start.me

Inspiration

As people use a growing amount of connected devices and internet services (websites, feeds, email, storage, etc) they suffer from a decreasing overview of their digital life. start.me helps them organize all their internet services in one easily accessible place that can be accessed everywhere (regardless of location, device and browser).

How it works

start.me offers a web-based personal start page with an integrated bookmarks manager, support for news feeds and a library with thousands of widgets that help users connect to their e-mail and other popular internet services.

Challenges I ran into

There are various challenges that we've faced so far. One challenge has been to allow people to display their latest e-mails from their inbox on their startpage. We were struggling integrating API's/IMAP-services from various e-mail providers like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL until we found out about Context.IO!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Within 12 months we have attracted over 840,000 unique users per month already (source: Google Analytics).

What I learned

Although the IMAP protocol is standardized, there are a lot of different interpretations and implementations used by e-mail providers. Context.io takes away a lot of this backend complexity and this helped us get our e-mail widget developed quickly.