English

There is a growing interest in social tools: both from individuals and organisations. The latter are looking at social tools, and more specifically, social sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) as a marketing and communication channel. Increasingly, they are also considering the use of social tools inside the organisation to improve communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, etc..

Spotting this trend many companies have decided to create tools (or “solutions” as some call them) based on social functionality. Some big known players (such as IBM, Microsoft, etc.) and also newcomers, often companies created on the back of this one product. That is the case with Podio.

Podio was founded in 2009 in Denmark. It has since opened an office in the US and its customer base is rapidly growing.

I met with Kasper Hulthin, co-founder and head of user engagement, when he visited Portugal in January. We talked about Podio – the company and the product – and I accepted the invitation to play with Podio and see for myself if it is true what he was saying.

Here are my thoughts on Podio.

Podio is an “online work platform”, as the company defines it. The work landscape may be split into Organisations. (Let’s say you have your own company, work for another, and volunteer for a local sports club. You can belong to these three “organisations”, each having its own “zone” in Podio.) Inside each organisation you then have the “Employee Network” where one can follow all the activity of that organisation. One can then create or join work spaces inside each organisation.

A space comes with shared activity stream, contacts, calendar and tasks, and allows registered users to comment and “like” every content item. Everything else are applications that one can get from the Podio App Store in seconds or that one can develop. Yes, one can develop applications in Podio without any coding involved. This is the key differentiator of Podio. Its ability to allow any person to create their own application or adapt existing ones.

Activity stream on Podio

If one wants to be critical and play devil’s advocate, which I did when I met with Kasper Hulthin, one could argue that the applications are little more than database tables where one adds rows of a certain data type (e.g. name, date of birth, checkboxes). However, I have been playing with Podio for a few weeks now and I can assure you of how extremely useful this “simple” thing can be. Besides, Kasper told me they are looking at implementing the possibility of adding some logic to the applications (without the user having to code, of course).

The app store is not a new concept. In his Enterprise 2.0 Summit keynote speech about what is coming up in social media, Dion Hinchcliffe mentioned that to his last count there are over 100 tools with an app store. It is nevertheless a big plus for Podio, that relies on its app store to increase the functionality of the basic platform. The Podio team is constantly building new apps, but so are Podio users who offer their efforts to the community.

There are close to 500 shared apps so far (some of them, variations from each other), organised by function and sector. Each organisation has a private area in the app store so that apps developed by that organisation may be made available only to users of that organisation.

Amongst the applications one can find document management, wiki, blogues, timesheets, meetings, etc..

The other cool thing about Podio is its free mobile app for iPhone and Android. Works quite well and, if Podio becomes the center of your work (yes, I can see it happening!), that is another big plus.

Podio on iPhone

Two more big pluses for Podio. The first is the interface: it is so intuitive that can be used by people new to this type of tools (I have tested this). The second is the fact that the way it has been built encourages certain types of open, transparent, trust behaviours so important for a knowledge-centred organisation.

Some areas that deserve a bit more attention: search (how do I search the content?), easy way of exporting the content and shared tags across applications. Would like to see if and how it could integrate with existing corporate tools (CRM, document management systems, etc.).

Price-wise, Podio is free up to 5 employees. After that, it costs $8 per employee per month and external collaborators are free.

Podio does not see itself as a platform for a whole big company but rather for small and medium size organisations or groups / departments inside big companies. Podio is not focused on the social aspects – do not expect to find “friends”, “follows”, etc.. It focuses on work, on productivity, on keeping employees informed about what is going on. And that, it does really well.

I have asked Kasper Hulthin a few questions to understand Podio a bit better. Here is what he said.

Why did you set out to bring one more collaboration platform into such a crowded market?

Exactly, there is way to many products out there for getting your work done. Most people is opening 20 tools in the morning, which is a horrible disconnected experience. Very few has a single work platform, and for those that has, it’s run by IT. Meaning that the individual doesn’t have any control on how it’s structured and thus has to match his/her workflows to the tool, not the other way around. I believe this is the main reason why most people still manage work in email and plain documents. Simply because they are amazingly open and flexible tools, that can be customized by you. But if you think about it, the format of emails and documents is pretty old school. The email is a complete copy of the old letter system (you have an address, you send a mail to a post office, it sends it to the receivers address). It wasn’t designed to be a collaboration platform, no matter how many cc, bcc, reply all hacks you apply, not even to mention how to structure the content in the right context. The same for spreadsheets, which most often is used for anything but numbers, e.g. the project plan, the list of clients, etc. We’ve all tried adding the last column for comments to make it social, and it didn’t really work. And what about rich media and contextual data? How to add images, videos, rich links, people, related data etc? It needs a new format, and I believe that format has to be easily modifiable for the individual, contextually rich, inherently social, and of course web based.

So looking at it from a format perspective I believe apps will be to spreadsheets, what the MP3 was to the CD-rom. Think about it. The CD-rom, was much much better than it’s predecessor (so is the spreadsheet and the email), but it wasn’t social, contextual or web-based. MP3 is, in comparison. And even though many claimed: “I will never quit CD’s, because that’s how I’m used to listen to music”, MP3 has for sure reinvented how people listen to music by making it more social, more contextual, more searchable, and more empowering for the individual music creators. So why should we keep playing our work on CD’s, when we can do so much better? Especially as the tools we use for our social life is lightyears ahead.

Why is Podio available as SaaS (Software as a Service), and only as SaaS?

Because a SaaS model allows us to create a connected experience focused on the user, not the billing relation. With Podio you have one identity and one log-in regardless of how many companies or projects you’re involved with. Further it allows us to provide you a great experience on all platforms.

What are the next steps for Podio?

We’re aiming to make it even simpler and yet more powerful to create your own work tool. Simple by making the app experience on Podio better, and more powerful, as in connecting Podio to other services. Further we aim to build our eco system around Podio starting with partners, and including the app store as a meeting point for people and processes.

Finally, what five “tags” would you use to brand Podio?

Apps, work, collaboration, social, project management