Tuesday, August 31, 2010

A perfect complement to Google's Priority Inbox.






No matter how often we may have heard pundits profess the death of Email, the truth is that workforces increasingly interact via Email and there’s an enormous demand for clarity & insight.  There are a growing number of studies demonstrating the human cost of Email and digital devices.  For example, 30% of office workers suffer from Email stress and incessant information bombardment appears to decrease one’s ability to make memories, even one’s IQ.

This can’t be good for people, can’t be good for business or for the society at large.  Email is crucial to communication and yet there’s very little innovation outside spam reduction, i.e. Messages continue to accumulate inside Inboxes in the order they arrive without any self-aware notions of time, people, or importance.  Imagine if everyday conversations were this senseless.

Shouldn’t Emails shake, for example, as soon as a Meeting’s been cancelled at the last-minute?  What if Emails were self-aware, understood their relative importance to you, and made themselves noticed at the right time?  Emails with consciousness would reach us whether or not we were using Email in the moment, help us avoid traversing the entire city before discovering the sudden cancellation, and might even discourage the development of harmful reflexes such of compulsively scanning one’s Inbox for insight. 

Well, Google announced Priority Inbox a wonderful improvement to Gmail which offers you a clean Inbox view without having to configure complex rules yourself.  Used in conjunction with KwagaContext (and the upcoming KwagaMobile) you'll have Emails that know that they’ve been forgotten, or should appear just before your flight to Guangzhou, or that it’s an urgent matter!

Kwaga takes any ordinary Email and make it smarter for business users.

Our in-house natural language processing (NLP) technology detects urgency, requests for action, deadlines, open-issues, meeting proposals & cancellations, and contact details.  All of the semantic complexity is beautifully hidden behind interface controls that provide the business user context and actions.  For example, you’ll be able to add to your contact manager the details, automatically detected & extracted from inside the Email text, in just a single-click and avoid repetitive & tedious data-entry.

Available from the Google Apps Marketplace, KwagaContext, our cloud-based solution is available for testing in virtually a single click and is a perfect complement to Google's Priority Inbox.



This post was written by Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing at Kwaga. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at eckblad@kwaga.com.

We would love you to try out Kwaga here.

With so many emails it's hard to remember what everyone's doing. That's why we created Kwaga Context.  We bring all of the email conversations (threads) you're having with someone into one centralized place tracked automatically to help you remember which email threads (that contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings) you may have forgotten to answer and who still owes you an answer to one of your emails (that also contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings).

To find out exactly what Kwaga Context does, click here.

Follow Kwaga
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kwaga/145525111987

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Google Apps Email Webinar






Google's already signed up 2 Million businesses to Google Apps and are signing up 3000 new businesses per day including name brands such as Motorola, GE, and Procter & Gamble.

Read Google's blog & Sign-up for the Webinar on September 8th.

We completed our prototype and private alpha earlier this year and the public-beta for Google Apps Email was released mid-May.  As one of only ten companies worldwide invited by Google, we seized the opportunity to weave our core semantic technology tightly into the Gmail experience and gain hundreds of Google Apps business customers early-on.  

In virtually a single click, from the Google Apps Marketplace, the KwagaContext application becomes instantaneously available.  The business user gains insight into either the nature of a specific email or a group of conversations from a particular sender:
  • What have we talked about previously? 
  • Have I dealt with this Email already? 
  • Are there any open issues? 
  • What's this person's reputation on the social web? 
  • Have i added her details to my Google Contacts? 
Since our launch within the Google Apps Marketplace we've signed-up +600 business customers.  These customers have told us they value the ability to spot Emails they'd forgotten either because they slipped entirely through or because they weren't actionable at the moment they were first read.

The smart-pod neatly nestled inside your Google Apps Email reminds you when you’ve forgotten to deal with important Emails or vice versa, allows you to see who’s forgotten to reply to your important questions or requests.  KwagaContext, our name for this smart-pod, is a set of features which also includes the possibility to see all of your previous conversations with someone, set a reminder for an Email next week before your flight to Guangzhou, or quickly add the contact details we’ve detected inside the Email text to your Contact Manager, without the tedium of data entry normally imposed.   

We’ve chosen to focus our reach on Email users who’ve already made the choice to rely on “Email in the Cloud” as we embrace the cloud as part of our own infrastructure as well as the delivery channel for our products.  Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, our solution is available in virtually a single click.  We’re listening to our customers and refining our offer on an on-going basis, as well as starting work on new features to bridge Email with other business applications our customers are using.


This post was written by Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing at Kwaga. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at eckblad@kwaga.com.

We would love you to try out Kwaga here.

With so many emails it's hard to remember what everyone's doing. That's why we created Kwaga Context.  We bring all of the email conversations (threads) you're having with someone into one centralized place tracked automatically to help you remember which email threads (that contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings) you may have forgotten to answer and who still owes you an answer to one of your emails (that also contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings).

To find out exactly what Kwaga Context does, click here.

Follow Kwaga
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kwaga/145525111987

Friday, August 13, 2010

Update :: In Action (HD video)








This post was written by Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing at Kwaga. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at eckblad@kwaga.com.

We would love you to try out Kwaga here.

With so many emails it's hard to remember what everyone's doing. That's why we created Kwaga Context.  We bring all of the email conversations (threads) you're having with someone into one centralized place tracked automatically to help you remember which email threads (that contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings) you may have forgotten to answer and who still owes you an answer to one of your emails (that also contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings).

To find out exactly what Kwaga Context does, click here.

Follow Kwaga
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kwaga/145525111987

Kwaga Context Adds Contacts






KwagaContext Update.
 

As you may already know, Google just recently updated Contacts and revamped the Gmail user-interface.

We're happy to announce that we'll also be releasing an important update to KwagaContext starting Sunday, August 15th at 8AM GMT which automatically replaces the current version you've already enabled.  

KwagaContext update:




What's New?
We've simplified the user-interface and added a new "Add Contact" feature which allows your users to quickly add someone's personal details to Google Contacts - this feature leverages Kwaga's powerful automatic detection & extraction of contact details inside of email texts.

What should I Do?
Domain Managers please ensure that IMAP is enabled in your domain for Kwaga Context to work properly.  For the "Add Contact" feature to function you'll also need to grant KwagaContext additional access to Google Contacts using your Domain Manager console. 






NB: The people you communicate with are YOUR business.  We will NEVER send emails to your contacts.  Please read about our full commitment to your privacy in our Privacy Pledge to you.


This post was written by Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing at Kwaga. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at eckblad@kwaga.com.

We would love you to try out Kwaga here.

With so many emails it's hard to remember what everyone's doing. That's why we created Kwaga Context.  We bring all of the email conversations (threads) you're having with someone into one centralized place tracked automatically to help you remember which email threads (that contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings) you may have forgotten to answer and who still owes you an answer to one of your emails (that also contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings).

To find out exactly what Kwaga Context does, click here.

Follow Kwaga
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kwaga/145525111987

Friday, July 9, 2010

Mashing-up Salesforce.com and Google Apps.






A customer success story:
How to more effectively leverage Salesforce.com and Google Apps together.



This post is also available on Google's Blog.

Challenges
Over the past year, Qameha’s head of business development and co-founder Cedric Hauguel has been looking for a bridge between his CRM Salesforce.com and his organizational Gmail via Google Apps. 

Hauguel often uses social networks like Viadeo to identify prospects and determine if they’ve any friends in common, before initiating the first email contact from within Salesforce.com.  He then receives email replies from prospects inside Gmail and continues conversations from within Gmail.  

After weeks of exchanges with a prospect there might be hundreds of separate emails requiring different types of actions.  It’s a significant challenge remembering both what’s been discussed previously and if there’re any questions that remain open and unanswered.

Solution
Qameha chose Kwaga to bridge the gap between Google Apps as their “getting things done” productivity tool and Salesforce.com.  Hauguel enabled Kwaga in seconds from the Google Apps Marketplace and sees the full conversation history with any one of many sales prospects or existing clients.  Kwaga helps Hauguel and his team ensure that important questions from prospects are never forgotten.

The solution works in three steps:
  • Once a Google Apps Domain Manager enables Kwaga Context and individual users inside the domain have “signed-in”, Kwaga machines analyze the content of incoming email texts to detect which ones contain requests for actions,
  • Let’s say “Jenny” logs then into her Gmail and opens a new email from “Bob” she will see a list of all the conversations they’ve had in the past at the bottom of the email, as well as an indication of any important conversations that have been forgotten by either “Jenny” or by “Bob”,
  • When “Jenny” replies to any forgotten important email the service automatically detects this and no longer displays the thread as requiring her attention. 

Results
Using Kwaga Context has enabled Qameha to view of all of the conversations they’re having with prospects and determine quickly which ones require immediate attention - all inside Gmail.

Kwaga’s detection is powerful and it’s comforting that we’ll know if we’ve missed any important points before we meet with our clients,says Cedric Hauguel, co-founder & in-charge of Business Development at Qameha. 

For more information, visit http://www.Kwaga.com

This post was written by Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing at Kwaga. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions, feedback, or if you just want to say hello at eckblad@kwaga.com.

We would love you to try out Kwaga here.

With so many emails it's hard to remember what everyone's doing. That's why we created Kwaga Context.  We bring all of the email conversations (threads) you're having with someone into one centralized place tracked automatically to help you remember which email threads (that contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings) you may have forgotten to answer and who still owes you an answer to one of your emails (that also contain important stuff  like questions, tasks, meetings).

To find out exactly what Kwaga Context does, click here.

Follow Kwaga
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kwaga/145525111987