Designed to rescue overwhelmed email users by leveraging the simplicity of the iPad, Cannonball’s app inspires users to fall in love with email again
Cannonball today launched a new iPad app that solves email overload by intuitively organizing the inbox. Cannonball’s goal is to inspire users to fall in love with email again. The company is supported by $600k in seed funding. The Cannonball iPad app is available in the iTunes store.
The Cannonball app automatically organizes the inbox by separating important communication – such as personal correspondence and purchases – from leisure email, including daily deals and newsletters. Important messages appear as text, much like the standard email inbox, while leisure email is presented using a highly visual browsing experience that groups messages by sender. Messages can easily be marked as read/unread or deleted with a simple swipe.
“We reached a conclusion that at first seemed counter-intuitive,” said Jim Caralis, one of Cannonball’s founders. “But it turns out the best way to organize the inbox is to organize it the same way we all do our normal mail every day. That is, one pile of important mail, another pile of coupons, catalogs, etc., and the rest in the trash.”
Cannonball is led by founders Jim Caralis, Raffaele Colella and Thibault Le Conte and has been funded by angel investors including Prof Ed Roberts, founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; Alessandro Piol, an investor at Alpha Prime and author of “Tech and the City;” Amedeo Giurazza, an investor at Vertis; and Nobel Laureate Robert C Merton.
“Today’s offerings focus on the mythical goal of ‘inbox zero’ rather than focusing on how email could be engaging and enjoyable,” said Raffaele Colella, one of Cannonball’s founders. “Our personal inboxes have become a mess of messages with no sense of control and we want to change that. Cannonball’s mission is to make the inbox not only less cluttered, but also visually appealing so that users really do fall in love with email again.”
The app is currently compatible with email accounts from Gmail. Support for Yahoo, iCloud, AOL, and Outlook.com accounts will be added soon.
Cannonball’s key features include:
Email has grown from being a useful vehicle for one-to-one communication with friends and colleagues to a cluttered list of newsletters, deals, social notifications and spam. A recent study by Microsoft found that only 14 percent of the inbox is made up of person-to-person conversation, while the other 86 percent is comprised of non-urgent content. In addition, the rise of the tablet market has prompted more and more consumers to manage their email on a tablet. eMarketer estimates there are 65.7 million iPad users in the US alone. According to a survey conducted by Gartner, Inc. one of the main activities moving from the PC to the tablet is checking email, accounting for 81 percent of respondents.
Cannonball/Business Wire