Recently, startup Cc: Betty, a nifty service that organized and managed group email threads, decided to rebrand and relaunch its service. The new product, Threadbox, was going to be streamlined and tweaked to appeal to workspace users.
Today, Threadbox is officially launching in private beta, as a more collaborative and user-friendly service. Essentially, the site aims to combine email, IM, and collaboration tools into one platform. Instead of focusing on email like Cc:Betty, Threadbox centers around collaboration in the workplace. The service organizes and logs every type of communications with clients, allows users to share documents and images, and record decisions and feedback. The new service also has the ability to serve as a project management tool, allowing users to share and track requirements and specs, then track and follow team members from start to finish.
Additionally, Threadbox aims to serve as a communications tool between employees, with the ability to gather comments, opinions, exchange feedback, share documents and media on the same page. You can add maps, files start conference calls from within the platform. And as the service’s name implies, all communications are threaded and organized according to client and subject. Threadbox still incorporates elements of Cc:Betty’s technology. You can received notifications of thread activity and reply to threads directly from your email client. It’s unclear if the service will integrate with social networks, like Twitter and Facebook.
The basic Threadbox service is free but the startup offers a premium product for $19.95 per year. Cc: Betty raised $500,000 in December of last year, and has $2 million in total funding now.
With Threadbox the startup is clearly making a play towards the work user; I’m doubt the average consumer will find the service as appealing as Cc:Betty was for personal use. But collaboration is the key word in enterprise-focused products at the moment, so Threadbox will certainly catch the wave of small to medium sized businesses which are looking to upgrade their communication platforms. However, this is a crowded space with many worthy players so the competition, which includes Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Socialtext, WizeHive, and many more products, will be tough.
Here’s a video from Threadbox that goes into more detail about the new service:
Is there really a difference between ThreadBox and Google Wave ?
Both say they’re about collaboration when they’re actually about conversation and keeping people distracted from doing actual work.
@Bogdan I echo your comments.
As to realtime collabration for business, this is a good platform which tailored for business to check out: http://bit.ly/cYAyUw
The difference is that Threadbox looks useful, and Google Wave is simply not.
Demo video on threadbox.com site “not found.” Lame. Service sounded like it might have been interesting like many others…not too sure now after earning a FAIL! on being able to have a working video on their site – doesn’t inspire confidence and certainly a lost opportunity to try and set itself apart from others flooding into this market space.
Next!
it wasn’t planned to be viewed until 5pm pst today, so yea, lots of shit on the site isn’t ready. These guys ran early. If you’re inclined, come back at 5pm..
Lol!! Video still isn’t working
for those that would like to see the video, meantime just go here http://bit.ly/Threadbox-Demo
or, you can just watch the one embedded in the TC post.
Feedback:
* Eliminate distraction: don’t blast music when you want viewers of your product/service’s video to focus on your product and what it may do for them.
I wonder if this is helpful in gaining traffic?
The Padrino
http://www.thepadrino.com
What about Presently.com? ;-)
I’m not sure what value this really presents over just replying all to a group via email and sorting by subject.
Brian, this keeps everyone in the group on the same page. By everyone looking at the same thing, and interacting in a more rich basis, there’s a productivity win for all involved. Try it if you get a chance, with some colleagues.
btw, if any TC readers want an invite, we’re handing a few hundred out with invite code “crunchbox”, starting in 15 minutes
yay
http://www.confessionhub.com
Zenbe’s been doing this with their Shareflow product for the past year or so as well. Came out before Wave, even.
nice article……i like it