Kyle
I’ve been pretty hard on the “Mailbox” app, and for good reason. In my opinion they had the best marketing I’ve ever seen (in 1 year with nibletz and 4 as thedroidguy) for any app release, ever. At the end though, the cute, hipster email sensation left me with email blue balls.
The Mailbox app prompted me to write this post “Am I the only one one earth who thinks Mailbox suck” two days before any other journalist stepped up and called them out. Finally, Nicholas Carlson at SAI posted his thoughts, that were inline with mine.
Low and behold, a messiah rose out of the email heavens on Friday afternoon at SXSW when Andrew Eye, the CEO at Taskbox pitched a new form of email, blending your email with your tasks in a way that’s natural for business. My only regret so far is not spending time with him on Thursday night on the ATX startup crawl, so I could have started to use Taskbox even earlier.
So in his pitch Eye reveals some interesting information that makes sense. With the rise in smartphones and the mobile first experience, people are checking their email 40% more by mobile than on a computer. My hand is raised on that one for sure. On the computer there are plenty of ways to delegate your email flow, on mobile not so much. On the Mailbox app, delegation just sucks.
Eye is no stranger to technology, he’s been a software architect for NASA and the U.S. Marines. Taskbox is also a Capital Factory startup, which just happens to be run by email startup king Joshua Baer.
So after using Taskbox for the last 18 hours or so and driving the crap out of it, here’s what I like.
- deleting: even though its swipe deleting it doesn’t require that long press that Mailbox does, just swipe to the left real fast and it’s gone. It leaves a second ask up on the screen but if you’re deleting quickly once you swipe the next message the first is gone
- calendar priority assignment. If you want to delegate an email for later in the day or week you can do it easily. You’re not just throwing it in a “later” bucket, you can assign a date. For example, I’ve gotten a bunch of emails during SXSW that I want to return when I get home, I just assign them for the day I’m home. They don’t sit in a later bucket with 100 other emails they go to the date I want. (it makes you look more punctual)
- Folders, all of my gmail labels are in Taskbox, where Mailbox only had three labels and labels I didn’t use.
So if you fell for the Mailbox app like I did, I highly suggest you check out the right box, task box. Check out Eye’s pitch below from the SXSW panel “Startups Immune To The Series A Crunch”, and for more visit taskbox.co
