Koombea, a 90-person development agency that builds web and mobile applications, has announced the launch of its new app, Convergely—a suite of productivity tools that have been designed to enhance the team communication application, Slack.com.
Slack is a nascent platform designed to “kill email” through a multi-faceted communications interface. Since it’s release a little over a year ago Slack has added over 750,000 users, 250,000 of whom are now paying customers. Convergely was developed to give teams using Slack a range of new functionalities, including: Time-zone responsive message scheduling, an auto-responder system, the ability to annotate and send images, task assignment, and a group polling feature.
Convergely is all about helping increase collaboration within a team without getting in the way. Users can seamlessly start using Convergely by integrating the app to their Slack accounts. Keo, the product’s mascot – a furry raccoon that acts like a personal assistant – helps leverage Convergely’s tools either by using custom commands directly through Slack or it’s stand alone website.
Convergely clients can make use of the plan for non-business users and small teams, free of charge. For medium sized companies, Convergely also offers its services for $2/user/month during its beta testing phase, which will increase once released out of beta. They are working on a complete enterprise solution that will serve companies with hundreds or thousands of team members.
“The Koombea team was fed up with our fragmented internal communication channels, so we decided to try Slack. We immediately saw benefits when our email usage dropped drastically and our internal communications improved. However, despite these improvements, we felt that Slack was still missing a few vital tools that would further improve how we got the entire team working together seamlessly. Several Koombea developers started building their own ad-ons to the platform, which started propagating throughout the different teams in our company. This gave us insight into some of the things we could build and productize so that other companies could use them. We assembled a team and started working on it, which got a lot of interest shortly after being released,” said Koombea CEO, Jonathan Tarud.
Koombea, Convergely’s parent company, is no stranger to scalable software development, having been in the business for more than 8 years. Their project Convergely is one of the first apps to completely rely on Slack, a program that has recently experienced rapid growth.
“We are constantly developing new ideas for Convergely, and implementing requests based on customer feedback to improve user experience. The Convergely developers are all looking forward to seeing how the app continues to make team communication more clear and efficient—be it for small projects or large-scale businesses,” added Tarud.
