Klink: The Best Enterprise App at DEMO 2014

The reduction in startup costs and the flattening of information have democratized the ability to create. Consequently, entrepreneurship has become one of the most common paths, with every graduate aiming for Zuckerberg fame. This glut of entrepreneurs has led some investors like Ben Horowitz of A16Z, and Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, to sound alarm bells. Horowitz writes about the hard times of starting and running a company in his book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things." Peter Thiel talks about the need to refocus entrepreneurs on the biggest problems in his book, "Zero to One," about radical innovation that departs the mainstream. 

There are more companies and tools than ever before.

For any discerning CEO, it's difficult to know which tools are best, and how to piece them together. Companies end up adopting laggard, proven technologies, paying top dollar for those services, and then under-utilizing those tools. One of the most common disparities between tools and workflows is related to the telephone. We all understand mobile computers in our pockets, but we forget that phone calls are also growing.

Companies pay hundreds of dollars per seat per month for platforms like Salesforce, the dominant customer relationship management (CRM) software. Yet this customer data is not surfaced and contextualized in real-time when employees need it. Three billion phone calls are made by businesses in the US each day. While call centers have optimization solutions to surface account data and context, billions of these calls are not consumers calling businesses. These are enterprises trying to execute the daily challenges of business such as selling solutions, building partnerships, signing deals.

Last week, Klink, a productivity tool that structures enterprise data in real time and displays caller and company profile information across devices on inbound and outbound calls, launched at DEMO in California. This week, CIO Magazine heralded its launch, naming it one of the top enterprise apps of the year at DEMO.  

As tools proliferate, it becomes imperative that others stitch together the data, and bring us back to the point of technology in the first place – to make our lives easier.