TechCrunch50 in 2008, an e-mail management service that was acquired by Return Path in 2011. His previous two mail-centric startups were UnsubCentral and Skylist, which he started out of his Carnegie-Mellon University dorm room.
Since we now spend a fourth of our time on reading and responding to e-mail—according to a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute—and we are getting slammed with more of it year after year, e-mail is a pain point that is ripe for innovation, entrepreneurs say.
In my quick and extremely unscientific try-out of Boxer, I found the “quick responses” helpful, though I would like to add a few customized ones. I liked being able to click on a large icon of the sender’s initial and immediately call up their contact card, instead of having to fish through contacts to find the information.
However, I found out that you have to set your phone to “silent” when you sleep. Otherwise you will be jolted by buzzes each time an e-mail comes over the transom. (This happened because I use my iPhone as my alarm, not because I’m addicted to e-mail, of course.) If I set my phone to completely “silent,” I might miss someone trying to reach me overnight.
“We’re all in an information overload,” says Johnston at Engine.co, who was motivated to start his company after he found himself staring at 50,000 e-mails in his inbox. “The idea is showing you what’s important when you need it.”
