Vardhan Koshal is the co-founder of Ridingo.com, a Forbes Hottest Global Startup. He shares his learnings on startups, business and technology regularly at his blog on Medium at medium.com/@vardhankoshalI just managed to get my hands on Google’s new email client, if we call it that, “Inbox”. No I do not have invites yet 🙂
To give you a summary of what it does:
- In a single sentence, it combines Gmail, Google Keep and Google Now in an email client.
- It is a substitute of Gmail.com and Gmail mobile app, but only for personal ([email protected]) addresses.
- It groups your emails into bundles like time (month, last week etc.), travel, purchases, promotions etc.
- You can swipe away the whole bundle to be archived once you are done with those emails. Previously you could swipe-archive single emails.
- It integrates reminder functionality to emails which you can use by swiping emails to the left side on mobile app. You can also set reminders independently to the mails from within the app.
- It gives contextual information like Google Now: Tickets, travel reminders, purchase shipment info etc.
Why it matters?
Our generation suffers from information overload and associated notifications anxiety, where every interaction has an email tied to it. Every communication (save few between close friends and family), subscriptions, purchases, invitations, meetings etc. takes the form of an email, and till now we have done a poor job in structuting that information.
Gmail tabs were a huge relief, but it was less intuitive and resulted in large piles of unread mails in obscure tabs called “promotions” or “social”, even those which we would have liked to read. Inbox solves this problem beautifully.
Cleaner
It helps you create your own context and priorities on the top of auto-classification like “updates” and “promotion” in a way where every mail have an equal opportunity to prove its utility to you.
The “About Us” page on Google says:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
And Inbox is definitely a huge step ahead in the direction of organising the information buried in our emails.
While there is a lot to be worked upon, Inbox represents a long overdue innovation in email and things should only get better.
Here is the introduction video:
Inbox by Gmail
If it excites you, the best way to get the invitation is to send an email to [email protected] from your gmail account.
Let me know your thoughts in comments or at @vardhankoshal on Twitter.
