Featured Company: CircleUp
Posted: 3/19/07
By John Payne, Co-Founder and CEO
In the past fifteen years email has gone from a techie tool used by engineers, academics and scientists to the defacto method of communication for hundreds of millions of people in all walks of life. Instant messaging has been hot on its heels in the younger demographic and is now reaching critical mass even in the enterprise. With daily emails worldwide totaling somewhere between 50 and 62 billion messages, an almost unmanageable torrent of information flows every single day. While one of the most common and potentially powerful uses of Internet communications is among groups, where it is the most widely used knowledge management tool in existence, email has proven itself to be relatively inefficient when it comes to group communication and information gathering.
What we’ve done at CircleUp (www.circleup.com) is create a social communication service that turbo-charges the email and instant messaging services already in use around the world today. As users ask questions and gather information from groups of any size, they get back a single, organized result that can be used and shared by ALL of the members of the circle instead of an overwhelming flood of emails and IMs. CircleUp is a communications service for real world groups that is built to make people’s lives easier and reduce information overload.
What is CircleUp?
Today, when you ask a specific question of online and “real world” communities you get back a blizzard of emails that often include random answers, distractions and extraneous details that complicate and delay the information gathering, collaboration and decision-making process. The problem today really has three parts:
You ask for information, opinions, decisions, facts or guidance from 30 people in a group you belong to, and you get back 35 emails or instant messages to sort through, including tons of “reply to alls” that really gum up the works.
You not only have to find and open all 35 emails or instant messages, but you have to painstakingly cut and paste the information you need to get the group information all in one place.
And once you have it in one place, it’s buried on your hard drive somewhere it can’t be used or shared by anyone but you!
CircleUp solves that problem with a unique new social communications service that gathers the answers and presents you and the group with a single, organized result that can be used and shared by everyone.
CircleUp is a free service for consumers, professionals and small businesses. There is no charge to ask or answer questions, and no registration, download, or membership required for those who are circled-up. The service uses your messaging credentials as a proxy for membership in a group you already belong to.
Who Uses CircleUp?
- Campus Clubs Use It: Send a CircleUp to 100 people in the campus ski club asking for drivers for the spring trip to Lake Tahoe. Get back a breakdown of who can drive, who needs a ride, and how many snowboards fit on top of each car instead of sorting through a flurry of 80 IM and email responses.
- Volunteer Fundraisers Use It: Send a CircleUp to the 65 members of the committee for the fundraiser asking, “Who can volunteer for the night of the event?” Get back a master list of who will do what, and when, instead of 50 emails and IMs.
- Politicos Use It: CircleUp with 100 local campaign volunteers to see who can attend the big rally, who needs a ride, who can drive and who has a truck or van to haul the really big signs. Get back a single list of all attendees that can be shared by riders and drivers.
- Coaches Use It: Expedite a CircleUp to the families of 20 kids who made the traveling team for the big soccer tournament, asking how many tournament T-shirts they want. Get back an exact list of shirt sizes instead of 27 emails and IMs.
CircleUp Results
How do I “CircleUp”?
CircleUp was created with the mainstream email and IM user in mind: techie or non-techie, the mom on the go, the soccer coach dad and the president of the university ski club
- Simply ask a question in the “What’s Your Question?” toolbar found integrated in messaging applications such as Microsoft Outlook or at www.circleup.com.
- Then choose a specific AnswerPattern, which determines how the results (answers) will be returned, putting an end to the back-and-forth that often goes along with getting incomplete or incorrect information – while organizing them in one single location. As they say, “If you ask a better question, you’ll get a better answer.”
If you are on the receiving end of a CircleUp question, you will get what looks like a normal email or IM from the questioner - a person you already know within your community. So, if you typically communicate with friends or colleagues through Yahoo! IM or through email, that mode of communication will not change. You will only realize that you’ve been circled up when a Flash-based QuestionBox widget with the sender’s picture appears on your desktop or in a browser to explain the question and collect your answer.
So Sally, who’s getting married, can circle up all the family and friends coming in to town for the wedding to see who needs a ride and what their flight and arrival information is. Then she can circle up her local friends and family to see who’s available to give rides from the airport. And perhaps most important, she can share the details of who needs a ride with the people available to give one by distributing a single tag.
In addition, Sally can select whether the discussion is public (to be shared with everyone), private (just for the circle that is responding to the question) or personal (only accessible to the question author).
Most widgets today are distribution endpoints, a way for someone to take something from his/her site and offer distribution everywhere. As you can see in Sally’s example above, we’re turning the traditional widget model on its head by using the widget as a collection endpoint. CircleUp widgets act as a tool to focus a user on a specific task and gather very specific information or decisions.
CircleUp Makes Group Communication Painless
When we first started CircleUp, our main concern was to make sure that our solution mapped to the problem consumers find most extremely painful – efficient communication in groups. We’re social animals, and participating in a wide variety of communities is a normal way of life for all of us. Email and IM have become the standard for communications among those groups, whether in sports, school, volunteerism, politics, online gaming, or even business. Our goal is to take the basic, extremely powerful tools we all use today and dramatically expand their efficiency where it counts the most -with the circles of people we interact with every day.
I founded CircleUp along with Doug Tung in 2006 and we officially launched at DEMO ‘07 in February. The company is headquartered in Newport Beach, Calif. and is privately funded to date.
CircleUp: www.circleup.com
---
StartUp Beat would love to hear from you. Please feel free to comment on this article or contact the editor at editor at startupbeat.com.
