TinyGmail, a handy email shortening tool for businesses

With the advent of Twitter and other social media platforms, conveying your point in the most concise way possible, in a minimum number of characters, has become the need of the hour.The online market is flooded with URL shorteners to enable you to do the same.

This inspired Karthikeyan Kuppuswamy to take it one step further. He has come up with a new product called TinyGmail, a free email shortener service that automatically creates a tweet or tiny email ready to share on Twitter and other social media platforms with a single click and without having to leave your Gmail. TinyGmail also brings in the latest tweets of the company you are working for right to your inbox. What’s cool is that there is no user action required and the integration is seamless. However users have the choice of mails they want to link to TinyGmail. So for example, if there is a mail which contains information on confidential revenues numbers, that need not be made public and TinyGmail allows you such discretion.

Explaining how it works, Karthikeyan says: “It basically takes the important part of your subject line, along with important links and content in the main body and creates a small sensible tweet which can be readily shared. This will help business houses in their social media marketing promotions.The inbuilt URL shortner further increases the productivity of the app.” They aren’t monetizing at the moment, but will do it through ads sometime in the near future. Within a few weeks of release in the Google App store , TinyGmail has emerged as top new app.

Privacy is a very touchy issue, and most people won’t be willing to use this service for personal mails. Keeping this in mind Karthikeyan has developed this product just for businesses. “You can only avail this service if you have an official company based email id. The app primarily targets niche departments like sales and marketing,” he says. Knowing that even companies might be a bit apprehensive at first, he Karthikeyan adds “Even for the companies, you will have an option to choose which emails go out as tweets, so that confidential data doesn’t go out.”

TinyGmail currently has 20 companies using their app, and serve close to 500 users. The team comprises of Karthikeyan and his partner Tom Praison. Tom mainly manages the coding and backend operations while Karthikeyan manages the business end of things. He is in talks with new clients who he thinks may be interested in using the product. He is also in talks with LinkedIn and Yahoo! -- two platforms they intend to expand to.