Kwaga celebrates its flagship service’s birthday with WriteThat.name presents for all

Posted by Anne de Forsan on mai 30, 2012 in PR | 1 comment

Paris, May 30, 2012 – Kwaga has announced today that WriteThat.name the online service that automatically updates email address books, just hit its first-year mark. To celebrate the event, Kwaga will be offering twenty-five percent discounts on all of its subscriptions and features from May 30 to June 7.

May 31st will not only be remembered for the birth of an innovative email service, but also the birth of a great universal soul, that of Walt Whitman nearly 200 years ago, who famously said:

  »If you done it, it ain’t bragging »

Since its launch a year ago, Writethat.name has analyzed more than 100 million emails and created 1.5 million contact cards for its international community of users.

  »We are pleased and proud with the success WriteThat.Name has had since its launch in 2011. We would especially like to thank our users for their confidence, for sharing the service within their communities, and also for their valuable feedback which enables us to continually improve this great application. Our success is also theirs, and that’s why we want to celebrate this first birthday with them! » said CEO Philippe Laval

And what’s a birthday without presents?

From May 30 to June 7, Kwaga is offering a 25% discount on first year subscription services:

• Premium version WriteThat.Name for $15/year instead of $20.
• HistoRecall, the tool that scans a year of emails for a fast, complete update, available at $15/year instead of $20.
• The Highrise connector that allows WriteThat.Name to update one’s CRM contacts from $2.25/month instead of $3.

Registration and purchases are available on the WriteThat.name site.

3 email solutions we love, and you will too

Posted by Brad Patterson on mai 21, 2012 in Productivity tool | 2 comments

How often have we heard the doomsday proclamation « email will be gone in a few years », and how often do we realize « nope, it’s here to stay for quite awhile yet ».  Plus, there’s so much innovation within the sector these days, that the pain points of email have really started to ease, and lots of messaging that use to happen via email is now finding its more appropriate channel via chat apps, yammer, and other collaborative messaging.

In the past three weeks, WriteThatname has been featured in a number of great articles, alongside other email innovators:

10 Gmail Addons for Email Productivity

5 Simple Tools That Make Email Suck Less

50 Ways to Make Email More Productive And Enjoyable

and the reality is that with so many options out there, there have got to be a few that are truly must-haves… here are our 3 medal winners:

1) Rapportive

This plugin slips easily into the right hand side of gmail (where Ads normally would be) and provides useful information about the contacts concerned in the email you’re writing or reading.  It shares their social media info, recent updates and important email exchanges between you and them. You have to give it a try here.
 
 

2) Sanebox

Sanebox does what priority inbox was supposed to do, and it does it much better, and then adds on handy other features like @saneblackhole, @sanenextweek @sanetomorrow and more.  Their service keeps what’s important in front of you, and the rest tucked away until you have time for it.  Oh, and they’ve saved 6,546,381 minutes for their users already, so let them help you too.

Your 2-week free trial awaits you at SaneBox

3) Boomerang

They just hit their 1,000,000 user mark and well-deserved!  I’ve been using personally for over a year and love it.  Started using it professionally and started getting this brilliant message:

Boomerang is great for scheduling emails.  Doing work internationally means that you might not want to send someone an email at 8PM or 2AM their time, or you know that they prefer getting emails at 11am.  Now it’s easy.  And the boomerang effect is magical for keeping tabs on whether a specific task moves forward, was replied to, or simply to add a reminder to contact someone 2 weeks later.

I don’t need 1 more message anymore as I’ve just upgraded ;-)

Give these apps a try and I’d love to hear what you think, or if you’d add on another « must-have »!

We’re hiring!!! Junior Middleware Developer

Posted by Brad Patterson on mai 15, 2012 in We need you | 0 comments

Ready for a coding adventure at Kwaga?

We are looking for a junior middleware developer who has already gotten his feet wet, and is hungry to be a part of a great startup!

Preferably someone in Paris with these required skills:

• Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)
• Java/J2EE, Web container (Tomcat 6)
• MVC Support (Struts2)
• Development support tools (Maven, Subversion, Eclipse and its related plugins)
• WebServices (Axis2 and its Eclipse plugin) would be a great plus
• Apache UIMA would be a great plus
• O/R Mapping (Hibernate) would be a plus
• Dependency injection and Inversion of Control (Spring) would be a plus
• HTML5+CSS+jquery would be a plus

Efficiency secrets revealed by Kwaga’s Bruno Foucault

Posted by Rachael Branum on mai 14, 2012 in In the Press | 0 comments

Here at Kwaga, we are all about increasing your efficiency. That is why we were so pleased when Marti Trewe asked Bruno Foucault, our new Deputy General Manager in charge of Business Development at Kwaga, to do an interview about his secrets to efficiency.

Check out this brilliant interview featured in AGBeat to see how Bruno keeps up with today’s business climate.

Have any secrets of your own? We would love to hear them!

Kwaga makes its confirmation emails optional for WriteThat.name

Posted by Anne de Forsan on mai 11, 2012 in PR | 4 comments

Established as a quality control feature, the option to activate or deactivate confirmation emails is now optional for all WriteThat.name users.

Paris, May 11, 2012 – Kwaga, the creator of WriteThat.name, the online service that automatically updates address books for Gmail, GoogleApps, Outlook (beta) and Lotus Notes’ users, has announced today that its confirmation email feature is now optional for all users.

This decision, taken the afternoon of May 10, is in response to the negative reaction by Sarah Perez,TechCrunch writer and enthused new user of the service. Sarah Perez in particular stated that this feature, which can be seen as quality control for contact updates, could be likened to spamming, and she was disappointed that only paying users could disable the option.

Kwaga has collaborated closely with its users since the launch of WriteThat.name to refine the quality of its service, and the decision was immediately taken to make this feature optional for all users. Philippe Laval, CEO at Kwaga further detailed this in a post promising to make sure the changes were in place within 24 hours, and this has since been executed.

« WriteThat.name continues to have wonderful growth throughout Europe and the United States, and the feedback from our users is very important to us, as their outside perspective helps to evolve the service to an ever greater quality. We could not allow users to think that WriteThat.name was spamming their contacts and have made immediate changes to this feature that we had implemented in good faith. » Commented Philippe Laval, CEO at Kwaga. »The update is now in place, and sincere thanks goes out to our users for their trust and to my team at Kwaga for their reactivity. »

What is the purpose of confirmation emails?
To ensure the quality of contact updates in WriteThat.name’s users’ address books, each time a new entry is detected, an email is sent to the new contact asking if the information detected is up-to-date. See an example of the email sent.

Optional for both Freemium and Premium
Until now, these emails could only be made optional as part of the Premium plan. Now both Freemium and Premium customers can disable/enable this feature in their « preferences » within their settings at WriteThat.name.

We’ll always do what’s best for our users

Posted by Philippe Laval on mai 10, 2012 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

 
UPDATE: Just got a very nice message from Sarah at TechCrunch, and I’m glad we were able to clear the air so fast: the wonders of modern communication!

——————-

We just had a bit of negative buzz on TechCrunch and it’s moving us forward: while we’ve seen the confirmation emails as a mostly win-win feature, this was not the case for everyone. This buzz, coming after glowing reviews, pushed us towards a decision: from now on, the confirmation email will be optional for all users, whether Premium or Freemium.

Here is a copy of the mail I’ve just sent to Sarah :

Dear Sarah,

 

I’m Philippe, the Founder of WriteThat.Name. I’ve just read your post and while it’s great to see that you were excited about the service, it’s tough to know that you view the confirmation emails in such a negative light.

 

As Brad said in his comment on the post, we saw this as both a quality control feature for us (especially at the start) and also a way that non-paying users could contribute to the overall quality of the service. More specifically, around 10 % of our premium users do actually opt to still send out confirmation emails.

 

That being said, our team has just had a little pow-wow, and in the end, I know that I created WriteThat.Name to make our users’ life easier, and above all not for anyone to think we’re spamming their contacts, be that the reality or not. SO, I’ve decided to make this confirmation feature optional for all our users, both freemium and premium. I’ll add this comment directly on your post right now and we’ll make an official announcement by this time tomorrow.

 
My hope is that this will make WriteThatName’s direction crystal clear and that you and our future users will never have second thoughts about leaving a service that they enjoy.

 

Thanks again for your thoughts.

 

Best,

Philippe

 

We live and we learn, and what’s important is that we create a service that is valuable to our users. Today, I’m even more confident that we’re heading in that direction!

Presse-Citron catches up with Kwaga

Posted by Rachael Branum on mai 10, 2012 in In the Press | 0 comments

In September of last year, Presse-Citron named Kwaga their first Startup of the Month. They checked back in with us last week to see what we’ve been doing lately. It was a great opportunity to reflect back on what changes we’ve made, how we’ve grown, and how we are making our services better for you, our customers!

All of my francophone friends out there, take a moment and check out this great interview by Valentin Pringuay – and keep us in mind at the end of this year as Presse-Citron asks you to vote for the French Startup Company of the Year.

Click here to read the full article.

For my English-reading friends, here’s a brief summary of what we’ve been up to in the past 8 months:

Fundraising – we announced in January, our first fundraiser of €1.2 million from private investors advised by Financière Fonds Privés. This allowed us add new personnel, bringing you a stronger, better Kwaga team.

Recruiting – allow me to introduce our new additions:

• Brad Patterson – Community Manager
• Adi Bein – Marketing Director
• Bruno Foucault Deputy General Manager in charge of Business Development focusing primarily on developing an ecosystem of third-party CRM vendors and system integrators for WriteThat.name. Bruno is the former CEO of Siebel France and his experience will be invaluable.

New Features
Launched in May 2011 for Gmail and Google Apps, WriteThat.name now works with Outlook (beta) and Lotus Notes.

We also launched a feature that either you love or haven’t tried yet: HistoRecall. This is an feature that allows WriteThat.name to scan all of the emails you’ve received the 12 months prior to registering for the service, and WriteThat.name will extract and update all new contact details found. It really is the logical addition for all users satisfied with our service.