Work Week | Where Knowledge Goes To Die
| Email | Dropbox | Workboards | Automation | APIs |
The long-anticipated email solution from Basecamp has surfaced, called Hey. It seems largely motivated to avoid tracking (which co-founders David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried call ‘spy pixels’).
Adoption is going to be somewhat difficult since they start by requiring users to take on a new email domain, in my case, stowe.boyd@hey.com. (Don’t send email to that account, I haven’t been admitted to the beta yet.) That barrier to adoption is just the beginning. See this 37-minute walkthrough to grasp the sort of reimagining that may be necessary to understand Hey.
I agree that email is in need of some rethinking, and I also agree with the premise that asynchronous long-format communication should be the basis of business communication to support deep work.
More to follow on the specifics if and when I get access.
To get into the beta, you have to send an email about email. I sent the Bill French quote:
Email is where knowledge goes to die.
…
Other people are trying new takes on email like Tempo and TwoBird. I am trying out TwoBird, and it’s promising-ish.
:::
Dropbox
Dropbox announced a number of new features:
For Home
- Dropbox Passwords: Store passwords and sync them across devices with zero-knowledge encryption
- Dropbox Vault: An additional layer of security on top of Dropbox’s existing best-of-breed security feature
For Work
- HelloSign: HelloSign eSignature embedded as a native feature within Dropbox, bringing the joint value proposition of HelloSign and Dropbox to life
- Dropbox App Center: A centralized place to discover and connect best-of-breed tools, like Slack, Zoom, and Google.
:::
Workboards
In various recent articles that discuss tools to support distributed work (working from home), the very promising category of workboards (digital whiteboards) often are omitted (see Prospectus | Workboards).
Clive Thompson wrote the very long but very good What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?, in which he focuses on video conferencing, work chat, and numerous other work technologies, but only mentions whiteboarding once.
Similarly, in Dear Remote Teams, I’d Like to Introduce You to Your New Team Members, Kathryn Maloney provides a shopping list of best-of-breed tools, and leaves out this category:
Video. Zoom, WebEx, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Bluejeans, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts
Persistent Chat Tools. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, Workplace, Google Hangouts, Webex Teams
Cloud-Based Document Storage. Box, Dropbox, Sharepoint, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams/Office 365
Real-Time Document Authoring. Google Docs, Microsoft OneNote, Evernote, Office 365, Box, Confluence
Project and Workflow Management. Notion, Trello, Basecamp, Jira, Microsoft Planner (which now also exists within Microsoft Teams), Virtual Task Board (within Service Now), Asana, Monday
:::
Automation
Enterprise automation platform JIFFY.ai raises $18 million Series A | Catherine Chu reports on a fund raise by Jiffy.ai:
JIFFY.ai, the brand name of Paanini, uses robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning and artificial intelligence to help companies automate tasks that are usually performed manually, making operations more time and cost efficient. Its platform also includes a design studio for no-code application development, and a configurable analytics dashboard to monitor automated processes.
JIFFY.ai’s largest equity shareholder is its non-profit organization, Paanini Foundation, which was created to provide job training and placement programs for people whose positions are displaced because of RPA and other automation tech.
Cool idea to combine RPA tech and a non-profit to retrain those who’d be displaced by automation.
APIs
API platform Postman delivers $150M Series C on $2B valuation | Ron Miller talked with the CEO of Postman, Abhinav Asthana:
Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder at Postman, says that what’s attracting all that dough is an end-to-end platform for building APIs. “We help developers, QA, DevOps — anybody who is in the business of building APIs — work on the same platform. They can use our tools for designing, documentation, testing and monitoring to build high-quality APIs, and they do that faster,” Asthana told TechCrunch.
The value for a single platform for all who are building on APIs is obvious.
