Inc – A Smarter Way to Share

Inc is a social sharing platform that businesses can use to work smarter and faster. Users can share links, files, and notes with their colleagues through the custom web application, opening up the dialogue within small to mid-size companies without clogging up the workflow with unnecessary hurdles.

Start discussing company news and information with your team by signing up for Inc. Login through Google Apps to set up your account, and manually add any links, notes, or files your team might find interesting. Inc will show you a preview of what you’ve posted before your content goes live to the whole team. People generally use Inc to share things like industry news articles, notes of encouragement, links to websites for inspiration, questions about projects they’re current working on, and meeting notes. The links you add can be viewed by everyone at your company. Inc will let you know who has seen which postings. Once colleagues have viewed the content you’ve shared, they can start discussions about that content using Inc’s online commenting tools.

Get notifications when new content has been posted on your company’s account, and look for past articles using Inc’s “Search” feature. Inc serves as an archive of important knowledge for its business users, saving all the documents that employees post for future reference. Larger organizations can also create smaller “groups,” which are useful for people who would prefer sharing information only with the colleagues in individual departments or teams.

Practical Uses:

• Share an article that’s been posted about your company
• Ask if anyone has ideas for how you should handle a difficult project
• Send out notes from a recent company meeting
• Encourage employees to stay on top of industry news

Insider Tips:

• Add an @-sign to mention another user by name
• Anyone in a Google Apps organization can join a company’s Inc account
• Notes and comments use Markdown for formatting
• Inc integrates with Hipchat and Flowdock

What we liked:

• People can share articles without bombarding their colleagues with emails
• Inc alerts users when they’ve been mentioned in a note or comment
• Inc is free for up to three users
• Automatic previews give people an idea of what their content will look like before it’s published on the company stream

What we didn’t like:

• Pricing is based on the number of users, which means Inc could be expensive for larger companies

Alternatives:

• Chatter – https://www.salesforce.com/chatter
• Convo – http://www.convo.com
• Yammer – https://www.yammer.com

Company Info:

• Launched: June 2013
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Karri Saarinen and Jori Lallo
• Web site: https://sendtoinc.com

Costs:

• $5 per user, per month