There's an incredible amount of cool stuff you can do with this kind of email integration, and mostly it's done in-house by companies for competitive advantage reasons.
A real world example I've seen: A potential clients emails you, the system checks if they know any of your colleagues or friends, pull up data on the client's company (company news, figures, creditworthiness, etc.), finds common interests, etc. With the extra information instantaneously to hand, your chances of converting the prospect to a client go up by an order of magnitude.
That kind of functionality can be worth a fortune. But at the moment it's only large enterprise companies that can build it, making it affordable to small to mid-size companies seems a pretty solid business plan. I think Rapportive in going the more "generic" route (api, etc.) are going to steal etacts thunder and the marketplace. It's a brilliant idea.
A real world example I've seen: A potential clients emails you, the system checks if they know any of your colleagues or friends, pull up data on the client's company (company news, figures, creditworthiness, etc.), finds common interests, etc. With the extra information instantaneously to hand, your chances of converting the prospect to a client go up by an order of magnitude.
That kind of functionality can be worth a fortune. But at the moment it's only large enterprise companies that can build it, making it affordable to small to mid-size companies seems a pretty solid business plan. I think Rapportive in going the more "generic" route (api, etc.) are going to steal etacts thunder and the marketplace. It's a brilliant idea.