Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2014, at the app’s launch, when it was only available on the App Store. Howard Lerman is described as CEO of Yext, a role he left in 2022.
Just as in social networks we have Facebook and LinkedIn, the second aimed at professional use, several New York technology executives have created a company that wants to be the Snapchat of business.
The app is called Confide and, for now, it is only available on the App Store. Its goal is to let professionals send messages to each other. These messages self-destruct automatically. They are also encrypted in such a way that they are only decrypted as you read them, according to BusinessWeek. A message looks like an email, with a subject line and a body in which the text is shown in blocks. As you move through the blocks, the words are revealed; you cannot take a screenshot or open the message on another device, because the key needed to decrypt it is only on the recipient’s mobile phone.
What’s more, messages are not stored on Confide’s servers, so not even the app’s creators would have access to their content. In this way it promises complete confidentiality for those somewhat sensitive business messages.
The app is a good idea for business people who don’t want a paper trail. However, it also comes with controversy, given the many different uses it could be put to in companies. For example: if Luis Bárcenas and Mariano Rajoy had used this app for their conversations… (Bárcenas, the former treasurer of Rajoy’s party, was at the centre of a 2013 Spanish party-funding scandal in which text messages between the two were published.)
The app’s creators are Jon Brod, a former AOL executive, and Howard Lerman, CEO of Yext.
And that is how some business ideas are born: first someone invents the original product aimed at the general public, and then someone else decides to create a service based on that product but aimed at a specific audience.
“Innovation is copying and improving, or adapting.”
Further reading
- You don’t need an innovative business idea to succeed
- The future of business: 7 technology trends for 2014
Featured image: Ralf Peter Reimann, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
