Vendor Profile: Coffeepoke

on February 20, 2013 at 12:00 pm

The Intranetizen team are often asked advice about intranet vendors that supply software and hardware solutions to run your intranet. Whilst we have 35 years of blue-chip intranet experience between us, in common with many intranet practitioners, we have relatively limited experience of the 200+ software systems that companies use.

To help you, to help us and to help the vendors themselves, we’re running a series of posts of over this coming week showcasing 5 intranet companies. We’ve supplied them with the same standard set of questions and will publish their answers in their own words to ensure equity! All the images have been supplied by the company themselves and are reproduced with permission.

Today, we showcase Coffeepoke

In a brief paragraph, who are you?

3 founders and 2 associates,we are based in France (except one of the associate based in Mexico). Antoine (CEO), Renaud and Evrard are former viadeo employees, Edouard (CTO) is a former employee of Pixamania and Boris has a banking/selling background (at barcap and calyon in London). Boris and Evrard are in charge of the business development in Europe and Renaud is developing the business in the LATAM region.

Coffee Poke is the 1st Cross-Platform application (Web +Mobile App + TV App) dedicated to strengthen bonds between employees in a workplace. Coffeepoke is the 1st social network with a TV app. Coffeepoke does not replace the traditional coffee break. Coffeepoke allows an extension of those informal exchanges on a virtual platform; from those that usually happen between a limited group of people, to all the employees of the company.

Coffeepoke has an original functionality called “CoffeePoke” that creates real connection too, you can invite your colleagues for a real coffee and learn to know them !

Briefly describe your product’s history? Why did you start it, where does it come from?

Steve Jobs thought the most efficient meetings were the informal ones taking place in hallways, at the coffee machine or in the parking lot ! So do we!!! From this assumption, we have decided to developed Coffeepoke app that unite colleagues, promote informal exchanges, reinforce conviviality within the company.

Describe your typical customer – what kind of company, what size, what are the kinds of problems they need to solve?

Typical customers are the mid cap companies (between 100 and 500 employees and even more) whatever the industry. Problem they need to solve is how to get a more efficient communication between employees within a company.

We also have clients that already have a social network deployed but the adoption by the users is difficult, using just our TV app is a booster for adoption as we also offers access to its RestFull API allowing clients to integrate the application in their work environment.

What do you see as your product and company’s USP?

Coffeepoke, the enterprise social network

Which feature(s) of your product do your customers rave about most?

The TV app, in the common area (open space, canteen, hallway…), the TV application is simply and permanently broadcasting on a TV screen the last posts from the coffee wall (you can customise which messages can be broadcast).

Also Coffee TV is a powerful tool dedicated to internal communication or human resources. Because some messages are more important than others, Coffeepoke has a functionality that broadcasts “Top-Down” messages; for example results announcement, internal promotion, new recruits, events and more….

Which feature(s) of your product do you feel are most under-used?

As we have decided to have a very simple platform and also very easy to use, we don’t have any features that are under used, if so we would take the features off the platform.

How much customisation does your product typically need / how much to you recommend your customers make?

To keep the value and the spirit of the company, it’s very easy to customise the coffeepoke interface. The admin can easily customise their Coffeepoke interface with the company’s logo and a specific background. Very simple to do so! As well users can customise their profile with an avatar and a background picture.

CoffeePoke also offers access to its RestFull API allowing clients to integrate the application in their work environment (as Yammer, Jive, Sharepoint, Salesforce, Intranet…)

What advice would you give a company planning to invest in a new intranet platform? / what are the most important factors to consider?

You need to be able to integrate other application to an intranet platform (for example coffeepoke app with Yammer). The 3 most important factors:

simple : users must understand straight away what they can do with the platform
social: users need to be able to collaborate through the platform
smart: users should be able to look for existing information using semantics for example

What’s your cost model? Free; one-off; per seat per month charging; something else?

£4 per users/month
£50 per TV/month
Set up fees: £2000 (includes TV set up, platform set up…)
We also sell the TV sets

Who are your main competitors?

Basically, our competitors are all typical Enterprise social networks as Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Yoolinkpro, Bluekiwi, Jamespot…. Even if we are not exactly doing the same.

What do you need from your customers to deliver intranet success?

To have an intranet success, customers need to be ready for some change management, implanting a new intranet is a long process with new practice. Coffeepoke is not an intranet but a collaborative app which is very easy to deploy in a company and can be used as the social brick for an intranet

What does the future have in store for your product?

After coffeepoke, we have a few new collaborative apps for 2013 and 2014, but I can’t really tell what they will be (yet). The only thing I can say is that you will be able to connect all our apps together and our new apps will still be based on “one need = one App”