DEMO: Cc:Betty makes email easier for collaboration

March 2, 2009 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

updated

A new company called Cc:Betty is making it a lot easier to follow email conversations.

Ever get fed up with tracking threads in your email inbox? Google’s Gmail was early to track conversation threads, but if you’re like me, it’s confusing, or at the least bothersome: You have to open the threads and scan through them all each time.

Cc:Betty, of Palo Alto, Calif., offers a single view of an entire conversation, and an overview of any files, places, images or videos included in the exchange. And you don’t have to wade through conversations opening emails.

The company just launched at DEMO here in Palm Desert, Calif.

Its beauty is simplicity. The only thing you have to do is cc your emails to Betty, and they’re collected automatically by its eponymous virtual assistant and presented to you on a centralized web page. Betty offers you a link to this site whenever you correspond with her, so that you can go there seamlessly during your work flow.

There’s no download, and it only requires your email address and password for registration. The person you’re emailing with doesn’t even have to be registered for the product to work.

It also collects all of your files (see image at bottom) under tabs, so that you can find maps of locations contained in your correspondence and related attachments in an orderly way.

The company was incubated in the offices of Venrock, a VC firm in Silicon Valley, and hasn’t raised a first round of capital yet. It was co-founded by Michael Cerda, previously founder of VoIP company Jangl.

The only thing the company needs to tackle is making it automatic to cc: Betty on all emails (so you don’t have to type it in each time). Already, Gmail gives you an option in settings to have all mail cc’d to a particular person, so the app works well there. The company is currently developing plugins to make this possible for other email products.

Well, the other thing is figuring out a way to make money. In this department, Cc:Betty is working on a couple of distribution deals with bigger Web players.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • mlstotts
    Michael Cerda was co-founder, along with Ben Dean of Jangl, which was acquired by JahJah. Can't wait to start using CC:Betty.
  • jspace
    Jangl was not acquired by Jajah. Live Universe acquired it after Micheal and Ben ran out on the company leaving it and the employees to fade away.
  • Email Boy
    I really like this concept. I live in email and end up in large e-mail threads all the time. I also loose attachments related to specific threads. After trying out this product I can see how it's going to help. It's like a light-weight Evite, Xoopit, and Wiki enabled through email. Brilliant.
  • Sandy's sister? :-)
  • Salil Pradhan
    very cool stuff!
  • Timothy Johnson
    @jspace -- I was with Michael and Ben at Jangl almost from the beginning that's not how it went down at all. You couldn't have asked for two more loyal co-founders than those two. They fought their asses off to get the best exit possible for everyone involved. Unfortunately, a few disgruntled, anonymous folks choose to completely misrepresent things. Michael and Ben are class acts who work hard and take care of people. Period, end of story.
  • Style Police
    That's got to be the ugliest user interface since the original MyBlogLog.
  • Matt Marshall
    Whooops, meant to say Jangl. I've updated. Cerda and a few other Jangl employees joined Jajah when Jangl closed down. Jangl's assets were indeed sold to Live Universe.