Feature
Just when it feels like we have enough collaboration tools, another application wants to take on the market to change the way people work.
Hailing from Boulogne-Billancourt, France, collaboration application Amplement launched this month in the US and boasts almost 10,000 US-based customers and another 500,000 in France.
CEO Adrien Sommier founded the company in 2010 and followed up with a 2013 launch in Europe. Sommier claims Amplement offers the best of Slack, LinkedIn and Skype in one application.
“The real problem is that there's no link between all these applications, and they don’t even identify users the same way,” Sommier told CMSWire.
“Slack and Skype use an alias, LinkedIn uses your first and last name and Yammer uses internal logins given by the company. Because of that, transitions between the apps are difficult, as are managing your contacts. Even just moving between them ends up costing a pretty considerable waste of time.”
One-Stop Career Management
The application supports public and private channels, video calls, attachments and career management and networking. The idea is professionals can work together, manage projects, share files and manage their careers in one place.
Roughly 700 new users join Amplement every day, according to Sommier. The free single-page application runs on any browser and updates in real-time.
“It is free when you talk to people on the street or with your team at the office, right? We want to work on the same principle,” Sommier said.
Users see a homepage with contacts, groups, their profile and a news feed. They can navigate between different conversations, search for new users to connect with or share documents.
The company plans to add document collaboration capabilities soon, according to Sommier, to allow creation, editing and viewing of docs within the Amplement application.
Productivity Mingled With Career Management
US users will soon have access to the job search and recruitment tools currently available to European users. The "LinkedIn-style job searches" will also be free.
Since Amplement supports both public and private interactions, employers using the platform for recruiting will be able to move new hires into internal workflows if they've already established a relationship in the app.
Sommier said Amplement eliminates the need for different communication platforms so that conversations can happen then and there. Rather than finding a connection on LinkedIn and then emailing to schedule a chat or video call, users can skip all the corresponding by adding a contact on Amplement.
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“Every conversation we have ends up being logged in a different place,” he said.
Trying to Cash in on Microsoft's LinkedIn Buy
Amplement is meant to offer a unique experience for every worker depending on how he or she uses it, Sommier said.
“Amplement is an intuitive application, based on artificial intelligence. The user identifies the collaboration part and the career part pretty easily. He can deal with both at the same time, or just collaborate.”
“It's almost predictive. Even if the user has not clicked yet, we already know where she is going to click. It adapts to a user being American versus European, because it adapts to most any factor that changes how a person would use it, such as their job position, status as staff or freelancer, age.”
Despite differences in European and American workplace cultures, Sommier isn’t worried about the application’s success in the US.
Amplement raised 1 million euros ($1.126 million) in 2015 as France’s first professional social network, drawing comparisons to LinkedIn, recently acquired by Microsoft. Sommier, however, says Microsoft’s bid only “reinforces” Amplement’s strategy.
“With such big players already in the market, and a team of just 15, our strategy focuses on our ability to be a lot more agile than the big boys. We can act faster and make split-second decisions that large companies can't.”
“So Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn means that the two will now be even slower than before.”
