A San Diego startup founded by a couple of Qualcomm alums yesterday introduced its first commercial product, a system for Android-based mobile devices that organizes the daily flood of e-mail, calendar notices, alerts, text messages, and social media messages.
Baback Elmieh and Rachid El Guerrab founded Human Engines in 2008, initially providing customized user-interface technologies for Qualcomm and other “big brand” clients and partners that now include Google, Kyocera, and Lenovo. Because venture capital has been hard to find in San Diego, Elmieh says they initially bootstrapped Human Engines, and later raised some capital from their friends and families.
“We were immediately cash-flow positive and revenue-generating,” Elmieh says. “We’re 10 people and one of the cool things about the company is that we’re very interdisciplinary.”
The company describes Influx, its new commercial product, as a next-generation “universal inbox” that manages and streamlines the information overload that can burden heavily scheduled mobile users.
Influx organizes all of the events on your Android calendar into a daily “timeline viewer,” a display that Human Engines describes as its key innovation. The timeline, which can be scrolled, automatically combines incoming messages from a variety of sources and sorts them, according to when they came in, along the timeline. In essence, Influx is a visualization tool that flows like a river of information throughout the day.
“Currently, most people have to access corporate email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, calendar, and browser alerts in separate applications,” Elmieh says in a statement the company issued today. “It’s enough to create more than a little confusion in our busy lives. Influx simplifies things, and puts the focus back on the comprehensive user experience versus individual applications.”
Elmieh says the multi-disciplinary nature of Influx represents a new category of what he calls user experience (UX) technologies. It also explains why
