Hiri, the Email Re-invention
Established in 2012, Hiri is a startup based in Dogpatch Labs Dublin dedicated to fixing email for large companies. Hiri will streamline email communication within organisations.
“Email is still the best invention there’s ever been in the tech world; it’s even more important than the Web, because it’s completely reliable and everyone has it.”
– Jason Fried, founder, 37signals
We depend on email, but email hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years, even though the amount of mail we send and receive increases every year. As a result, we spend far too much time managing our mail – over 2.5 hours every day.
And it’s not just the volume of mail that causes the problems. Bad habits make up a lot of this time. For example, the average employee checks their mail every 5 minutes. That’s 96 times a day. Every time you check your mail it takes you 60 seconds to get back to actual work. Hiri features timers that remind you not to check your mail so often, helping you knock the habit. By fixing these kinds of bad habits, Hiri saves you 30 minutes every day. 30 minutes may not sound like a lot, but for a company with just 400 employees that’s a saving of 6,500 man days each year! Imagine what a company like Telefonica, with quarter of a million employees around the globe could save.
But it’s not all about saving time. Hiri separates the things you need to do from the things you need to know about. Hiri does away with the To: and CC: fields and replaces them with Actionable or FYI. This way the things people ask you to do end up in an Actionable inbox, and the things you just need to know about end up in an FYI inbox.
Ever wanted to be a teacher and grade other people’s essays? Now you can. With just a click of your mouse you can rate your colleague’s email and help them improve their communications skills. Hiri also lets you turn your emails into a To Do list – all you need to do is drag and drop. The interface is pure eye candy, which makes you wonder whether you’re working or having fun.
On the technical side, Hiri posed a series of challenges for the developers. Hiri is built in Python and uses PyQT and QML. These are brand new technologies that enabled Hiri to create the cutting edge user interface Hiri has, and run Hiri on any platform. But it also brought challenges. The Razor developers had to make up for the lack of libraries for accessing Exchange and LDAP, create custom user interface components, and support other backends such as IMAP.
According to Hiri CTO Milorad Pop-Tosic: “We’re also proud that we have been able to make all these different emails look good and readable – a feature that nobody has yet tried to do. Of course, we had plenty of challenges to make the app fast, responsive and not require a lot of memory. But we’ve solved them all. Razor’s developers are simply top class”.
Hiri will teach you how to improve your email habits and make organising your email super simple. More importantly, Hiri helps you spend a lot less time in your inbox, saving your time and money on the way.
