Hippflow: Now With Google Glass Support

Hippflow, which provides a service that makes it easy to update investors, mentors, team members and other stakeholders on a startup’s progress and future plans, has now added support for Google Glass.

The new Glass app brings Hippflow updates, which are pushed on the hour to Google’s wearable tech, once a user has linked their Hippflow and Google Glass accounts.  It may seem risky to build an app for Glass ahead of an iPhone or Android app, but Hippflow’s young Russian founder Kirill Chekanov is excited by the opportunities that the new Google Glass has to offer.

First off, he notes that the Glass platform, in which ‘cards’ are used to display small snippets of information in a user’s peripheral vision, means that it fits with Hippflow’s status update M.O. and mission to cut down on email to and from a startup’s investors and other stakeholders. A Hippflow milestone update and other types of startup updates work well within the confines of the Google Glass User Interface.

Second, Chekanov says that a Glass app enables him to reach a defined group of target users (those in the Glass Explorer program) including some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investors, founders and other influential early adopters within the startup sphere.  This is exactly the type of user that Hippflow has been designed for. “I want to thank Google,” he says, also revealing that he and his team actually built the first Hippflow Glass prototype ‘blind’ since he does not have Google Glass! Instead, he had to rely on help from others in the developer community for access to the Glass API.

Chekanov says, “I wanted to help the community to experience an absolutely different way to do things, a way to do it in one click, organically, just as you breathe.”  In this way, Hippflow’s main competitor is email.  Instead of a founder having to send out monthly or weekly email reports to investors and mentors to keep them updated on progress, problems and plans, or even things like major purchases, these updates can be posted on Hippflow and appear in the startup’s timeline.   Then, it’s various stakeholders can ‘follow’ the startup, and while most updates will invariably be marked as private, updates can also be public, providing a nice way of keeping early adopters or maybe crowdfunding backers in the loop.  For investors, it’s also a way to help their portfolio communications scale. “How do you track 10, 20, 50 companies? You need your data systematized,” says Chekanov. “This is a key to success. You want it on the go, short, good-looking.”

We look forward to seeing the full applications of this new tech.

[Image via: hippflow]

SOURCE: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/investors-can-be-glassholes-too/