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‘What’s hApp’ening Flock?

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Pratima Harigunani
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Pratima H

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MUMBAI, INDIA: The early bird catches the worm, but what about the worm?

May be that’s the question that beeped in the right-hand-side brain of Bhavin T, CEO of Directi when he incubated the first few vibes for a business-chat application.

Most of use use words like ‘crawling through files’ or ‘worming one’s way through endless meetings’ when one conjures up images of a typical day at work chained by mediocre or absent collaboration tools. Ironically then, as much as one can spot home pigeons as well as field sparrows and sea gulls in the always-on app fauna, not many have attempted distinguishing the feathers before humming a woo-note. Enterprise-apps are almost conspicuous by their absence in this vast and teeming forest.

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Would Bhavin’s offering be able to ‘flock’ the right feathers together despite distractions like BYOD, Internal IT contingent, user addiction to already-dominant apps and usability gaps? Here’s what he is slicing.

Why something like Flock? Why Now?

It’s the equivalent of consumer-popular apps for business and meant specifically for communication between teams, at workplaces. The consumer-messaging space is very crowded and this is one niche where we can allow for better, faster sharing of ideas and fill gaps in collaboration. This is ‘in’ and not ‘outside’ the scope of an organization, specially as other breed of apps are not standardized. It can get frustrating for users and employers because personal and work conversations get mixed. Here after 5 pm, you can be sure of being free of those constraints.

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In short, Flock.co is a free and simple chat app to power business communications, available for download for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Chrome. Flock has been developed with love in India. Every business chat app is either bloated with features, built to be crippled in some way, or mixes business and personal communication. Flock challenges these popular apps, presenting one simple service: instant messaging built for the enterprise. Messaging/chat is a crowded space, but nobody's nailed it yet for business.

Usually BYOD policies act as killjoy for new mobile add-ons and there are reasonably serious factors like containerization, privacy, security to reckon. Have you taken that into account?

One big value proposition of this app is that it would be extremely useful for enterprises for precisely those reasons. In absence of an apt app, people are using hangouts, BBM, What’s App etc and trying to manage security, control over these conversations. As good as they are in their own space; these alternatives are not an apt environment for business communication. Flock, on the other hand, does not require IT approval as it is built from grounds-up approach and has an administrator interface for better, tighter control that IT would desire. The SSL-secured layer and other features take care of security.

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Does that mean it can be leveraged as a collaboration tool, specially in a phase where consumer-storage options like Dropbox or Onedrive have become street-talk? Also, what about high levels of usability and design which consumer-app users must have gotten used to?

Yes, this complements cloud options and we intend to provide integration with Dropbox etc so that any sharing requirement is addressed right there, we would be working on this and similar other capabilities very soon. Flock is free, easy to use, doesn't require IT to set up, bridges desktops and mobile, and runs on any platform, speeding up and simplifying the way workplaces communicate. Our app is very user-friendly, can use viral features and allows frictionless conversations that are vital for work and productivity.

So this would be beyond ‘Behind My Back IT’ for IT departments?

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IT Departments will take some time to catch on and Shadow IT remains a valid issue. The paranoia around it will exist for some time but over time the scenario would relax. Over time, things would evolve for everyone’s benefit.

What’s the monetization model for the app and who would you woo – the IT guys or the device-owners?

Flock is not intended to be worked that way, it is free. There are other products that we would introduce around it but that’s for later. We would chase both audiences – users as well as IT departments.