DEMO: Cc:Betty makes email easier for collaboration

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A new company called Cc:Betty is making it a lot easier to follow email conversations.

Ever get fed up with tracking threads in your email inbox? Google’s Gmail was early to track conversation threads, but if you’re like me, it’s confusing, or at the least bothersome: You have to open the threads and scan through them all each time.

Cc:Betty, of Palo Alto, Calif., offers a single view of an entire conversation, and an overview of any files, places, images or videos included in the exchange. And you don’t have to wade through conversations opening emails.

The company just launched at DEMO here in Palm Desert, Calif.

Its beauty is simplicity. The only thing you have to do is cc your emails to Betty, and they’re collected automatically by its eponymous virtual assistant and presented to you on a centralized web page. Betty offers you a link to this site whenever you correspond with her, so that you can go there seamlessly during your work flow.

There’s no download, and it only requires your email address and password for registration. The person you’re emailing with doesn’t even have to be registered for the product to work.

It also collects all of your files (see image at bottom) under tabs, so that you can find maps of locations contained in your correspondence and related attachments in an orderly way.

The company was incubated in the offices of Venrock, a VC firm in Silicon Valley, and hasn’t raised a first round of capital yet. It was co-founded by Michael Cerda, previously founder of VoIP company Jangl.

The only thing the company needs to tackle is making it automatic to cc: Betty on all emails (so you don’t have to type it in each time). Already, Gmail gives you an option in settings to have all mail cc’d to a particular person, so the app works well there. The company is currently developing plugins to make this possible for other email products.

Well, the other thing is figuring out a way to make money. In this department, Cc:Betty is working on a couple of distribution deals with bigger Web players.

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