Business communication is not mere chats happening between team members; it is actually a full-fledged business collaboration wherein ideas, along with excel sheets and presentations; gossips along with accounts receivable and term sheets are shared and exchanged.
When the whole business environment and operations are translated and converted into a mobile app or a desktop tool, then it is much more than just chat.
Flock, the brainchild of self-made tech billionaire Bhavin Turakhia, has clearly decoded this need and requirement of creating a full-fledged business collaboration platform.
As Flock keeps on adding newer features and services into its vast repository of team-centric functions, it is now evolving into a full stack business collaboration platform, providing a much richer and deeper interface than existing players in this niche.
Enterprise collaboration market is now valued at $26 billion, which is all set to surpass $49 billion mark by 2021, and going by the aggression and attitude shown by Flock, it is clear that they want to disrupt this massively under-served market within trillion dollar B2B tech space.
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What Is Flock & How It Is Different?
Flock is a real-time team messaging and collaboration app, which combines the properties of project management, app-ecosystem and business collaboration features into one integrated platform.
It was launched in 2014 and currently serves more than 25,000 companies across the globe. As of now, Flock has physical presence across 5 countries besides India: US, Brazil, the UK, Russia, and Spain. In Brazil, Russia and Spain, it provides support in local languages, which are Portuguese, Russians and Spanish respectively.
Some of the brands which are right now using Flock as their primary business communication tool includes Yepme, Voonik, 1mg, Arihant Capital, Meru Cabs, CouponDunia, Mothercare, VMWare and more.
Till now, it has received $45 million as internal funding from Bhavin, who is the founder & CEO of Flock.
Media.net, another brainchild of Bhavin & his brother Divyank Turakhia, was acquired by a Chinese tech conglomerate last year for $900 million, making it one of the largest tech acquisition India has ever witnessed.
Flock is different because of mainly one reason: FlockOS.
FlockOS: The Catalyst?
FlockOS is an operating system created by the Flock team, exclusively for their app. In fact, FlockOS is world’s first chat operating system.
Using this OS, any developer or programmer can create virtually unlimited apps and tools. Knowledge of HTML, Java and CSS is enough to use and explore FlockOS, and to create business-centric apps and tools, which can simplify business communication and make the whole platform more dynamic, useful and time-saving.
In a way, FlockOS is the catalyst which has elevated Flock from being a mere chat app for professionals into a full-fledged, dynamic and scalable ecosystem of enterprise collaboration platform.
We explored FlockOS ecosystem, and discovered 4 interesting features, which can prove to be that catalyst which can transform everything about business collaboration technology:
1) Widget based, Website-like Interface
FlockOS has certainly been created by artists because the interface and the GUI it offers seamless, user-friendly, and quite optimised for business usage. The power to create widgets, and then place them in the native locations within the app makes it fully customised, laser-targeted towards the actual needs and demands of the respective teams. In other words, FlockOS doesn’t ‘impose’ any predefined GUI on the users. It can be moulded and changed anyways the team wants. We thought its implementation of democracy into the business communication space!
2) Integration with external apps and tools
Now, this is the killer. Personally, I am a die-hard user of Google Drive, and my 90% of my time is consumed within that space. FlockOS can integrate complete Google Drive platform into its own interface, which means the user can now explore Google Drive on Flock as if he is never outside the Drive platform. In fact, FlockOS has made the user-interface of Drive even easier, by making the permission control mechanism powered by a single click.
Besides Drive, there are tons of other external services and apps which can be used within Flock, thereby making it extremely cohesive yet flexible.
Take for instance the example of Uber. Once the employee has completed his working hours, he can book a Uber ride, right inside the Flock platform.
Some of the apps which are right now available in Flock Appstore includes Google Drive, Twitter, Trello, Bitbucket, Uber, Asana, Github, MailChimp, Google Analytics, Zendesk and more.
3) Marketplace for business apps
Now, these apps within the Flock Appstore can be created by anyone, who has some basic knowledge and skills of a programmer. This introduces a very unique and niche concept of the marketplace. Very soon, these developers can buy and sell these apps, just like on Google Playstore or Apple App Store.
The developer is having the complete control over the apps he or she makes, and it can be either used as privately within their respective teams and channels, or it can be made public, allowing any Flock user to use it.
Creation of a dynamic marketplace is one of the stellar features of FlockOS.
4) Easy interaction between the users and the apps
The way in which users can interact with FlockOS is quite interesting. For example, simply by using a backslash command, any app within the FlockOS can be called, instantly.
The widgets functionality allows easy placement of the apps, and the user can simply click on that button to activate any app. The app discoverability feature is another very important foundation of FlockOS.
The team behind Flock has informed us that they conducted few surveys among their existing users, and some interesting feedback has been received. For instance, Flock has triggered 40% more productivity for them, the dependency on emails has reduced by 40% and the best part: 70% of the users claimed that their meetings have been reduced by 60%.
It would be really interesting to observe how Slack and other major competitors in the business messaging app niche respond to the new standard set by Flock, and to the powerful platform which FlockOS enables.
Do you use Flock for collaborating with your team members? Do let us know your feedback, by commenting right here!