告别固定的办公区域，初创公司Doist推出远程工作方案
八年多前，当Amir Salihefendic开发Todoist时，并不是想建立一个供员工大范围使用的网络。
Salihefendic在Bosnia长大，他在开发这个任务管理工具的时候还只是在丹麦念书的大学生，主要目的也只是供自己使用。几年后，他决定全心投入在这个工具上，他发现自己需要雇几名员工，而且经济情况不允许他对工作地点挑三拣四。
现在，这家正式名称叫做Doist的公司已经在20多个国家有了40多名员工，遍及白俄罗斯、巴西、加拿大、德国、意大利、日本、葡萄牙、俄罗斯、韩国和西班牙等等，在美国还有五名兼职员工。这个团队为100多万用户提供服务。没有依靠任何风投，公司仅通过订阅内容，从一开始就保持着稳定的盈利能力，每天新增注册用户大约有1万人。
这样的经历让Salihefendic变成了远程工作的传道者。他不是一个人在战斗，开发了WordPress的Automattic以及Buffer多年来都一直在宣扬分布式劳动力的好处，但有趣的是Doist出于自身利益做到了远超过其他公司的程度。它为远程工作者提供工具，并且能将这一过程中学到的东西都充分利用起来。
远离科技城市
Salihefendic正通过Skype从葡萄牙波尔图和我聊天，他和他未来的妻子几年前决定搬到这个城市。Doist有九名员工都在葡萄牙安家，Salihefendic也在一次游玩中爱上了这个国家，所以他们理应在这里建一个办公室。但他们并不需要呀！
Salihefendic说Doist采用分布式劳动力主要是出于必要性。在台湾为社交网络Plurk工作时，他突发奇想地申请了智利的初创公司孵化器，一获得批准他就打包离开了，从2008年起他就不太重视的Todoist重新得到了他的注意。在开发这个应用的第一个移动端版本时，Salihefendic开始远程雇用员工。
Doist的第一名员工来自Salihefendic在孵化器中同事的推荐。为了更好地扩大队伍，Doist采取了“游击战术”，从Hacker News、Github和Reddit之类的论坛上招兵买马，至少在公司发展到足以吸引求职者之前都是这样做的。
“在圣地亚哥并不是我出去转一圈就能雇到厉害的安卓开发者的，”Salihefendic说，“可能是有一些，但是我找不到。”
很快，Salihefendic发现远程工作还有其他好处。不算办公室和管理费用，光是雇用费用和在旧金山这样的科技城市相比就只要二分之一到三分之一，而且还不用担心Facebook和谷歌这样的科技巨头挖自己墙角。
“这不仅仅是开销的问题，还有人才。”Salihefendic说，“如果你去旧金山，你就是在和拥有数百万投资的大公司竞争。”
不过，最大的好处大概就是Doist能按自己的步调发展，一点一点地学着怎样建立一家远程公司。和其他创业者相比，Salihefendic对来自硅谷的投资以及它给公司带来的压力非常谨慎 。
他说：“这种投资会迫使公司非常快速地发展，但却无法真正地去建立一个优秀的团队或去发展企业文化及经历所必要的过程。”
完善及推广远程工具
Doist的发展过程和其他宣扬远程工作的公司相比并没有很大的不同，它也一样在招揽新员工，其中包括一项能看出求职者在独立工作的情况下将如何表现的测试。员工津贴中包括员工的办公场所费用和团队偶尔见面需要的费用。Salihefendic还强调了书面沟通的必要性，并且每过一段时间一定要达成特定的目标。也就是说，雇主必须要完全投入这种远程工作的模式，否则这种工作方式就注定失败。
但在这些年来建立远程公司的过程中，Salihefendic也发现所需的工具并不完备，而随着Doist的发展，它可以制造更好的工具。Todoist本身就已经开始了这方面的尝试，因为公司首先要迎合自己员工的需求。
比如说，遇到支持不同语言的问题时，Doist就因为在中国有一名财务经理而让问题简单了很多，他帮着解决了日期表述的复杂问题。Salihefendic说：“对一般的公司来说，我觉得他们可能不需要为中文日期花费大量的时间来改进、测试，但对我们来说这都是很正常的。”
Salihefendic认为如果一件产品是由世界各地的人制造的，那么它就更有可能和全世界的用户产生共鸣。他说Doist在台湾有一个设计师，提供的观点就和欧洲的设计师很不一样。他补充说：“现在这个时代，我们制造的产品必须面向整个世界而不只是富有的白种人。”
除了待办清单软件，Doist受自己的分布式劳动力的经验影响，正在研发全新的产品。Salihefendic认为它有点像Slack，公司已经在用Slack了，不过新软件更注重线程通讯。
“我们正在研发这个通讯软件，我们内部也在使用它，并对它进行优化，让它更符合我们的结构。”Salihefendic说，“在Todoist身上也是一样的，我们优化我们的产品使它们符合我们的要求，很可能最终它们也能满足其他远程公司的要求。”
虽然远程工作有一些成功的例子，但规模都比较小。并没有足够的事实能证明大型公司也能采用远程工作。但Salihefendic想试一试。
“我不觉得扩大到几千人的规模是不可能的。”Salihefendic说，“我们想做的事之一就是制造出支持远程工作的工具。你会看到我们在这些工具上的许多创新，它们能帮我们沟通、分享以及在一个庞大的团队中安排活动。”
WITH 40 PEOPLE IN 20+ COUNTRIES, THIS STARTUP WANTS TO MAKE PHYSICAL OFFICES IRRELEVANT
A network of far-flung employees wasn't what Amir Salihefendic had in mind when he created Todoist more than eight years ago.
Salihefendic, who fled Bosnia when he was six years old, was just a college student in Denmark when he designed the to-do list manager, primarily for his own use. When he decided to work on it full-time a few years later, he realized he needed employees, and couldn't afford to be picky about their locale.
Todoist creator, Amir Salihefendic
Today, Doist—that's the official company name—employs more than 40 people in more than 20 countries: Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere—including five who work in the U.S. at least part of the time. This team serves more than one million active Todoist users. Through optional subscriptions, it has remained profitable from the beginning without any venture capital, and is adding roughly 10,000 new registered users every day.
The experience has turned Salihefendic into something of a remote-work evangelist. He's hardly alone—companies like WordPress creator Automattic and Buffer have been preaching the benefits of distributed workforces for years—but what's interesting about Doist is the extent to which it's powered by its own self interests. It's a distributed workforce making tools for remote workers, drawing on everything it learns in the process.
WORKING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE
Salihefendic is talking to me via Skype from an office space in Porto, Portugal, where he and his wife-to-be decided to move a couple years ago. Nine of Doist's employees list Portugal as home—Salihefendic fell in love with the country during a visit—so having an office makes sense. But no one is required to be on the premises.
TO BUILD ITS WORKFORCE, DOIST USED "GUERRILLA TACTICS."Doist's distributed workforce arose largely out of necessity, Salihefendic says. He'd been working from Taiwan on the social network Plurk, when on a whim he applied for a grant from a startup accelerator in Chile. He packed up and moved upon acceptance, and Todoist, which had been on the backburner since 2008, became his focus once again. Salihefendic started hiring remotely while building the app's first mobile versions.
Doist's first employees were recommendations from Salihefendic's accelerator colleagues. To build the workforce further, Doist used "guerrilla tactics," he says, recruiting through forums like Hacker News, Github, and Reddit—at least until the company was large enough to attract applicants directly.
"It's not like I can go out and hire great Android developers in Santiago," Salihefendic says. "There were probably some, but I could not find them."
Salihefendic quickly figured out that a remote workforce had other virtues. He estimates that his employee costs are a half to a third what they would be in a tech hub such as San Francisco—not counting savings on office space and other overheads—and he doesn't have to worry about tech giants like Facebook and Google stealing his best employees.
"It's not only about expenses, it's also about talent," Salihefendic says. "If you go to San Francisco, you're competing against companies that have a lot of millions in investment."
Perhaps the greatest benefit, however, is that Doist was able to grow on its own schedule, learning how to build a remote company as it went along. By comparison, Salihefendic seems wary of Silicon Valley funding, and the pressure it puts on companies to rapidly staff up.
"This kind of thing forces you to grow really fast without having time to really build a team, build a culture, build a process," he says.
FASHIONING THE TOOLS
Much of Doist's process doesn't sound drastically different from what's being preached by other remote-work evangelists. The company's screening for new hires, for instance, involves a test project to see how well the candidate works independently. Employee perks include an offer to pay for co-working space and the occasional team meet-up. Salihefendic also stresses the need for written communication and an emphasis on achieving specific goals over time. In other words, employers must go all-in with a remote-work mindset, otherwise they'll fail.
But in building a remote company over many years, Salihefendic has also started thinking that the tools are incomplete, and that Doist can build better ones as it grows. Todoist itself has already been part of that process, as the company adapts it to the needs of its own employees.
SALIHEFENDIC BELIEVES A PRODUCT STANDS A BETTER CHANCE OF RESONATING WITH A GLOBAL WORKFORCE WHEN IT'S CREATED BY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.When it came to supporting different languages, for instance, Doist's job was made easier by having a financial manager in China, who helped deal with the complexities of date parsing. "For a normal company, I don't think you would focus on implementing Chinese date parsing, and spending a ton of time on improving and using and testing it, but for us it's just natural," Salihefendic says.
More broadly, Salihefendic believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world. He points out that Doist has a designer in Taiwan, who provides a different perspective on design than someone in Europe. "In the current world, the product that we need to build has to target the whole world, and not only white rich people," he says.
Beyond just its to-do list product, Doist is working on something completely new, borne from its own experience as a distributed workforce. Salihefendic describes it as somewhat similar to Slack—which the company already uses—but with an emphasis on threaded communications. It's in early alpha, but the plan is to eventually release it publicly. Not unlike Todoist in its dorm room days, it could be another self-serving tool that ends up being useful to millions.
"We are doing this communication app, and we are using it inside our team, and we can evolve it and fit it to our structure," Salihefendic says. "And the same thing with Todoist: We can develop stuff that solves our needs, and maybe in the end will solve the needs of other remote companies as well."
While remote work has plenty of success stories, most of them have head counts in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. There's not a lot of proof that a massive organization can have a fully distributed workforce. Salihefendic wants to try.
"I can't really see why you should not be able to scale to thousands of people," Salihefendic says. "One of the things we want to do as a company is create tools that enable remote work. You will see a lot of innovation in the tools that we have access to that enable us to communicate, share thoughts, and organize thoughts inside huge remote organizations."
Source:Fastcompany
硅谷
2015年07月24日
硅谷
【印度】TracxnLabs为雇佣平台ZenRadius注入启动资金
导语：总部设在印度班加罗尔的网络招聘平台ZenRadius帮助企业，特别是初创企业，通过职业社交网络网罗到合适的应聘者。
由Flipkart联合创始人及Anzy Careers的Deepak Singh 所共同支持的创业孵化器TraxcnLabs近日为招聘平台ZenRadius注入了一笔数额不详的启动资金。
这家由Nitesh Mishra，Arpit Kumar 及Alok Yadav所创办的班加罗尔网络招聘平台帮助企业，特别是初创企业，通过职业社交网络网罗到合适的应聘者。
世界间的联系已经变得越来越千丝万缕，在不久的将来，利用这些丰富的人际网络来网罗适宜的应聘者正在成为招聘的重要方式。
·ZenRadius如何工作？
用户可通过电子邮箱地址登录ZenRadius平台，然后输入职位或求职的关键词。该平台会自动从用户自己的联系人列表中进行匹配并推送相关信息。
为了与被推荐者取得联系，用户需要编写一封标准邮件来对职位要求进行详细描述，仅需单击一下，该平台就能向所有潜在应聘者发送个性化邮件。
此后，平台的数据分析系统将会显示有哪些人已经阅读了该邮件，并对这些推荐候选人对于职位的兴趣度进行评估。
当一家企业或是招聘公司使用该平台进行招聘时，尽管应聘者能够与诸多联系人取得联系，但是其简历只会被自动发送至职位发布者（而非推荐人）的手中，这样做是为了表达对职位发布者的尊重，因为他们拥有挑选适宜求职者的职业裁量权。
职位发布者能够看到某位求职者的所有推荐人有哪些，因此，雇主就可以利用这些不同的信息渠道来对求职者的背景进行交叉比对，以确保求职人信息的真实性。
“以前，亲朋好友或是工作伙伴经常问我们能否为他们公司的空缺职位推荐合适的应聘者，这给了我们灵感。通过某个人的人际圈所完成的雇佣过程，虽然非常有效，但是也很麻烦，实际上，没人会为了找到更好的求职者而对自己圈子里已经存在的资源进行广泛利用，”Mishra说。
“作为职业人的我们，通常会对自己圈子中其他专业人士的才能非常熟悉，并且能够很好的为某个具体职位推荐合适人选，这是一个基本事实，”他补充道。
在打造ZenRadius平台之前，该公司的核心团队所创办的第一家初创企业名为Smokelift Technologies，主要为Olacabs、Practo、Acceltrade及StudyPad等公司提供包括大数据基础设施服务在内的可扩展分析服务。
Tracxn的创始人Abhishek Goyal表示，“多年来，我们见证了通过共同朋友所完成的雇佣具有更高的成功率，特别是当我们有职位空缺的时候（而不是求职），但是通过人脉寻找求职者的过程非常累人。我们认为科技可以大大简化这一过程。”
目前，TracxnLabs已经完成了对两家初创企业所进行的投资，分别是美容服务移动市场StayGlad和按需物流企业Parcelled。
Hiring platform ZenRadius raises seed funding from TracxnLabs
Hiring platform ZenRadius has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding fromTraxcnLabs, an incubator backed by Flipkart Co-founders and Deepak Singh of Anzy Careers.
Founded by Nitesh Mishra, Arpit Kumar and Alok Yadav, this Bangalore-based network hiring platform enables firms, especially startups, to hire the right candidates through professional networking.
The world is getting more socially and professional connected and making use of these already enriched networks to obtain the right candidates is going to become the key method of hiring in the near future.
How does the platform work?
A user can log in to the ZenRadius platform with an email address and enter keywords of the professional vacancy or requirement. The platform automatically pulls out appropriate references from the user’s own contact list and suggests new ones.
To contact the referred professionals, the user types a standard mail detailing about the job requirement. The platform then sends personalised emails to all the potential candidates in a click.
Further, the platform analytics shows data on who has opened the emails and provides a way to assess the interest of referred candidates in the available jobs.
If a company/recruitment firm uses the platform, despite employees referring job vacancies to multiple contacts, CVs are automatically routed to only the Job Creator (and not the referrers) honouring the fact that only the Job Creator must have the professional discretion to choose the right candidate.
The Job Creator is able to see all the people who might have referred the same candidate. Hence, backgrounds could be crosschecked from multiple sources to ensure the authenticity of candidates.
“We were often asked by both our personal and professional contacts if we could recommend potential candidates for job opportunities in their companies? This got us thinking. The entire process of hiring through one’s network, though very effective, is very cumbersome and no one is actually using the data which is already present within their networks to get better candidates,” said Mishra.
“It is a basic fact that as professionals we are usually familiar with the skill sets and talents of other professionals within our circles and are in a better position to suggest the names of ‘likeminded’ professionals who would be most suited to specific job positions,” he added.
Prior to developing the ZenRadius platform, the core team founded its first startup Smokelift Technologies and developed scalable analytics involving Big Data infrastructure services for Olacabs, Practo, Acceltrade and StudyPad.
Abhishek Goyal, Founder of Tracxn said, “Over the years, we have seen that people we hired through common friends had much higher degree of success more specifically when we asked for people (and not inbound), but the process of finding people through network was very tiring. We thought technology could simplify this process significantly.”
TracxnLabs has already invested in two startups StayGlad, a mobile marketplace for beauty services, and Parcelled, an on-demand logistics startup.
via e27
硅谷
2015年07月24日
硅谷
大数据服务平台Cazena获2000万美元B轮融资Cazena，一家帮助企业处理数据的新平台，今天宣布已获2000万美元B轮融资，融资由Formation 8领投。其他的投资方包括Andreessen Horowitz和North Bridge Venture Partners，他们也参与了去年十月Cazena800万美元的A轮融资。
Cazena由部分Netezza的前任员工创办，Prat Moghe是公司的领头人。2010年Netezza被IBM收购时，他担任数据监察部门总经理，收购后，任职高级副总裁，负责产品、战略和市场营销。
在IBM干了一段时间后，Moghe觉得是时候用新的视角来解决Netezza曾遭遇的一些问题了。“在看到企业都是如何同全新的大数据堆栈（如Hadoop，一种分布式系统基础架构）挣扎较劲的情况下，我们开始思考下一个十年数据处理的前景，”他说道。“每一个企业，尤其是中大型企业，都在积极寻找着能提高进程灵敏度的云方法，但是现有平台的复杂性和安全问题是很大的障碍。”
Cazena 的目标是极大简化商业中的大数据进程处理。Moghe设想，最终的理想状态是，使用Cazena时只需点三下，就能设置好数据处理工作（当然现阶段还有一些问题需要解决）。
这项服务通过自动搜寻到，处理设定数据组的分析技术方案，从而解决掉处理的复杂性。接下来，它会替客户自动的规定、优化和管理工作流程，无论是Hadoop、Spark、MPP还是SQL9（如Amazon Redshift）类型的结构。
根据你的工作量和其他标准，如价格或是你想要获得结果的速度，Cazena会为你提供适当的基础结构，然后全程关注进度。“最终，数据即服务成为一个新的分类，我们希望能助企业一臂之力，让他们用好云计算。”
Cazena花费了约两年的时间，才公开他们的新产品。但Moghe说，公司尚在和一小部分大型企业合作，进行β测试，现在还没有达到完全开放服务的阶段。
当准备就绪的时候，Cazena会使用相对特别的定价计划。Moghe说，计划是针对服务，包括所有的云计算成本、支持和SLA开销，收取单一费用。他认为，目前针对云处理的收费系统，如gigabyte、note，对企业而言结果都太难预测。
公司的这一轮融资资金，将会用于技术开发、销售推广和合作伙伴建设。
Cazena Raises $20M Series B For Its Enterprise Big Data-As-A-Service Platform
Cazena, a new platform that wants to make it easier for enterprises to process their data, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round led by Formation 8. Other participants include Andreessen Horowitz and North Bridge Venture Partners, who both also participated in the company’s $8 million series A round last October.
Cazena was founded by a number of former Netezza employees and is now led by Prat Moghe, who was Netezza’s general manager for data compliance before its acquisition by IBM in 2010. He then became the senior vice president for strategy, product and marketing at Netezza under IBM’s ownership.
After a few years at IBM, Moghe decided that it was time to look at some of the problems Netezza was trying to solve from a fresh perspective. “We started thinking about the next decade of data processing and how enterprises are struggling with the new big data stacks like Hadoop,” he told us. “Every enterprise — and particular the medium to large enterprises — they were actively looking at the cloud to speed up the agility of processing. But they were being held back by the complexity and security issues [of the existing platforms].”
Cazena aims to greatly simplify big data processing for businesses. Ideally, it should only take three clicks to set up a data processing job with Cazena, Moghe believes (though in reality, it’s still a bit more involved right now). The service strips away the complexities by trying to automatically figure out what technology to use to analyze a given set of data. It then automatically provisions, optimizes and manages that workflow for its customers, no matter whether it’s a Hadoop, Spark or MPP SQL (think Amazon Redshift) job.
Depending on your workload and other criteria like price or how fast you need the results, Cazena will provision the right infrastructure for you and then take care of the processing. “Ultimately, data as a service is a new category and we want to help big enterprises get into the cloud,” Moghe said.
It took the Cazena about two years to get to this point where it’s openly talking about the new product. But while Moghe told me that the company is already running some beta tests with a small number of large companies, Cazena isn’t quite ready to open up its service to all yet.
Once it does launch, though, it will do so with a relatively unusual pricing plan. Moghe tells me that the plan is to charge a single fee for the service that will include all of the cloud costs, support and an SLA. He argues that current cloud processing systems that charge by gigabyte or node are too unpredictable for enterprises.
The new funding the company announced today will go toward building out the company’s technology, sales force and partnerships.
来源：tc
硅谷
2015年07月23日
硅谷
【印度】Avaamo：想解决“企业使用WhatsApp不够安全”这个问题
在成为创业者之前，Ram Menon和SriramChakravarthy都供职于TIBCO，这是一家企业通信软件企业。在TIBCO工作的那段时间里，他们开发了一个名叫TIbbr的企业通信应用，这个应用成为了Yammer和Chatter的主要竞争对手。这段经验让他们了解到了人们在工作中对于通信应用的需求。目前工作通信软件最大的问题之一，就是大多数这类软件都是基于桌面型电脑所开发的。当人们希望在移动设备上使用这些软件的时候，总是会陷入许多麻烦。在过去的五年里，这两位创业者一直在想办法解决这个问题，于是他们成立了Avaamo这家企业。
Chakravarthy在接受采访的时候表示：“在看到消费通讯应用的趋势之后，我们意识到移动应用的最大价值在于其简洁性。”站在普通用户的角度来看，Chakravarthy和Menon最大的贡献，就是让应用下载变得极其快速，而且还大大降低了用户的使用学习成本，缩短了用户之间在进行沟通的时候所需要的时间。而站在企业的角度来看，这个产品最大的优势则在于其安全性和数据的隐秘性。
Chakravarthy以一家总部位于班加罗尔的企业举了个例子。这家企业在于地产经纪公司沟通的时候，一直在使用WhatsApp这个应用的群组聊天功能。然而这个群组并非安全群组，也不会合适群组成员的真实身份。加入群组内的某一个人某一天离职，而群组管理人忘记将其移除群组，那么公司的许多私密信息就很有可能泄露出去，从而对企业的数据安全造成威胁。
Chakravarthy和Menon决定彻底解决这个问题，于是他们在2014年成立了Avaamo。这家在印度和硅谷都有办公司的初创企业为企业提供了一种安全并且便于监管的通信应用。这个应用分为免费版和付费版，企业可以根据自己的需求来选择。
免费版的Avaamo与WhatsApp非常类似，用户可以添加群组成员，并且发送无限量的消息。而付费版则提供了数据保护功能，它可以自动移除已离职成员，群组管理员也可以手动管理成员。为了方便管理，企业管理者还可以安装Avaamo的网页版应用，并且使用其中的控制面板来更加快速的管理聊天组成员。付费版的价格由企业的员工数量所决定。
Chakravarthy表示：“这个应用有着非常方便的控制机制，企业可以随时对聊天成员进行管理，避免数据出现泄漏。”
WhatsApp isn’t safe enough for business messaging; Avaamo fills the gap
Before turning entrepreneurs, Ram Menon and Sriram Chakravarthy worked for TIBCO, an enterprise communication software company. During their stint there, they built a product called Tibbr, an enterprise communication app that competed with Yammer and Chatter. This gave them a first-hand experience in understanding how people use communication apps in their professional lives. A clear drawback was that these apps were primarily desktop based. The apps did not have the elements of ease that people look for while communicating on mobile. This became more apparent as Menon and Chakravarthy noticed the big shift to mobile in the last five years. That inspired the duo to co-found Avaamo.
“After seeing the trends in consumer messaging apps, we realized that there was an inherent value proposition in the simplicity of mobile apps,” Chakravarthy tellsTech in Asia. The main points that Chakravarthy and Menon worked on, from the consumer point of view, were how quickly the app could be downloaded, how easily it could be maneuvered, and how to ensure minimum response time during communication. From an enterprise point of view, the main elements were security and data privacy.
Chakravarthy cites the example of a real estate company in Bangalore which uses WhatsApp to communicate with the real estate agents through groups. These are not secure groups in terms of assessing the identity of the members. In the case where a member has left the company, an admin might not necessarily have remembered to remove him from the group. A lot of private and confidential information is exchanged in these groups and without centralized monitoring of members, the company might be compromising on its security and data privacy.
Eureka
Menon and Chakravarthy decided to tackle these challenges and incorporated Avaamo in 2014. The India-Silicon Valley based startup, provides enterprises a secure and an easily supervisable communication app. The app has both free as well as paid versions. The free one works like Whatsapp and the user can add members and send unlimited messages. The paid version provides data compliance, automated user on & off boarding, broadcast to company users, support and administrator control. An enterprise administrator can install the Avaamo web app and control messaging and communication through a dashboard.
The pricing for the premium app is for enterprises and varies with the size of the enterprise and number of employees
AN administrator can create a list of members, monitor the daily user activity on the app, and manage the groups. The groups can be predefined for departments and can also be created by employees according to their convenience. An employee can download the free version and keep in touch with the company for their daily tasks. The administrator can decide the amount of time to keep the data before it gets deleted automatically.
“The app has fine-grained controls that will ensure that only the right people join,” says Chakravarthy.
For the mobile employees
There are several applications available to companies for enterprise communication in India. Skype for Business, Slack, and Flowdock, among many others, address the problem of being in touch with employees across all offices and branches a company might have. When asked about the well-rooted competition, Chakravarthy said, “These apps are great, but for the desk-bound employees. But for example, in an insurance company, if the manager wants to get in touch with an agent riding a moped on a hill in Shillong, he can’t reach him with Slack, because the agent is on WhatsApp.” According to Chakravarthy, people using their mobile phones 70 percent of the day lack an enterprise grade communication system that is easy to use. “Avaamo bridges this gap in an under-served market,” he claims.
Avaamo has 7,000 companies on board out of which, 3,000 are Indian companies – mostly insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and banks. “We focus on companies that have more employees on their mobile phones and provide a secure and easy communication platform on cheap Android phones,” adds Chakravarthy.
Messaging 3.0
“SMS was 1.0; Whatsapp, WeChat,and Line were 2.0; and we would like to think of ourselves as 3.0,” says Chakravarthy.
Recently, Avaamo introduced a ‘Smart Card’ as the latest addition to their app. Smart Cards are broadcast cards that allow sending out aggregated information to the members of a group on the app.
For example, the sales growth in a certain period of time can be sent out in the form of a card to employees. It can also be sent out as surveys for feedback or as a letter from the CEO. The employees can read it, reply, or ask for clarifications. “The read rates on HR surveys and letters are more than often under 10 percent and this feature will help them know how many employees are looking at the information on the card and responding. They can then take steps to improve the engagement rate,” says Chakravarthy.
The app also makes it possible to check-in so that the employee can be located on the map. Take an ATM servicing company, for example. It is necessary to know where their employees are so that they can promptly deal with any ATM-related issues by assigning the task to an employee in the vicinity of the ATM.
Chakravarthy believes that Avaamo is taking everyday business processes and making them mobile-ready.
The big hurdles before Avaamo in the way of further expansion in India as well as rest of Asia, in terms of communicating their product, is the bandwidth and battery. In India, people are concerned about keeping their phone alive and using their data cost-consciously. Also, the 3G infrastructure of India is less reliable compared to the other countries. Avaamo sees this as its main challenge.
The startup believes in the concept of information velocity. This concept deals with the speed at which messages are sent and ensures a short response time during conversations. To tackle fluctuating internet connection, Avaamo introduced its “fire and forget” feature, which ensures that the message that has been sent from a phone reaches the recipient irrespective of whether the sender has stable data or not.
Avaamo is a team of 40 based in both India and Silicon Valley. Menon is CEO and Chakravarthy is CTO at the startup. Even though the business has a global focus, Avaamo is currently seeing an unexpected yet welcome increase in customer traction in India. It has now set up a sales team focusing on increasing its customer base here.
In October of last year, the startup raised US$6.3 million in seed funding from WI Harper group, with participation from Streamlined Ventures, Rembrandt Ventures, Ovo Fund and Eleven Two Capital.
来源：Tech in Asia
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