Let me introduce myself, I am not a professional HR manager nor a team builder or another gourou. In fact I just finished my Masters in Data Science, and together with engineers and business enthusiasts, we have decided to create PiPle. Our goal is to rethink messaging and team interactions within the company and the society.
H
aving grown up using chat technologies, we feel there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we communicate and that, surely, it can be done better.
I come from a world different than the one of business managers and senior team leaders. I have always lived with social media, video games, hyper-connectivity and Internet. And most of the time, communications and dialogues feel like a bottleneck. It is slow, redundant and inefficient.
All in all, there is a gap between what we can do with today’s technology and how we use it in our daily discussions.
We can have billions of interconnected computers but we cannot manage to have 5 people discussing together in a quick and organized way.
While I think that this observation is shared by everyone, we have a tendency to get used to the status quo and this is why change might come from outsiders.
It is crazy to know that today, one fourth of one’s daily work activity is just about replying, sorting and managing emails. Another example, in 2017 US companies booked a total of more than four hundred million flights for the sole purpose of “enabling” communications. It means that people are not able to understand each other in any other way, and at what cost.
This is because for centuries our communication system has been based on face to face interaction and mails. With such restrictions, communication between many, was intractable and could only flow two ways one to many, using clear directives, or many to one, with votings. In the case of groups of people this process is basically repeated until reaching an agreement. In this system, it is frequent that some great ideas are never heard, some people cannot express themselves and many are misunderstood.
You could say that this was “before”, and now, emails, SMS, Messenger, Snapchat and Whatsapp have revolutionized our communications and answered those problems.
But what has really changed between a Whatsapp text, an email and a letter? It is faster and there might be more colors, sure , but the underlying rules remains the same. One could say that more information can be displayed and that it is more interactive. This is first step, but we unfortunately use the same paradigm: It is a linear one to one thread that is fundamentally meant for two people and not for groups.
The thing is that everyone wants and needs to converse in groups, and when people have the possibility to do so, they do it. Ask the young generation how much of their daily exchanges are made in groups? My little brother receives more than half of his texts on whatsapp groups.
We can see that there is efforts from the big players to remediate to this problem, trying to launch upvotes, emojis, in-message replies, etc…
But these, to us, are just short sighted fixes to a system that is not meant for groups.
With this in mind, we set out to create PiPle.
The thing is that everyone wants and needs to converse in groups, and when people have the possibility to do so, they do it. Ask the young generation how much of their daily exchanges are made in groups? My little brother receives more than half of his texts on whatsapp groups.
If we had to invent messaging today, how would we do it?
What today’s usages tell us is that PiPle needs to be interactive, responsive, intelligent and open to many modalities.
What today’s apps tell us is that:
- If we cannot show everything at a glance, let’s design multiple layers of information.
- If we have the possibility, let’s embed the information in the image, movement and structure of our designs.
- If as a closed organization we cannot provide for every needs of our consumers, let’s open our code for everyone to extend it.
- If we want companies to trust us, let’s design PiPle with them, and use their data to provide them with useful information on the interactions inside their companies, while ensuring the privacy and ownership of their data.
And, If google maps can let you interact with Planet Earth, we can definitely let you interact with one conversation.
Each message is a bubble which is an object that can contain any media
You can have multiple replies to every message and Bubble sizes are function of the number of replies and upvotes.
There are different levels which let you see Particular replies
The thread of a conversation, or even a full discussion and its important informations.
Notice that :
- Trends are automatically created by the natural following of replies. Importance is mediated by size.
- Communication speed is increased by allowing many people to speak at the same time.
- A 2D surface means that we are now ordering the messages according to both time and topics.
This is definitely more than your regular email exchange. We call such a leap Augmented Messaging and we think that PiPle is the first of its kind in this new breed of messaging technologies.
We believe that augmenting our ability to do something as ubiquitous and human as conversation might revolutionize many parts of our society, from forums discussion to parliamentary debates and even ground operations.
But, we want to focus our efforts on businesses first. We think that it is the best way for our team to start and learn. It presents limitless possibilities in sizes and needs, and it is where we have sensed the greatest need for our technology.
We wish to bring PiPle to market in a beta version at the end of the year, we are officially starting in May at an incubator in Paris. We have secured our first 30k€ funding and are looking for as many talented and bold people as we can find.
PiPle is open-sourced and anyone from anywhere can participate to this adventure, so let’s start and change the world together!
