Email is a funny thing. While many knowledge workers consider an overflowing email inbox as the bane of their existence, multiple attempts to find alternative solutions have proven unsuccessful. Email might be fundamentally broken, but it is still the place where everyone spends most of their time. Hence moving people to an alternative, even a better one, is hard. And it’s not for want of pretenders to the email crown that we’re still living in Outlook (or Gmail) – Google’s ill-fated Wave initiative, solutions trying to unify social and email inboxes into one and enterprise social networks have all tried to “disrupt” email – as yet nothing has stuck.
Oakland based Kato.im is a company hoping to make something of a dent into email-based collaboration. Kato.im delivers a real time collaboration tool for distributed and diverse teams. It’s Kato Teams product, being launched today, is a free chat solution that provides 1-to-1 and group messaging, file sharing and search. Unlike other similar free real time collaboration products, Kato has no limitation of team members, message history storage or multi-company functionality.
Speaking of the rationale for developing Kato, Founder and CEO Andrei Soroker says that:
Kato improves workplace productivity by helping business teams of all sizes and at every stage communicate more efficiently… Businesses continue to incorporate chat applications into their company’s communication plans to replace the clutter of traditional e-mail. We built Kato Teams for groups that communicate across departments, companies, and locations.”
In terms of how it works, Kato Teams has a user interface that enables multiple, side-by-side conversations. From a single window, members can display conversations from one or more teams, eliminating the need to toggle between internal chat, external messaging, or multiple browsers. Extra features of Kato Teams include:
- Global Search – global search functionality allows members to identify important conversations and company information through an archive of all previous communications
- 360° Communication – chat solutions across the web, mobile devices, and soon, native desktop applications
- Restricted Access - Admins can designate external members as restricted users with limited access to people or rooms within their company. Access levels can be changed at any time
- Noise Control – Adjustable noise level controls allow members to focus on the most important conversations while quieting rooms that don’t require immediate attention
- Third Party Integration – integrates with dozens of third-party services, such as GitHub and ZenDesk, to aggregate notifications from multiple tools into a single and searchable stream of information
I wanted to dive in with Soroker about how Kato will succeed where others have failed (and continue to try, Kato competes with Slack and, to a lesser extent, IM tools like Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Skype and Google Chat). I put some questions to him
BK - Will "real" companies trust a free product (also known as the Yammer or enterprise freemium conundrum)?
“Real" companies already “trust” free products - Facebook Messenger, Skype,
BK - Why has email always stuck and no one had any real luck displacing it?
The reason no one had any luck displacing email in large, complex companies and organizations is because no other solution - until now - had come close to scaling as well as email does while also retaining its data governance semantics. However, in almost all new startups, email has been displaced - and dramatically so - as a means of internal communication. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a startup coming out of an accelerator in 2014 that uses email for team collaboration.
BK - Discuss the complexity of managing multiple communications streams (email, social etc) and how Kato helps solve that problem
Aside from streamlining internal communications, it’s paramount to have a clear way of keeping a “pulse” in a modern organization. Most companies, on a daily basis, are dealing with dozens of parallel streams of activity - code commits, social media noise, subscription updates, all-company announcements, PR news, internal and external chat - each one coming from a different platform that requires back-and-forth toggling. Kato Teams makes it possible to pull all this noise into a single-window dashboard, and enables everyone at the company to decide how much of that noise is necessary for them personally. Now, instead of time wasted by jumping back and forth from email, Skype, Gchat, Uber, Dropbox for separate forms of communication with internal and external team members, users receive, with Kato, everything in one window, with side-by-side, continuous conversation streams.
MyPOV
I really like the Kato product and have tried using both it, and competing products. The reality for me however seems to be that I end up reverting to email every time – it really is that sticky. Add to that the fact that, while Kato and other tools may have had significant uptake within startups – shifting enterprise reliance upon email is an altogether more difficult challenge – seeing how social tools such as
Something needs to displace email, but paradoxically our reliance on the broken paradigm of email makes that a difficult task. Time will tell whether Kato will succeed where others have failed.
