The Kippt Team Releases Inc for Lightweight Team Communications

    Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo, the team behind Kippt, last week released Inc, a new company communications tool aimed at startups and other organizations. At first an email replacement might feel like a strange direction to go in after bookmarking, but they built it out of necessity.

    “We noticed the need for it while working on Kippt, but since companies had different needs and requirements, we spinned it out as separate product,” says Saarinen.

    There are plenty of company communication alternatives out there, but Inc has the team’s nice design sense, and feels properly lightweight (perhaps because the tool was created in a little over a month). We’ve tried out a number of team communication tools at ArcticStartup, like Basecamp, Yammer, and Asana, but none of them have really stuck.

    Inc has pretty basic features, such as a lobby where users can post links, text, or Dropbox files. An “alerts” page can get you up to date with all the activity happening between your team, and the last real feature is the search function.

    We’ve only been testing out Inc for the past few days here, so it might still be the honeymoon period, but it seems to be a good fit for replacing email between ourselves. A lot of our work is sharing links or quick updates, mostly through Skype, so Inc is hitting that sweet spot between quick messages and something more permanent.

    Inc is also available as a downloadable application, which is pretty handy to always keep it open and to see notifications pop up when your coworkers post. It’s so simple, but it’s probably one of my favorite things about Inc just because I can always tab over to it.

    Inc is free to use at the moment, but clearly they have their eyes set on monetization, either by a flat rate per user, or through paid premium features. In the coming weeks they plan to roll out groups or categories for teams – so that larger companies can still use the product without too much crosstalk.