Technology

Readdle, the company behind popular email client Spark, is releasing a major new version of Spark on iOS and macOS. Spark is expanding beyond a personal email client. You can now work on emails with your team.

While some of the features made me think about Front, the company says that it wasn&t the inspiration for this update. Front lets you share inboxes, such as This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. so that the entire HR team can collaborate on inbound emails. With Spark, you can&t share inboxes altogether.

But you can create links and invite people to an email thread. After that, it works pretty much like Google Docs. Multiple people can write and edit emails in real time. You can comment and have a private chat about the email before writing a reply.

Along the launch of those new collaboration features, Readdle is launching a new premium subscription. Existing features remain free forever. You&ll get limited access to the new collaboration features. It works pretty much like Slackfree plan — comments search history is limited to one month, your team is limited to 5GB of storage, etc.

You&ll be able to pay $6.39 to $7.99 per user per month to unlock everything. Each team member will get 10GB of storage to share files in comments, you will be able to add more collaborators to an email thread, etc.

Ita software-as-a-service business model, and itgood to see that Readdle finally plans to make money with Spark. A sustainable business model is essential if you expect support and updates over the coming years.

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Finally, Readdle added new features for everyone. There is a new calendar view on macOS. It displays your calendar and you can input new events using natural language, like in Fantastical. And because Spark is an email client, when you write &Lunch with John at 1pm&, it&ll add Johnemail address to the calendar invite automatically.

While Readdle says that Front and Spark have nothing in common, it feels like they&re tackling the same issue but starting from two different ends. Spark started as a personal email client and is getting more collaborative. Front started as a collaborative email client and wants to become the only email client you need, including for your personal needs.

Eventually, ita win for the end user as ithard to find an email client that fits your needs.

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As companies start to gather more and more data on their users and customers, including a firehose of information from a nigh-endless flow of tests, managing and maintaining that data isn&t the only place companies are hitting a wall — and figuring out who can actually access it is becoming just as big of a problem.

That was the experience Amandeep Khurana had throughout his career and as he kept talking to more and more larger companies. So he and his co-founder decided to start Okera, which is looking to make it easier for stewards of various sets of data to ensure the right people have the right access. With data coming in from a myriad of sources — and hopefully ending up in the same database — it can be increasingly complex to track who has access to what, and the hope is that Okera can reduce that problem to flipping a few switches.

Okera is coming out of stealth mode and said it has raised a new $12 million financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Felicis Ventures and Capital One Growth Ventures participating. BessemerEthan Kurzweil and Felicis& Wesley Chan are joining the companyboard of directors, and Okera has raised $14.6 million to date.

&Iwas very underwhelmed by what other vendors were offering, there was pretty much nothing happening,& co-founderKhurana said. &There were not a lot of good solutions, and no vendor was incentivized to solve the problem. What we&d hear is, [employees] were spending so much time in data management and plumbing. We saw a trend — as more and more enterprises are moving into the cloud, so they can be agile, these problems amplified. There is a lot of friction around data management, and people spent a lot of time and resources and money making one-off solutions.&

Part of the problem stems from larger companies looking to move their operations into the cloud. Those companies can run into the problem of data coming in from various discrete locations, where everyone is handling something differently, and everyone has varying levels of access to that data. For example, an analyst might be trying to dig into some customer usage data in order to tweak a product, but they only have access to half of the records they need. To fix that, they would need to hunt down the people who are in control of the rest of the information they need and get the right copies or permissions to access it. All of this includes a robust audit trail for those handling security within the company.

it is going to be an increasingly crowded space just by virtue of the problem, especially as companies collect more and more data while they look to better train various machine learning models. There are startups like Collibra also looking to improve the data governance experience for companies, and Collibra raised an additional $58 million in January this year.

But streamlining all this, in theory, reduces the overhead of just how much time it takes for those employees to hunt down the right people, and also make sure iteasier to access everything and get to work faster. For modern systems, itan all-or-nothing approach,Khurana said, and the goal is to try to make it easier for the right people to get access to the right data when they need it. That isn&t necessarily limited to analysts, as employees in sales, marketing, and other various roles might also need access to certain databases in their day-to-day jobs.

Gift cards today are a $100 billion business annually, and as they continue to grow as a key way for companies to incentivise people in our too-often unengaged digital world, a startup that is helping corral the long tail of retailers, and match that up to the wave of businesses that want to offer the cards — a model that itdubbed &rewards as a service& — has raised a substantial round of funding.

Tango Card — which brings together some 500 companies& gift cards so that they can easily be used by companies like Microsoft, Chevron and Marketo to help build out their own schemes for gifting those cards to their employees, customers, or other businesses to in turn offer them to customers — has raised $35 million to expand its business. The round comes from a single investor, FTV Capital, a growth equity firm that has a long track record in taking stakes in e-commerce companies (its portfolio formerly included WePay, which was recently sold to Visa).

David Leeds, the founder and CEO of Tango Card, said that Tango is not disclosing its valuation with this round except to note that it is &absolutely an up round&. The company has had an average of 1200 percent revenue growth over the last five years, he said, and it is &nearing profitability&. Tango had only raised $9.5 million previously with other investors including Eric SchmidtInnovation Endeavors, Allegro, Floodgate and others.

The space that Tango Card is working in is akin to what Stripe is doing in payments. All the hard work is behind the scenes and taps into something that companies want or need to do but often find difficult, costly or time consuming to sort out themselves. Tango irons out the work in the backend and presents an easy way of integrating it at the front end by way of an API.

In the case of gift cards, a lot of businesses have started to offer these as incentives to employees as a form of spot bonus either for work they have done, or to encourage them to engage with a new health or other initiative that is being run; or gift cards are awarded to customers when they engage in surveys and other interactions that they might not normally opt into.

There is a problem for the companies doling out the gift cards, however: browsing a wider list of gift card options, and then selecting the ones that you might want to use in a campaign or service, and then actually having all that work automatically in the campaigns to award those cards, is not that straightforward. Tango Cardsolution is a platform to make the process of doing all this faster and easier, by way of an API.

Customers can either link into the platform to offer a single or range of cards (with the card recipient able to choose which card himself or herself), and then when a gift card is awarded, that, too, is processed by Tango Card as well.

Leeds said that Tango Card currently has around 2,000 enterprises using the platform each day. And that, in turn, works out to &tens of thousands& of customers drawing down those gift cards.

You might wonder (as I sometimes do) just why gift cards have become so ubiquitous in the world as a replacement for straight-up cash. On a person-to-person level they seem to lack a lot of the fun of giving a present, but from a B2C or B2B2C standpoint, Leeds said that there is a key factor — impact — that has played into this trend.

&When people get a gift card and use it to buy something, they are more likely to tell people what they did with that gift card,& he said. &When you get cash into your bank account, you&re not likely to tell someone you got $30.&

That means that for retailers, they become like a form of free and viral advertising. For those giving out the cards, it might also mean a more memorable use of what might otherwise feel like a small or random amount of money. ($10 doesn&t feel like much but a $10 gift card suddenly feels like a little present.)

For companies that have been long players in the rewards scheme, gift cards also are a safer satisfaction bet, given that the older practice of giving actual merchandise has waned, with people wanting to have more choice. &You can actually get what you want, rather than get what you do not want,& said Leeds.

&The B2B rewards and incentives space is massive and growing, and the gifting/incentive space continues its move from physical to digital delivery,& said Chris Winship, FTV Capital partner, in a statement.

&Tango Card provides an industry leading solution that capitalizes on this shift to digital, enabling its enterprise clients to efficiently use rewards and incentives for numerous use cases and to achieve business goals such as driving employee engagement and retention, improving employee culture and wellness, and incentivizing customer activities. We have been incredibly impressed with David and his team for their focused commitment to superior solutions for customers and end recipients.&