Editor’s note: Tom Limongello is based in NYC and is VP of Product Marketing for Crisp Media.
Another startup with ‘cloud’ branding, CloudMagic, wants their mobile email client to be the dominant window to productivity on mobile. Co-Founder Rohit Nadhani realized that 80 percent of searches from his toolbar in the first iteration of the CloudMagic product were used to search within email. Rohit explained that the reason we hadn’t seen apps improve much on Apple’s Mail for iPhone was because other apps were not able to run in the background and therefore relegated to IMAP, which didn’t include ways to store email for quick search. So, he moved in a different direction that enabled an ability to act upon emails immediately.
CloudMagic now uses the card metaphor popularized by Google Now to bypass app switching. It integrates note taking and project management tools right into your email by using APIs from apps like Evernote and Trello to tag and delegate tasks from the email body. Rohit feels that the catch-all email addresses that started in the 2000s like plans@tripit.com were great if they performed a function like automated scheduling, but have since just become catch-alls that vaguely push work away from you but don’t provide real value.
For some, the new markup feature on Apple’s OSX Yosemite doesn’t go far enough to bundle features into the email workflow. Eric Saund and his team of researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) are looking to get images into more Office application workflows. They started with computer vision research and applied to document authoring tools to create WYPIWYG  (What You Perceive is What You Get) to interpret salient objects in common with what the user perceives, which allows tap-selection of meaningful objects in the scene. They would like to offer for all devices a bundled email service that includes uninhibited sketching, text, graphics, rich layout, and document markup in an email authoring tool.
“An email message is no longer a string of characters, it’s a canvas that hosts mixed content and AI-driven authoring support,” Saund says. “‘Visual email’ should include lightweight feedback on documents and slides, design collaboration, engineering discussion, and sales conversations.”
Deleting metaphors 
Quip, billed the  “Word for the mobile generation,” claims to drastically reduce if not remove email from the workplace. I spoke with Quip’s head of Business Operations Molly Graham who only has an email address to communicate with people outside of her company. Quip’s take on mobile-first design is to tether each document to a messaging stream, so that you can talk about the document without attaching versions of documents to email. This goes a step further than track changes in Microsoft Word and Gtalk comments in Google docs, where in Quip the interface looks more like Facebook Messenger than just margin notes.
Graham laughed as she showed there’s no need for a ‘spinner’ in Quip because documents are accessed instantly. This is called “collaborative syncing,” she says, and it is how Quip gets rid of “files” and versioning within the app, which still exists in Evernote as notes need to be reconciled as they are separate versions.
“We think intermingling features is essential on mobile,” she adds. “There are two main things that people tell us about Quip that they love. First, integrating communication and messaging with content, and not having to switch to email to be able to talk to people about the document. The second thing they love is the integration of a checklist and a table into a document.”
For Quip to maintain a lightweight user experience, it does have to let go of some control. Quip attempts to deliver easy formatting to serve the 80 percent of users who had used Excel for things like bachelor party RSVP lists, rather than financial models. At this stage Quip is there to help handle most of the document creation process, but is not looking to own that last mile of margin tweaking and print formatting.
“We expect users to write in Quip and then format after they export back to Microsoft Word,” Graham says. “Our product is the best for that one paragraph that in a long document that 90 people have an opinion on and need to mark up.”
What about Excel and PowerPoint? 
Excel and PowerPoint are traditionally products that are seen as impossible to improve upon, but are spoken of in the same breath as old and outdated. They may not really be ready to get a mobile phone makeover, but iPad apps abound. Two startups in particular that are working out of Valuestream Labs, a FinTech accelerator in NYC, are focusing on the Office 1 percent problems.
It is understood in the term “death by PowerPoint” that there’s a challenge when most MBAs, consultants and finance people who are not designers try to arrange information for public consumption, and this was recently illustrated by a designer trying to lend Mary Meeker a hand in cleaning up her yearly opus.
Pellucid Analytics takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date.
However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets.
Of all the Office products, Excel is likely the toughest beast to slay. Dean Zarras’s ClearFactr stops short of mobile, but it is worth including as a cloud-based product that wants to improve upon Excel by making it a communication tool.  Zarras feels Excel is not a communication tool because it is too easy to botch the communication of your idea when $F12 cell symbolism gets in the way, which is why ClearFactr toggles those cell references with a description in English of what’s happening in each cell.
Whether you are in a bank, big corporate or even a small business, there is a tendency to have one person build a spreadsheet and only that person understands it. The big question most people have is, how much effort does a startup have to put in until there’s a value over just using Excel? Zarras says that when collaboration through natural language, version control and advanced auditing tools can let a user evaluate time-series data, and limit ‘spreadsheet risk’, then there is a value over Excel. (Spreadsheet risk may sound like a joke, but it’s the excuse that BoA leaned on when it restated 4 billion in earnings and in the EU there’s even an organization to clarify best practices called the European Society of Spreadsheeting.)
I’m not saying you should start thinking of your MacBook as only an expensive suntanning reflector, and you may be thinking that running your business from your mobile phone would be a nightmare.  But wouldn’t it be nice to just finish your work right on your phone?
