Former Microsoft Exec Rethinks Email For Mobile

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Name: Tipbit

One-Liner Pitch: Tipbit aims to be a smarter and more productive email client for mobile devices, starting with the iPhone.

Why It's Taking Off: The app serves as an all-in-one command center to view your email, calendar, contacts and documents.

If someone were to brainstorm a list of people who might try improving the email experience for an Apple product, a group of former Microsoft employees probably wouldn't be on the shortlist. But Gordon Mangione decided to do just that with Tipbit.

Tipbit, an email app for iPhone released on Thursday, aims to help users be more productive on the go by serving as a kind of all-in-one command center to check your emails, calendar, shared documents and contacts, including information from social networking accounts as well.

"No one can find anything any longer and no one can respond efficiently," Mangione, who worked as a VP at Microsoft for more than a decade, told Mashable in a recent interview. "That's the problem we need to solve."

While at Microsoft, Mangione helped oversee multiple products including Microsoft Exchange, the company's mail server. He left in the mid-2000s to work on XenSource, a software company which was later acquired by Citrix, but eventually found himself thinking about returning to mail products with a startup of his own.

A little more than a year ago, Mangione began assembling a team of engineers from Microsoft and Citrix to develop a more comprehensive email application. At first, the team focused on developing for desktop, but about four months ago they switched its focus to mobile instead. That shift came after a couple other mobile-first email products — most notably, Mailbox, an app later acquired by Dropbox for a rumored $100 million — started to get lots of attention.

"Most of the solutions that people are coming up with for mail on these devices is delaying your response. That was the big feature on Mailbox," Mangione says, referring to the option in Mailbox to schedule incoming messages to be resent later — or "triaging," as the founder of Mailbox refers to it. "Instead of doing triaging, we want you to do surgery: patch the patient up and send them on their way from the mobile device."

With that in mind, Tipbit attempts to give the user all the tools they would need to "do real work," as Mangione puts it. You can pull relevant documents from Dropbox, consult your schedule, pull emails from Gmail, Outlook or Microsoft Exchange, and check the latest tweets and Facebook posts from your contacts all without leaving the app. In that respect, the app functions somewhat similarly to Tempo, which merges the functions of multiple communications tools, except the focus here is on email rather than the calendar.

The all-in-one experience is both convenient and dizzying for casual users accustomed to email apps where the only options are reply and delete. But the robust options may prove enticing for professionals looking to manage emails and prepare for meetings while on the go.

"To think about email as separate from calendars and contacts doesn't make sense," Mangione argues. "How do you usually invite someone to a meeting? That triumvirate of email, contacts and calendars is so connected."

Tipbit came out of stealth mode over the summer and is currently still in beta. The startup, which has seven full-time employees, has raised $1.9 million so far from Andreessen Horowitz and Ignition Partners and is in the process of starting a new funding round.

As for why his team started with the iPhone rather than, say, Windows phones, his answer is pragmatic: "We really felt with such a small team, we should focus on the platform where the most number of email reads were happening," he says, before noting he's a regular iPhone user himself. Tipbit will either expand to iPad or Android next, but Windows is not in the immediate future.

Image: Tipbit