messaging

What differentiates a business messaging app?

Post published:May 22, 2014
Post author:philip

Messaging has become a hot area of late (for a look at the history of messaging over the past few decades, see my earlier post). While the $19B sale of WhatsApp to Facebook might take most of the attention, there's been no shortage of other movement in the industry, including the sale of Israeli/Cypriot company Viber to Japan's Rakuten for $900M, the investment of $215M by Alibaba into US company Tango (at a $1.1B valuation), and the rumored IPO plans of both Japanese company LINE (with some estimates putting the valuation at $28B although that seems unlikely) and Korean company Kakao (priced at $2B). One thing all of these companies have in common is their consumer focus. None of these companies develop business messaging platforms. Undoubtedly many teams within companies use these consumer apps, even if not optimized for their needs, to communicate. What features and requirements would make a business team choose a business-focused messaging platform over a free (or at least very inexpensive) consumer one? Let's start with a quick look at who the players are in the business messaging space. It turns out that they are legion. Really. Some examples include Autodesk Instant, Convo, Cotap, Flowdock, GroupMe (owned by Microsoft via Skype),…

What the heck are stickers? A half billion dollar and growing business…

Post published:February 16, 2014
Post author:philip

Viber Sticker Store

http://youtu.be/o5LKXDwpqPE I've noticed something when talking to friends about messaging. If they're not from Asia (yes, technically I live in Asia, but Israel is not Asian in that sense) they don't get what stickers are all about. Why would they really? In the United States, and I believe Europe as well, stickers are more or less irrelevant. I would venture to guess that most Americans think stickers are just fancy emoticons. Facebook added stickers to it's messenger app, but although it's called the 'Sticker Store' it appears they're all free. Perhaps this is a first step towards commercialization in the future, but I think if you get something for free you don't really appreciate it, and in this case it probably means most Facebook users ignore this feature. It's also, as I mentioned, viewed as just bigger emoticon. Viber, which just sold a couple of days ago for $900M to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, implemented a sticker store as its first monetization strategy, followed by connecting calls to the traditional phone network. Stickers, in fact, are available on all the major messaging platforms with the solitary exception of WhatsApp. See the nice chart from Mark Watts-Jones on the 10 ways…

The history of messaging, and where it’s going

Post published:February 6, 2014
Post author:philip

There are in my view four main phases in the history of online and mobile messaging. The first phase included e-mail and to some extent real-time messaging (in the form of chat rooms), but was strictly within walled gardens. You could only communicate with others using the same proprietary service provider (America Online, Compuserve, Delphi, etc.). The second phase was the beginning of interconnected systems and the Internet. E-mail no longer stayed on a single server, but could go between companies. Real-time messaging, switched from chats that people had to join, to curated lists of friends, the buddy list, which dictated who you could chat with and allowed people to know when you were available for chat. To chat with someone you needed to know their username (or be able to find it in a directory). In some implementations, such as MSN Messenger, the other user had to approve you being able to see if they were online, but in others like AIM, you could see who was online as long as you knew their username (assuming they had not blocked you). The third phase was the emergence of text messaging on cell phones. This includes SMS, which spread initially…