Stealthmode is over and Contatta, the visionary new company co-founded by Pat Sullivan of ACT! and SalesLogix acclaim, officially launched as a public beta at the DEMO Fall 2013 conference.
In a survey by McKinsey Global Institute, the average worker spends more than a quarter of their day in their email inbox, and the average corporate email user sends and receives over 100 emails/day-and this time suck doesn’t include flipping back and forth to our social media applications or other communication outlets.
Watch Contatta’s DEMO Video here.
Contatta aims to help workers simplify and streamline our influx of communication into one centralized modern digital platform that works across any device and focuses on relationship-based messaging and contextual collaboration. Their team has built Contatta’s platform for efficiency and speed, and with its integrated system, it decreases the amount of time of switching between apps and communication outlets, thus saving time during the workday. They describe it as “a combination of top business programs – Gmail, ACT!, Basecamp, Yammer and Force.com.” It will be easy to “live in Contatta” as Sullivan has described to me.
“Messaging and collaboration is at the core of what we do and is the heartbeat of who we are,” Sullivan explains, “Contatta is designed for the way we communicate today. It’s a new type of platform – we are going back to the roots of what started it all – an effective and efficient way to make contact.”
“No matter how many collaboration tools are out there, why do most of us still revert to email as the central organizing principle in our work lives? Contatta brings email together with contact, collaboration, and group communication tools into one central place to build smarter organizations,” said Erick Schonfeld, executive producer of DEMO.
If you want to try it, Contatta is giving a free trial away to the first 10,000 people for 60 days. Sign up for it at Contatta.
Contatta describes three ways they will streamline businesses:
Contacts
Business revolves around making contact. Contatta makes it simple to track your relationships. With one click, Contatta automatically completes a contact record with social profile, company information, location and bio information – all without typing a thing.
Communication
Contatta’s three communication paradigms are email and discussion threading similar to the familiarity of Facebook. Now, you can see interactions with customers and internal team members and take offline discussions privately via email. Business teams can filter their Newsfeed by group or any user defined methodology, finding the important signal in the workflow stream. In fact, Contatta’s big data repository is fully searchable and referenceable so team members can view their workday for contextual business intelligence.
Contatta has completely redesigned the inbox as a relationship-centric messaging platform that categorizes email not based on chronology but on relationship. Team members can associate emails to an event, deal, workroom instead of using antiquated and inefficient “cc” or “bcc.” Want to save even more time? Contatta assigns reminders if there’s no reply and schedules follow-up tasks and events directly from email or sends them at a later date.
Dealing with workday interruptions has never been easy, but Contatta removes the stress by integrating with high GTD design – never lose your place again.
Collaboration
Today, people are using multiple systems to collaborate like email, company social networks, project management tools, calendars and task management systems. Contatta built a streamlined system that brings all of these collaboration points together to increase efficiency.
Contatta takes task management to the next level by automatically grabbing voice to text to-do’s and events from any mobile device, corresponding bidirectionally. You are able to use and leverage your smartphone or Siri to add messaging notes and tasks to keep on top of your digital world.
Contatta includes workrooms for collaboration with vendors, teammates, prospects or customers, including external users at no charge with multiple levels of privacy. Workroom users can access a timeline of all current information such as to-do’s, project plans, files and Dropbox urls.
Best of all, any and all data within Contatta can be subscribed to via RSS – contacts, companies, workrooms, deals — even down to the note level and can proactively notify you.
For the executive suite, Contatta’s bird’s eye view helps top-level management keep their finger on the pulse of the business. With Contatta, everything is now in one place without switching from platform to app and back. Business management is no longer “out of the loop” – Contatta integrates your entire team into one user experience shared across cross-functional business lines.
The Contatta Team
Sullivan is joined by co-founders Adam Ross and Patrick Sullivan Jr. who bring more than 30 years of combined experience in the areas of Sales, Product Design and Marketing Automation. Contatta’s board of directors currently includes such business luminaries as Roy Vallee, Former CEO and Chairman of the Board, Avnet; Brian Smith, Grayhawk Capital; Raymond Croghan, Croghan Investments & Board Director, Crocs and Clarke Miyasaki, General Partner, Kickstart.
Read about their raises here.