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SF App Startup Cola Creates 'Slack For The Rest Of Us'

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There's no end of messaging apps that let you exchange texts, photos and videos with friends--Whatsapp, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and so on. There are also a lot of business-oriented apps such as Slack , HipChat, and Yammer.

But what about a messaging app that lets you address the space in between entertainment and work, which is to say coordinating and planning activities with a few friends or coworkers? That's what Cola aims to do.

Today the San Francisco-based startup is launching a limited, private beta test of an app that uses messaging as the basis for a wide variety of common things people want to get done, from figuring out where and when to meet with friends and creating joint to-do lists to tracking expenses at work and even engaging in multi-player games. The idea, says cofounder and CEO David Temkin, is that messaging has emerged as the most important function of a smartphone and even the foundation of many apps on the smartphone, from Uber to DoorDash to Venmo. "We are entering an era when messaging is the central app, like the browser was for the Web," says Temkin.

Indeed, Temkin hopes to make Cola the first "messaging OS," a platform on which activities that need to be coordinated among a small number of people can get done using messaging as the essential delivery mechanism. Cola, whose name was chosen to suggest "collaboration" without actually using a word that sounds mostly like work, was still playing with the language to describe itself Wednesday. That's an indication that the company is still feeling its way toward the clear value proposition it will need to communicate.

For now, it's trying several descriptions, all aimed at busy people on the go. The tagline at the top of its homepage is "Don't just text. Do something." And the tagline on a demo video calls it a somewhat more geeky "autocomplete for your day." But the pithiest description comes from cofounder Marc Canter: "Slack for the rest of us."

OK, so how does it work? The beta app, which will be available first on Apple's iOS and likely early next year on Android, looks like the messaging app it basically is. Everything starts with a conversation with another person, or among a group of up to 50 people.

Once a message opens the conversation, Cola brings up a list of several possible actions called "bubbles" (yes, Cola bubbles) that people commonly want to complete throughout the day. That includes "When Can We Meet?", "Where Are You Now?", "Take Photo Or Video," "To Do List," and "Quick Poll." In other words, they're mini-apps contained within messages.

Tap "When Can We Meet?", for instance, and a calendar for the next few days appears. You choose several possible times, and those appear instantly on the screens of the people you messaged. They choose options that work for them. Once each person agrees on a common time they can meet, that can be added to their calendars.

At least in the demo, that whole process took only a few seconds. Wireless glitches aside, a couple of the other options appeared to work quickly as well. "Where Are You Now" lets you "advertise" your location for a certain period of time so others in your conversation know where you are, in real time--no more multiple texts while you're driving to tell people how late you will be to a meeting.

The big advantage here is the speed with which these tasks can be carried out. You don't have to open multiple apps such as messaging, calendar, and maps in a cumbersome series of steps that some call "pogo-sticking" in order to tap into the functions of those apps. In a real sense, you're sending apps or selected functions of an app through the message. "It's about getting you through your day quicker," Temkin says. "We're winning when people send fewer texts."

If you don't have the app, by the way, you can still get the bubbles through your default text messaging app, though you're prompted to get Cola for the full-featured experience, such as the ability to initiate a conversation.

The next step for Cola, and it's a key one, is to engage outside developers to create their own bubbles with apps embedded inside them. The bubbles are engineered so that they can "talk" to external apps and services such as Uber and the FlightAware flight tracker using their APIs (application programming interfaces).

Temkin aims to have hundreds of bubbles, maybe many more, created by outside developers so more tasks can get done within Cola. The developers could be those apps themselves, such as Uber or FlightAware, or independent developers that might mix and match existing app capabilities to create a bug tracking system, an expense reporting system or even multiplayer games.

So how does Cola make money? TBD, but the idea is a freemium model like Evernote's or Dropbox's. Temkin won't hazard a guess yet on what features Cola might charge for, but if and when a significant number of people get hooked, there's usually a way to persuade them it's worth paying for more features.

The 10-person company includes a number of Silicon Valley veterans besides Temkin, who most recently was chief technology officer at Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), a former executive at AOL and Palm, and an engineer who worked on Apple's early mobile device Newton. Others on the founding team include Macromedia founder Marc Canter; onetime Adobe engineering director Mike McEvoy; Jeremy Wyld, a member of Apple's original iPhone engineering team; and Brian Maggi, founder of Postini. The company has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, Tribeca Angels, and other individual investors such as AOL cofounder Steve Case and longtime tech executive Brad Garlinghouse.

The big difficulty with any app is getting enough people to try it to get a virtuous cycle of use going. Cola is no exception. The company also needs to make it very clear why people would want to try what at least superficially looks like yet another messaging app when most people have too many of those on their phones already.

Cola competes at least nominally with any messaging app, of course. Although it's focused on the U.S., its notion of doing everything within a messaging app echoes that of China's WeChat. Cola also goes up against as any number of single-purpose apps such as sports calendar TeamSnap and multipurpose apps such as Pingpad for social productivity and Evernote for creating an online workspace. Most of all, it competes with existing, if imperfect, ways of coordinating and getting things done with other people, whether it's email or shared Google Docs.

But Temkin believes no other company competes directly with its approach. It's possible Cola is on to something valuable no one else has picked up on, but the flip side of a product that doesn't have a direct competitor is that perhaps nobody really needs it. There's no telling whether there's enough market space between messaging for entertainment and messaging for work until Cola is out in the wild for a few months.

Despite the wondrous capabilities of the smartphone, it remains too hard to get things done quickly on them. For all the challenges, Cola has identified a problem that a lot of people want solved.

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