, but by improving the productivity of entire teams and departments. Here is a rough idea of how it works: www.taglocity.com/discovermore.html
But the pessimist in me says go easy everybody, be conservative, and expect the worst because we're in uncharted territory. Who knows?
As for Taglocity, we're conservative by nature. Our business plan is not based on hype and getting millions of 'eyeballs' but rather on provding real solutions to real pain at a very reasonable cost. Fortunately we have 'staying power' and can afford to ride this out for a while.
In the meantime, let's all work hard together to get through these uncertain times as quickly as we can!
Dave Towert
Posted by David Towert on Mon, Sep 22, 2008 @ 03:27 AM
A few years ago, David Ing, our CTO and co-founder, came to the same conclusion as many others at the time: email, the killer productivity application of the 90s, was breaking down.
Or as he put it, "Email is basically broken. Or rather it is at the stage where its bad habits are institutionalized and accepted as the norm." He predicted that productivity gains would be eroded to the point where people would want to throw it out.
Sure enough, wikis, blogs, and other intranet solutions popped up in attempts to solve the burgeoning email overload problem. These solutions built on the premise that people use email for purposes it wasn't designed for, so why not offload the work onto other purposefully designed systems?
Well as it turns out, people love email too much, or it's simply too convenient and easy to use for collaboration and information sharing. So after witnessing mixed results, David came up with a brilliant idea: instead of making people leave email, rather extend it to support the way people like to work!
Why not extend it to easily allow people to place information in a fixed location in context? Why not let people browse and subscribe to this information? Why should email be a ‘push' only system? Why not extend it to support ‘pull' like wikis and blogs?
In other words, give people the benefits of wikis and blogs but do it with their email program of choice in a non-disruptive way. Give people less email to process but access to more information on-demand, on their terms.
And so Taglocity 2.0 was conceived! Now two very busy years later, Taglocity is nearing the end of a very successful six month beta program. And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to all of our beta users for their encouragement and feedback over the last 6 months - thank you very much!
We are very excited about how David's vision has been realized in terms of the solution. Stay tuned for our official launch where we look forward to helping solve email overload and improve knowledge sharing for as many individuals and businesses as we possibly can.
We hope to use this new blog to start a useful dialog about saving email and getting people to love it all over again. Please let us know your thoughts!
David Towert
President & CEO