The Obindo Blog

Capture and transform the rich, unstructured data in your organization.

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New Stuff Cooking...

We’ve been working lately on some really cool stuff -- like when-you-hit-88-miles-per-hour-the-flux-capacitor-kicks-in-cool -- but we’re not quite ready to talk about all that yet. But watch this space! 

Speaking of innovation, we were happy to discover that while you may not be able to buy a new DeLorean today (which I guess makes sense, because if you had one you probably wouldn’t keep it in the present, right?) -- you can still buy luggage from them. Um, okay. 

More to come in the weeks ahead! 

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Help Your Employees Thrive by Giving them Less

Obindo CEO Joe Kleinschmidt wrote an article over on CMSWire today describing how employees often want fewer bells and whistles, not more. 

"Most employees don’t want yet another tool,” Joe writes, “they just want a way to find the information they need so they can get their work done quickly.” 

If you’re interested in having a read, you can check it out here. 

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Email is Eight Platforms in One

Email is overwhelming. On average, it consumes between two and three hours’ of every businessperson’s day. 

But why does it feel like it’s ever-present -- and ever-growing? Is it really just because other people can’t help themselves from sending you yet one more message? 

Maybe. But there is something more fundamental at work here, too. Email can be overwhelming because we ask it to do a lot -- and, while it’s not the best at any of those roles, it does each of them reasonably well. And so we keep using it. 

But what are those roles? Let’s break it down: 

Let’s read this diagram from the bottom-up, and provide just a little bit more detail about each role: 

Email is a storage platform. We use email to store files, documents, presentations, photos, you name-it. Sure, we should store those files into Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sharepoint -- but how often do files remain in your inbox? 

Email is an integration platform. When your web designer creates a new customer form on your website, what’s the first thing they do? Save that data into your underlying CRM system? Most likely not. Chances are, it sends out an email -- serving as a way to “integrate” your website into other areas of your business through notifications. 

Email is a scheduling platform. "Hey, can you meet for coffee at 3pm on Friday? No? How about Tuesday at 10?” 

Email is a productivity and task management platform. Pop-quiz: if you need your co-worker to complete something for you by this afternoon, do you (a) assign a task through your company task management system, or (b) send them a quick email asking them about its status? 

Email is a social platform. Email gets a bad rap for its social features (or lack thereof), but the truth is, because it’s so flexible, we use it to connect with others to start new relationships and cultivate existing ones. 

Email is a collaboration platform. Ever ask your customers for feedback on a new feature you’ve been building? Have you ever needed to respond to that feedback? How do you do it?  

Email is a creation platform. If you’re sitting at a tech conference and you want to jot down some very quick notes and ideas, have you ever opened your email client to do so? 

Email is a discovery platform. When a new person joins your team and would like to understand how you came upon a design three months ago, what’s the most natural thing to do? Point them at a specific place on your intranet -- or forward them a few email threads from that time to bring them up-to-speed? Is it any wonder email is one of the world’s biggest “big data” platforms?

We ask email to do an incredible amount -- and, amazingly, it does provide a solution in each of these areas. Is it the best at any of these? No, almost never. But does it work -- at least enough to get the job done? 

In the upcoming weeks, we’re going to dig in on each of these areas just a bit more. 

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Sending Email with Obindo

For all you Obindo developers out there, you’ll be happy to know we’ve just added some new capabilities to the platform that allows you to send email in html format, include attachments, forward messages, and a few other goodies! 

The Obindo platform is of course primarily focused on inbound email processing -- helping you parse email data, structure it, and integrate it with the apps you use every day -- but as part of the process of course sending out email notifications, files, and other information is a pretty useful (and necessary) set of tools. 

You can drop these new email-processing methods into any Obindo email-processing script whenever you like. Enjoy! 

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Parsing Inbound Email

We’ve been hard at work here over the past few weeks making our service even better at email parsing and routing those inbound email messages into services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Salesforce.com. 

We’ve also been especially excited to see the growth of our Google Chrome Extension -- keep an eye out for new apps and innovations to be added there soon as well!

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Connect Gmail to MailChimp with Obindo!

Have you ever wanted to add someone to your MailChimp mailing list without leaving your Gmail inbox? It's easy with Obindo's Chrome extension for Gmail. 

The next time a lead or customer send you a note and you'd like to add them to, say, your organization's email list, just click the new "MailChimp" icon in Obindo for Gmail: 

Obindo will ask you to confirm: 

Click Yes, and that's all there is to it. Your contact is now in MailChimp! 

Our list of integrations keeps growing! As always, please drop us a line if there's an app or cloud service that you'd like to see added into Obindo!  

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Inbox Productivity in Gmail in 29 Slides

Interested in getting a quick overview of our new Google Chrome extension Obindo for Gmail and learning how you might use it to improve your own inbox productivity -- in, oh, say, 29 slides? Check out this quick run-through on SlideShare! 

Obindo for GMail connects your inbox to apps like Asana, Box, and Dropbox, to name just a few. Click here to download the extension and try it for yourself!

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Connect Gmail to Asana With Obindo!

Obindo for Gmail is a new Google Chrome Extension that provides you with a super-simple way to update your favorite apps -- all without leaving your inbox. 

Today, we thought we'd introduce it by showing how it works with our favorite project and task management system: Asana. 

How does it work? 

It's really easy! Obindo for Gmail is a free Google Chrome extension that you can drop into Gmail in about 15 seconds. Once it's installed, you'll see a toolbar at the bottom of each email message you receive that looks like this: 

Now, just as an example, let's say a co-worker sends you an email asking you to update some photos on your company's website by the end of the week: 

You're a busy person, and you'd rather not leave this request in your inbox where it will be tough to find later. Instead, you'd prefer that this be sent into Asana. So let's use Obindo to do just that. 

First, click the link in the toolbar at the bottom of that message. A list of apps will appear:

From this list, choose the Asana logo in the upper-left corner. Obindo will immediately ask: 

That's exactly what we'd like to do. So we just click "Yes, Please!" 

Now, because this is the first time we've ever used Obindo with Asana, we just have one more step: we need to tell Asana to accept this message from us. That's easy, Obindo asks us that straightaway: 

Easy enough -- click the link, tell Asana to accept our message from us, and that's it. We're redirected over into Asana, and there's our task. 

OK, great. But: what about setting the project name? And the due date? And what if I want to assign this to someone on my team, or tag it so I can more easily find it later? 

Right! No problem there. Whenever you send a message into one of your favorite apps, you can always optionally set additional parameters by clicking on the icon next to the confirmation question. If we did that in this example, we would see something like the following: 

In other words, you can send a message or file into an app like Asana with just a click - or you can specify things like project names, folders, due dates, and so on before you send the data over. It's up to you. 

Alright, I can see how Obindo helps to remove the barrier between Gmail and Asana and make it easier for me to get information into Asana. But what about Box? Salesforce? Yammer? I have to use each of those at different times throughout my day. 

Us too! That's why we built Obindo like we did: to work not just with a single app, but to work with each of the apps that we use every day. So watch this space, because in upcoming posts we'll show how you can use Obindo for Gmail to do things like: 

- Add a contract to DocuSign 

- Save your reports and files to Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive

- Backup an email message and turn it into a Google Doc

- Save sales leads into Salesforce

- Post a message or idea with your co-workers on Yammer

We're also building integrations for Google Calendar, LinkedIn, Twitter...the list keeps growing! 

Obindo is designed to connect your inbox with each of your favorite apps -- so you can get your important ideas, tasks, files, and documents out of your inbox and into the apps where they belong. 

How do I get started? 

Obindo for Gmail is a Google Chrome plug-in, so in order to use it you have to use Chrome as your browser. If you do, just browse to obindo.com, or to the Obindo for Gmail download page on the Google Chrome App Store. If you are on obindo.com, you will see a big orange button on the page looks like the following:

Push that button and you'll immediately see a box pop-up similar to the below, asking if you want to install this extension into Chrome. 

Click Add, and as soon as you do, that's it -- your extension will be installed! You'll see a message like this: 

Click on the link -- or simply browse to Gmail yourself, and refresh your browser. Open any email message and you will see the Obindo toolbar at the bottom of the message with a link asking you to authenticate Obindo for your Gmail account. Click that link, authenticate the plug-in, and you're all set!

What comes next? 

Well, now comes the really fun part. Because as everyone who has following our progress knows, Obindo is more than a plug-in -- it's an email productivity platform that is open, extensible, and designed to work with almost any app. 

What does that mean? That means you can help us make Obindo for Gmail better and more powerful by letting us know what apps we should be adding to it as we go. So if you have an idea for how we can improve Obindo for Gmail -- drop us a line! 

Other Questions? Comments? Ideas? 

We want to make Obindo for Gmail the best product we possibly can -- so if you have a thought or idea that you think would make Obindo better -- please let us know. We'd love to hear from you!

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Social Business Software vs. Email

Why won't email go away? 

Years ago, before starting Obindo, we worked together building a social business software platform that companies used to connect their employees and help them communicate more effectively. And it worked -- organizations like The Home Depot, Pearson, Wells Fargo, and many others utilized the platform we created to spark communication throughout their organization. 

Of course, we weren't the only ones to see the promise of applying social communication approaches to the enterprise. Salesforce.com released Chatter, Microsoft acquired Yammer, and companies like Jive Software grew and evolved. Today, there are even reports that Facebook will be rolling out Facebook at Work to enable companies to communicate internally. 

With so many new and innovative social business tools available, the lowly email protocol must have finally -- finally! -- been sent out to pasture. Right? 

Wrong. Email volume in business settings has continued to grow -- and it's estimated that this volume will increase by almost a third by 2017. 

What's going on? Social tools like enterprise social networks were supposed to be a cure-all for enterprise communication, but in many ways, they continue to struggle. In the meantime, email volume is actually increasing? 

We believe strongly in the promise of collaboration and social business software, but feel there are three key reasons email continues to grow. 

Email is open. Unlike so many other tools - no matter how powerful - email is, at its base, a protocol not a product. Yes, companies absolutely experience lock-in as they standardize on tools like Microsoft Exchange, but switching to another email vendor is always a possibility. 

Email is flexible. Email's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Because it can do almost anything, that's what we ask it to do: almost anything. Does it get used as a to-do list? A scheduling app? For file storage? Archiving? Task management? Ideation? Yes, yes, and yes. Is it the best at any of these things? No -- there are so many dedicated apps that do one of these things really well. But trying to replace a protocol that is capable of everything means that the new solution is going to have to be just as flexible. 

Email is integrated. Integrated with what, you might ask? Everything. Think, in the past week, did you receive an email invitation from a calendar application? How about a message from marketing software? A newsletter? From Salesforce? Facebook? Yammer? Dropbox? Like it or not, companies have spent decades integrating their systems with email. 

Because email is open, flexible, and integrated, it's incredibly powerful. It's also incredibly difficult to work with at times. Social business software definitely addresses some of these issues -- but for a tool to address enough that it actually decreases email usage seems like a big task. 

Social business software does provide a lot of value. So does email. We believe these two technologies will both co-exist -- and grow. The key is that these technologies are able to work together -- which is why we're excited to grow Obindo into the best email integration and processing platform in the world. 

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Google Inbox, Microsoft Clutter, and IBM Verse

Who says email is dead? There has been a set of major announcements in the past few weeks by three major software vendors -- and no doubt we'll see more in the months to come. 

A short recap. In October, Google announced Inbox by Gmail, an app that attempts to address the email information overload problem turning an email inbox into a sort-of a "to do" list. Rather than mark an email as "read," for example, the primary action is to mark it as "done." Users can also "pin" and "snooze" emails so that they will appear on one's list at another time. 

In early November, Microsoft announced Clutter. According to Microsoft, Clutter uses the "Office Graph" and machine learning to categorize messages into folder locations based upon a user's actions. Over time, the system is designed to become a sort-of "inbox agent" which puts messages where you are most likely to want them. 

Finally, earlier this week, IBM announced Verse, a "reimagined inbox" which claims to model email conversations more like a social network -- showing relationships between people, ideas, and files. 

Which of these models is the right one? In our humble opinion: all of them. Over the years, email has been asked to serve as a to-do list, a file-organizer, AND a social network -- and so it's not surprising to see vendors each take a stab at a different dimension of the "email problem." 

We spend a lot of time thinking about the issues and problems associated with email. In particular, we think a lot about what  it takes to parse email, extract information from those messages, and route that extracted data into its proper location. Regardless of which models succeed, it's great to see these new innovations appearing. 

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Software Models in the Enterprise

Last week I attended a very interesting event at the Yammer headquarters in San Francisco. Neil McCarthy, Director of Product, spoke about the freemium model in the enterprise. He made some excellent points around how empowered employees have become in recent years as the Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) model has grown - and how the model aligns well with that movement.

Neil remarked how this model can benefit three different audiences: users can try out and adopt a new technology without obstacles, customers know a product is getting adoption so the risk to their investment is much lower, and vendors can use modern methodologies to more quickly adapt to customer needs.

In addition to speaking about the benefits, it was refreshing to hear Neil comment on the potential objections to the model, as well as where it might not be appropriate. 

We think it's key to always focus on the end-user in any software design -- but we know from experience that for software to succeed in any business, it's important to think through the needs of everyone involved in the software acquisition process. It's great to see Yammer share their perspective on all this. 

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Parsing Email. But With Smarts.

One significant part of the Obindo technology stack, naturally enough, involves email parsing. That is, when a message comes in, that message needs to be broken down into its component parts and presented as a JSON object. 

However, one interesting aspect of the Obindo parsing engine is that it doesn't just treat the message as a message -- that is, looking at the "from" and "to" addresses, bcc lines, subject lines, and so on. It also will look for things that might also be helpful, such as contacts, dates, tags, and so on. 

That means that, if you want to simply write a smart inbox that extracts, say, subject lines -- no problem, you can absolutely do that. But, if you want to extract out names, titles, and companies, and put that into a CRM system so that one can send an email to Salesforce? Obindo can help you do that too. 

We think it's a pretty valuable part of the Obindo platform. If you're a developer looking to develop something innovative with email, we'd love for you to give it a try. 

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Five Reasons You'll Love Email Again

Yesterday I spent the day at Inbox Love, an excellent one-day event organized by email innovators Joshua Baer and Jared Goralnick. The depth and breadth of innovation on display was impressive -- here are five key takeaways. 

1. There is a lot of innovation going on in email right now -- and that innovation is accelerating.  

Google’s new Inbox by GMail has of course been attracting a lot of buzz this week, but the real email story of 2014 can be summed up in three little letters: API.

Several months ago, Google announced the GMail API which allows developers to write a new breed of application based on email. Not to be outdone, Micorosoft has also announced their Office 365 API. 

What does this mean to the non-developer? Tony Blank, the Developer Evangelist for Context.io, a company that indexes email data and provides developers a way to write applications against that data, showed how a number of startups can take advantage of APIs like theirs to build unique new offerings. For example, AirHelp, a company based in Europe, can scan your inbox for travel receipts and identify refunds to which you may be entitled. These APIs should mean we can expect many more ideas like this to flourish in the upcoming months. 

2. Information overload is the user experience to solve -- and it's finally starting to happen. 

Despite what those promote "inbox zero" might claim, the problem is not that we get too much email -- it's that the tools we use to manage our email haven't kept up with what we ask it to do. As Allan Nance, CEO of WhatCounts remarked, email clients today are incredibly dumb: the message that appears at the top of your list is whatever someone -- anyone in the world -- put there when they decided to send you an email. 

If new email client vendors have their way, however, the way you view and interact with your email will change -- and it could happen quickly. Interesting new startups like MixMax, TouchMail, Boxer, and Inky are just a handful of companies working to create new and more efficient user experiences. 

The best interfaces here are going to be those that are almost invisible: think auto-complete, natural gesture-based interactions, and context-based suggestions.

3. Email is the biggest of Big Data, and smart systems are evolving to make that data useful. 

Email usage continues to grow -- Radicati estimates that business email volume will increase from 100 billion messages per day in 2013 to 132 billion by 2017. For the lowly inbox to keep up, that is going to require more than just innovations in user interfaces -- the core data-processing is going to have to shift. 

That means that email messages can no longer be treated simply as messages -- email systems need to understand the difference between textual information that is describing a person, a set of directions, a contract to sign, or a task -- and treat each of these differently. The under-the-hood innovations required here will require further development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and context-based systems -- and companies are beginning to understand and work on this. 

4. Your inbox is still yours -- for now. And there are people fighting to keep it that way.

For many people, email is your most personal and most comprehensive social network — the place where your organize events with your family, discuss product designs with colleagues, and share new ideas and thoughts with friends. But of course every day there are attempted hacks on that information — and it’s key to keep that data private and secure. 

The good news here is that there is considerable innovation already in process here. Stephan Somogyi spoke about End-to-End, a Google initiative to make encryption more useable, and email privacy startup Virtru provided a demo of technology which allows one to set parameters and restrictions around how messages may be disseminated. Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, used the analogy of a battleship on the seas to represent your message in transit. 

Of course, as with every social communication innovation comes the key question: will users value this privacy? Or will they be willing to trade it away as many do in social networking sites? 

 5. Big email providers are working to create innovation ecosystems -- but beware the walled gardens. 

Shalini Agarwal, Senior Product Manager for Inbox at Google, announced that Google's intention was to provide ways for developers to write code against the Inbox platform.

In two interesting presentations, Pretish Abraham and Venkat Ayyadevra from Microsoft both offered compelling demonstrations of how Microsoft was opening up their email ecosystems as well. According to Microsoft, 24% of Exchange users are already in the Office 365 Cloud, which means that developers coding against these systems will be able to innovate at a much faster clip moving forward. 

The good news? App stores based on email are already here -- and they will grow, providing a number of options for users to customize and extend their email systems. 

However, the natural consequence of this -- clearly voiced by several startup vendors at the event -- was that, as these ecosystems grow, there is a risk that the platforms will turn into "walled gardens" just as we've seen in the smartphone and social networking markets. Time will tell if these innovations can grow and yet email remain the open and non-proprietary protocol it has been so far. 

Summing It Up

“Love” is often not the first word that comes up when one discusses email. However, the Inbox Love event held yesterday shows, there are a passionate and innovative group of people who do, in fact, love email — and are working hard to make it so the rest of us do too. 

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Add an Inbox to YOUR App!

Hey app developers! What if you could add inbound email-processing to YOUR app? You can -- and you can be up-and-running in just an hour or two. 

You don't need to stand up any mail servers or host any code at all -- just visit the Obindo developer page to learn about how Obindo can help you streamline each step of the email-to-app process, from inbound processing to email parsing to routing the data into your app. 

Email integration doesn't have to be difficult. Be sure to watch this space as we go into more detail around how Obindo can help you with every part of the inbound email-processing process. 

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Out of Email and Into Dropbox

"Hey, can you email that file to me?" 

This is how it begins. You're working on a project, your colleague has a document that you need, and they send it over. What's easier than that? You need a file, they send a file: done. 

But, of course: it's not done, because, along the way, those same elves who steal socks out of your dryer immediately go to work on your inbox. Your file is there for a day. Maybe two. Maybe even until the end of the week. 

But, come Monday, you need that file, and a quick search brings up...nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Frustratingly, the search brings up the discussion you had about needing the file, and maybe even a couple of follow-on emails you had after you received the file. But where is the file? How can that file disappear so quickly? What was it called again? 

Email search is, amazingly, one of those things that still seems to cause trouble because, at its core, the email data model is a transactional one: it's designed for quick communication, for immediate processing, but not for search. 

Which is why we love each of the Obindo integrations we built so far for dealing with attachments -- allowing you to send email to Dropbox, to Box, and to Google Drive. Each of those apps are designed for file storage. You simply forward an email with any attachment -- a file, a photo, a set of documents -- and Obindo will move them into the location that you need. 

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From Email to Database

An Obindo customer recently approached us and asked: could Obindo be used to parse email messages, extract a set of contacts, and store those contacts into a simple database?

Our first response was, naturally, to suggest they use our email to salesforce integration. But they weren't using Salesforce and, anyway, they were hoping for something even simpler. 

And, come to think of it, so were we. Salesforce is an amazingly powerful tool for a lot of things, but sometimes it just feels right to build something that is as lightweight as possible. 

So, first question: if the goal is to create a lightweight app that provides email to database functionality, what database should we use? Well, after some thought, the answer wasn't too hard to discover: we'd simply send data into a spreadsheet with Google Docs. 

Next question: what information should we pull out? In keeping with the spirit of the project, we thought we would focus on only parsing email headers, looking for names and email addresses in the to, cc, and bcc line. 

A bit of work, and: viola. We've got it. You can now send Obindo any email, and we'll pull out the appropriate contacts and create a simple, two-column file with the name and email address we find in the email. Just like this: 

And that's all there is to it!

Is this a sophisticated inbound email integration workflow that you use to route information from department to department throughout your organization, connecting to your CRM and marketing automation apps? Nope: this is a simple, straightforward tool that extracts just the information you need and creates a simple contact database for you on-the-fly. 

While we created Obindo so that you can create sophisticated inbound email processing workflows, we also like to check ourselves from time-to-time just to make sure that we can also keep things simple. 

We think this is a useful little tool. If you have a suggestion for another simple email to database tool that would make your life easier, give us a shout. 

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Routing Email to Multiple Apps

Did you know you can use Obindo to parse an email and route it to several apps at the same time? Here's one email workflow we find ourselves using quite a bit. 

One of us will send out an email regarding a new product feature with a set of questions and comments. After a little bit of back-and-forth, we'll flush out the feature to a point where one of us is able to put together a few files -- say, a wireframe with a more flushed out design sketch. We're ready to start building, so: now what? 

Here's where things with Obindo can get fun. Just by adding each appropriate Obindo address on the cc line, we will, in one shot: 

* Forward that email to Asana (so the tasks are captured appropriately for the engineering team.)

* Forward that email to Dropbox (so the files are uploaded to a folder we share with a designer so he can start working on some graphics, etc.) 

* Forward that email to Yammer (so the conversation can be shared with a few beta testers we've been working with.)  

We're continually exploring ways to use Obindo to improve email workflow even more. If you have a workflow you think we might be able to help with, be sure to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you!