Harpoon Addresses Email Overload With Artificial Intelligence in Kickstarter Campaign
A new app called Harpoon promises to slay the email monster once and for all. By applying advanced artificial intelligence and a novel communications markup language, Harpoon is a combination of smartphone app and back-end computing power promises to distill emails into text-message like bits that can be quickly responded and dealt with.
Austin, TX, October 21, 2015 (Newswire.com) - The world is plagued by a monster named email. A new app called Harpoon promises to be the weapon that helps stop it once and for all. By applying advanced artificial intelligence and a novel communications markup language, a combination of smart-phone app and back-end computing power promises to distill emails into text-message like bits that can be quickly responded and dealt with. Following a successful alpha development phase to execute a proof of concept, Harpoon has bypassed the traditional venture capital route and went straight to its audience with a Kickstarter campaign that aims to raise funds to push development to the next phase.
Started by a trio of successful entrepreneurs in order to deal with the unmanageable amount of emails they were getting each day, Harpoon quickly became a hit when an early version developed as a proof of concept garnered interest from colleagues and friends. Realizing that they had a potentially game changing app in their hands, the idea to grow into a full product turned into a Kickstarter campaign to raise the necessary funds to take it further.
“The interest we were getting from everyone we showed the app to was amazing. It really made us think that this cool tool we made for ourselves might be a hit!” Said Blake Love, one of the founders, who previously created a successful company that built custom websites. “At first we just wanted a way to manage our mailbox, but the interest we received made us realize that there is really a lot of demand for a solution like this.”
The three love to tell how they met one day to eat at a greasy dive in Austin to talk about new business ideas, and found themselves on their phones, reading and answering a flood of emails and text messages from various sources. “We each have multiple projects happening at the same time, but your phone doesn’t know that, so to it everything is important at all times. And that’s a problem: There is no context! And we looked at each other and said: We know how to solve that. We should! And we did.” Added Tiago Soromenho, another of the founders, who previously created a successful loyalty platform that was recently acquired by a global mobile payment company.
“Our key insight was that all communications can usually be reduced down to simple components. Tasks. Meeting requests. Questions. Files or links. By detecting key indicators, and contextualizing them with time, location, sender, schedule, keywords, etc. we end up with a really useful filter that saves you time by calling out those contextually important messages, and filing the rest into categories for easy retrieval later,” concluded Emmert Ott, the third founder, who previously was lead architect for the world’s largest payment processor.
The trio came up with the name because it reinforces the idea that the service is proactive in hunting down the most important communications that need to be paid attention to, while spearing all the ones that don’t. Their video on Kickstarter features a satisfying and spectacular harpooning of a laptop with a real harpoon, alongside explanations of how the app works, and what is still needed to be developed. The three are excited about the drive to reach their goal and share their amazing app with the rest of us.
