US Start-up Fluent is making bold claims with a tagline that says it’s ‘the future of email’. The Fluent team is building a front-end email client that could address users on any platform, desktop or mobile. Founders and ex-Googlers Jochen Bekmann, Cameron Adams and Dhanji R. Prasanna are more qualified than most to redesign email having worked on Google Wave amongst other projects.
“Email hasn’t been innovated in 20 years,” explains Adams. “But in the last decade, there’s been a lot of change in how people communicate.”
Fluent aims to allow users to manage their inbox from one single stream (similar to a social media feed), which will allow multiple functionality such as composing, replying, reading, archiving, deleting, searching, starring and the useful “to-do” feature without switching screens. An ‘attachment view’ allows you to display images and documents automatically in the stream. The instant search system automatically displays old emails in real time as you type search keywords. This video illustrates the features more clearly.
Fluent will not replace Gmail – it won’t be handing out email addresses – rather it’s a front end from which you can access your existing email account.
The mobile version will enable users to use touchscreen features such as swiping to more effectively browse and manage their inbox as demonstrated in the video below. You can demo the product here, unfortunately Fluent is not quite ready yet but the founders expect a wider release in the next couple of months.
