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Swingdo to-do management app updated to offer location-based task-prioritizing feature

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based BHI, the Japanese startup behind mobile solutions focused on protecting users from information overload, announced last week the iOS version 2.0 of to-do management app Swingdo. This app was originally released last year-end, but it has been quickly upgraded for four added functions of interest. The new functions are: If a task is registered in the app with being associated with a specific location, a user will be recommended to deal with it as priority by a GPS-enabled feature when he/she comes in there. A function to list unreplied emails. A “Like” icon for completing to-do tasks and a “paper airplane” icon for completing mail tasks. An enhanced integration to its sister app Swingmail upon creating tasks in Swingdo that leverages e-mail reply history in Swingmail. In addition to this iOS version, a Chrome extension of Swingdo was released during February. Therefore, the basic function of Swingdo can be used not only on mobile but on desktop. To-do updates will be synchronized between the Chrome extension and the iOS version. BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi explained: Many users of Swingdo said they needed an interface, even as an extension, usable on desktop, so we…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based BHI, the Japanese startup behind mobile solutions focused on protecting users from information overload, announced last week the iOS version 2.0 of to-do management app Swingdo. This app was originally released last year-end, but it has been quickly upgraded for four added functions of interest.

The new functions are:

  1. If a task is registered in the app with being associated with a specific location, a user will be recommended to deal with it as priority by a GPS-enabled feature when he/she comes in there.
  2. A function to list unreplied emails.
  3. A “Like” icon for completing to-do tasks and a “paper airplane” icon for completing mail tasks.
  4. An enhanced integration to its sister app Swingmail upon creating tasks in Swingdo that leverages e-mail reply history in Swingmail.

In addition to this iOS version, a Chrome extension of Swingdo was released during February. Therefore, the basic function of Swingdo can be used not only on mobile but on desktop. To-do updates will be synchronized between the Chrome extension and the iOS version.

BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi explained:

Many users of Swingdo said they needed an interface, even as an extension, usable on desktop, so we responded to this by offering a Chrome extension

The world’s top 3 to-do managers including Wunderlist are also used on Chrome Extension and smartphone by their users, so we followed their examples.

The exciting news is that they will release the desktop version of Swingdo for Mac in April and an Android version in May.

Meanwhile, we go back to June of 2013 when Swingdo’s antecedent was introduced with its (still) current sister app, Swingmail. They have modified the engine three times since they launched Swingmail for improved efficiency in messaging, and for automatic extraction / creation of task.

Himukashi said,

To be honest, the first- and second-generation engines were failures. Automated task creator leveraging email is globally still rare. The logic to associate / unassociate a contact or a history with each task was very difficult.

In addition to Swingdo, the company continues to update SwingMail and recently added new functions such as displaying only important emails and muting unimportant ones.

Although BHI secured series A round funding in April of 2014, the company has yet to disclose its amount and investors.

Translated by Minako Ambiru via Mother First
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Swingdo, to-do management app from Japan, automates prioritization of what to do

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based BHI has been offering solutions focused on protecting users from information overload, represented by Swingmail. Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that aggregates messages from multiple social network accounts which helps reduce information overload and clutter. BHI has also developed Swingbook, a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated into the Swingmail app, as well as Swingcal, a minimalistic calendar app that focuses on the agenda one has with someone up to a week in the future. But both functions of these apps have been incorporated into the Swingmail app. See also: Japan’s BHI launches mobile apps that prevent info overload in messaging Swingmail: A new app from Japan to better manage email and social messages The company introduced a new app called Swingdo on Friday, aiming to help users streamline their task management like managing todos and appointments on calendar, or check e-mails that they forget to reply to by telling them what to do next automatically. Based on a user’s input and its history, this app determines the priority of every task and inserts appointments scheduled on the Swingcal or scheduler app within these tasks when necessary. Generally speaking, “stock-type” information…

swingdo_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based BHI has been offering solutions focused on protecting users from information overload, represented by Swingmail. Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that aggregates messages from multiple social network accounts which helps reduce information overload and clutter.

BHI has also developed Swingbook, a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated into the Swingmail app, as well as Swingcal, a minimalistic calendar app that focuses on the agenda one has with someone up to a week in the future. But both functions of these apps have been incorporated into the Swingmail app.

See also:

The company introduced a new app called Swingdo on Friday, aiming to help users streamline their task management like managing todos and appointments on calendar, or check e-mails that they forget to reply to by telling them what to do next automatically. Based on a user’s input and its history, this app determines the priority of every task and inserts appointments scheduled on the Swingcal or scheduler app within these tasks when necessary.

Generally speaking, “stock-type” information management tool like Trello would be helpful to manage todos from the point of view seeing which task is completed or not. To communicate with one’s counterpart or business partner, Slack and other “flow-type” messaging tools like chat and e-mail apps are convenient. In addition, a calendar tool would be convenient for managing planned tasks or the history of these in a time sequence.

That said, one will probably need three different types of tools at least in managing tasks the three aspects of time sequence, completeness/incompleteness and contacts. However, we merely see these three solutions synchronizing updates of tasks with each others (For instance, Trello will never add task updates automatically based on interactions on Slack.)

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Swingdo aims to manage tasks in one app by integrating these three items. In the app, the priority of each task will be automatically determined according to the due date and estimated amount of work that a user inputs. Regarding tasks based on received e-mails and scheduled appointments in a calendar app, their work amounts are set as 15 minutes by default but users can change this manually. Following the priority that the Swingdo app presents, all the users have to do is to complete such tasks accordingly.

BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi explained:

BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi
BHI CEO Yasuhiro Himukashi

When using our app, one will no longer experience the pain of thinking what to do next. Regardless of the pros and cons in our team, we decided to make the app that automatically determines the priority of each task and can’t be manually adjusted. Otherwise, users would be likely to put off tedious tasks for later and tend to forget to do them.

This latest Swingdo app is version 1.0 and still remains technically dubious. However, the company wants to keep updating it as their development advances thus they want to incorporate natural language processing and machine learning into the app so that it will better understand the context when adding tasks based on e-mails and calendar updates.

Possible integration with self-driving vehicles

Himukashi says, it will be possible to integrate the Swingdo app with self-driving vehicles in the future when many people are using it on a daily basis.

When one goes out, one’s self-driving vehicle would be able to assume where to do if knowing one’s appointment. So if one has saved a task in the Swingdo app, one can trust the driving to the vehicle even without telling where to go.

If one’s tasks are totally managed in the Swingdo app, it may automatically hail a ride-sharing car by interacting with the Uber app when one needs to go somewhere for an appointment. The company claims that Swingmail is intended to review what one has done while Swingdo is to look at what will happen to someone.

Leveraging the location data as well as task updates registered in the Swingdo app, it may be possible for the platform to predict what one wants to do next by leveraging artificial intelligence.

He added:

From the big data perspective, this can be applied to predicting traffic jams in the future.

Coinciding with the launch of the Swingdo app, BHI has upgraded the Swingmail app to version 7.0 while adding new functions like curating e-mails and highlighting critical messages. It plans to integrate with messaging platforms of mobile carriers around the world to give users a better experience.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s BHI launches mobile apps that prevent info overload in messaging

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Japanese startup BHI announced today that it has launched a suite of mobile apps called Swingnow, which will prevent information overload in messaging. The company is based in Tokyo, but they have made these apps available on the iTunes app store in English-speaking and Nordic countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. The Swingnow suite is comprising of three mobile apps of Swingmail (e-mail), Swingbook (contact book), and Swingcal (calendar). Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that helps reduce information overload and clutter. The app aggregates messages from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and calls from phone and FaceTime, so that you have everything in one inbox. Swingmail will filter out junk, spam, and messages that don’t require your immediate attention, so that you can stay focused and only receive messages from people that are important. Swingbook is a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated with the Swingmail app. Based on past messaging patterns, current time and location, Swingbook learns, predicts and suggests the most likely contacts who you would want to get in touch with at any given moment. Swingcal is a minimalistic calendar app that thinks about your contacts. The app focuses…

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From the left: Yasuhiro Himukashi (CEO), Jun Inoue (CMO), and Emelie Fågelstedt (public relations)

Japanese startup BHI announced today that it has launched a suite of mobile apps called Swingnow, which will prevent information overload in messaging. The company is based in Tokyo, but they have made these apps available on the iTunes app store in English-speaking and Nordic countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden.

The Swingnow suite is comprising of three mobile apps of Swingmail (e-mail), Swingbook (contact book), and Swingcal (calendar).

Swingmail is a minimalistic inbox and reply-only app that helps reduce information overload and clutter. The app aggregates messages from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and calls from phone and FaceTime, so that you have everything in one inbox. Swingmail will filter out junk, spam, and messages that don’t require your immediate attention, so that you can stay focused and only receive messages from people that are important.

Swingbook is a prioritizing contact list seamlessly integrated with the Swingmail app. Based on past messaging patterns, current time and location, Swingbook learns, predicts and suggests the most likely contacts who you would want to get in touch with at any given moment.

Swingcal is a minimalistic calendar app that thinks about your contacts. The app focuses on the agendas that you have with someone up to a week in the future.

BHI launched Swingmail out of these three apps late last year. In addition to developing two other apps in the suite, they abandoned the previous version of the Swingmail app and opted to develop it from scratch again for giving users a better experience.

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Regarding the geographical limitation on the availability of these apps, I had assumed that it was because of a language-dependent algorithm in filtering messages. But BHI CMO Jun Inoue explained why this assumption was mistaken:

We are a startup, so our resources are limited. Filtering or analyzing algorithms used in our apps properly work in any language. But if we want to market to the global market, we need to optimize the user interface of the apps in every different language market to fit the preference of locals.

Compared to the Japanese market, we understand there’s obviously a larger potential in the entire English-speaking market. We know English is not a mother tongue for Nordic people, but they don’t feel uncomfortable using apps with an English-language interface. That’s why we started with these countries.

If the apps can receive good reaction in the countries where they have just launched, they will expand availability to other countries like Canada, South Africa, and Singapore. Based on feedback from users, they may also develop an Android version.

BHI fundraised an undisclosed amount of investment in a series A round from an undisclosed Japanese investor in April this year.

swingnow_screenshots

Swingmail: A new app from Japan to better manage email and social messages

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Many business people struggle to find the time to manage their email. And if you have social media accounts, you might have difficulty keeping up with those messages too. Tokyo-based BHI has introduced a new messaging application today that lets you check and respond to e-mails or private messages on social media, all in one app. It’s called Swingmail, and it’s available for free on the App Store. While it doesn’t have any function to create new messages, it prioritizes and sorts received messages based on various metrics, such as how many times you’ve exchanged messages with a sender in a certain period of time, for example. The company expects that you’ll keep using your own preferred e-mail app on desktop or mobile. Marketing director Jun Inoue emphasizes that they don’t intend for Swingmail to replace existing e-mail apps. They are also working on a contact list app as well, giving you a list of contacts in order of priority. The default contact app on your mobile just presents contacts in alphabetical order, but this new app will determine priority based on your current location (i.e. whose office you’re currently close to) and how many times you’ve exchanged messages contacts…

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Many business people struggle to find the time to manage their email. And if you have social media accounts, you might have difficulty keeping up with those messages too. Tokyo-based BHI has introduced a new messaging application today that lets you check and respond to e-mails or private messages on social media, all in one app. It’s called Swingmail, and it’s available for free on the App Store. While it doesn’t have any function to create new messages, it prioritizes and sorts received messages based on various metrics, such as how many times you’ve exchanged messages with a sender in a certain period of time, for example.

The company expects that you’ll keep using your own preferred e-mail app on desktop or mobile. Marketing director Jun Inoue emphasizes that they don’t intend for Swingmail to replace existing e-mail apps.

They are also working on a contact list app as well, giving you a list of contacts in order of priority. The default contact app on your mobile just presents contacts in alphabetical order, but this new app will determine priority based on your current location (i.e. whose office you’re currently close to) and how many times you’ve exchanged messages contacts through the messaging app. This new contacts app will be launched early next year.

BHI is based out of the Tokyo startup incubation space Samurai Startup Island and recently invited former Google Japan president Koichiro Tsujino to get involved as their advisor.

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The BHI team at ICT Spring Luxembourg, June 2013.