Quirky Boston-based startup Baydin won this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad competition with their interesting take on e-mail search: Unsearch. Unsearch, now in closed alpha, is an Outlook plugin that analyzes individual e-mail messages as they’re read, and provides relevant search results next to the message. Imagine Gmail, but with related files and e-mail conversations instead of ads.
The ZapThink report the company commissioned notes that Outlook add-ons can be a dicey business proposition. “If Microsoft likes what a partner is doing and thinks they can do better themselves, then they’ll simply incorporate the partner’s functionality into their software and put the partner out of business.”
We asked Baydin CEO Alexander Moore how the company hopes to avoid commoditization. Moore thinks the company has some secret sauce that’s difficult to clone. Although driven in part by Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search API, Unsearch does its own filtering of search results returned by the API. “We have two layers of proprietary technology sandwiched around Microsoft’s tech,” says Moore. First, Unsearch analyzes the e-mail and extracts keywords. Then, it runs the keywords through the search API and returns search results from within the user’s e-mail as well as the organization’s Sharepoint and other locations. Finally, it runs a set of proprietary algorithms on the search results to filter and reorder them and displays those processed results.
The only piece of software Baydin has released publicly is Boomerang, a simple piece of productivity software that allows users to move a message out of their inboxes until a pre-scheduled time. Moore admits that Boomerang would be easier to replicate than unsearch, but notes that it’s actually just one piece part of a larger forthcoming project. “We decided to go ahead and release it as a standalone product when we realized that there were a lot of people who needed that specific feature right now,” he says.
Baydin could be seen as competing with Xobni.
According to the company’s web site, the word “Baydin” is Burmese for “foretelling the future through magic.” The company has strong ties to Burma: one of the founders ethnically Burmese, the other is in a long-term romantic relationship with someone from Burma. The company promises to donate 5% of its profits towards educational efforts in Burma.
Baydin won the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad competition in Boston last week. The other finalists were Doodle, InnovationCast and MindQuilt. Last year’s winner was CubeTree.
Baydin presented the following video at the Enterprise 2.0, which includes a history of the financial crisis that could be charitably called “incomplete”:
