Introducing Cubeit: All your apps in one place

An attempt at explaining the genesis of Cubeit, and the problems we hope to solve with it.

Why are we building Cubeit?

We started out building Cubeit because we realized that content organization on mobile is broken — apps own your content, and there is no way to organize and share it neatly in one place.

Here’s a use case: You are researching a story on Elon Musk. You get content from multiple sources — Tim Urban’s comprehensive article, a Product Hunt link from the Tesla Model X launch, Space X video from YouTube, Musk’s tweets and so much more. On your PC you would open a folder and put all these different types of content into it (via a document etc).

On the smartphone, we’ve built Cubeit to get your apps together.

How did we come up with the idea for Cubeit?

When we set out to hire for our earlier venture, we realized we had a tough time getting things done while on mobile. There would be emails floating around with candidate resumes, and links to their LinkedIn profiles, map links and phone numbers sent on chat, and discussions on date and time. Most of this content was sent in the form of links which were really tough to understand without switching out of the app I was in (because links are just text which give no context about the content behind it). That’s where the idea of creating a folder on your phone to connect different types of content in one place came about. We created this image as a proof of concept.

Cubeit Proof Of Concept

The Eureka moment — during user interviews we realized thateveryone shares screenshots of content on chat with their friends, because images are easier to consume within an application than links.

This led to the genesis of cards in Cubeit.

Our interface makes content view-able and actionable. So instead of links or text for saved content you get neat little cards which change depending on the type of content you save. Cards extract important information from content and show it to you up front and center.

Cubeit Cards

For example, if you save the Tesla headquarters location from Map in Cubeit, instead of a link or an image, you get an actionable card — we identify the type of content and create a card with Uber and Navigate buttons — so you can take action on content from right within Cubeit.

The list of apps we currently support is here.

Cubeit is a way for you to create an easily shareable folder of your apps, and accomplish tasks without needing to switch between multiple apps. You save, organize, share content in Cubeit, and act on it from within the Cubeit interface.

What are Cubeit’s features?

Here is a short video (36s).

• Collect anything — You can collect content from multiple apps in the same place by just sharing from the app to Cubeit. So if you’re researching for a story about Cubeit, you can save our product video, notes about our product, tweets from our twitter account, office location from maps, and Linkedin profiles of the founders all in the same place.
• Collaborate — You can share this research (as a set of links) with a colleague, and she is instantly updated. You both can share content, and its synced and saved inside the Cube.
• Interfaces for the future — Cubeit intelligently understands what is important from saved links and shows it up front. So if you saved a map location, Cubeit shows you a neat card with buttons to call an Uber or to Navigate to that location. With Cubeit’s consumable cards, you can accomplish tasks without switching apps! (Here’s a link of a link from Product Hunt being converted into a card)
• In App Search — To make content easier to access within Cubeit, we enable search across multiple apps. So you can search through Youtube, Wikipedia, Maps, and the web from inside Cubeit and then add it into the Cube.
• Share with everyone — If you’ve created a cool Cube, it’s super easy to share the Cube with friends who don’t have Cubeit — just share to any of your other social networks.

See an interesting Tweet? Cubeit! Watch a fun video? Put it in the Cube! Want save a friends address from Maps? Everything goes in a Cube!

The user experience

1. The first thing you have to do is Create a Cube for things you want to save. You have the option of sharing the Cube with any of your contacts to make it collaborative.
2. You will be walked through the process of getting content into the App.
3. You can share from apps using Android’s share functionality.
4. You can use our Chrome extension to save content from the desktop.
5. You can copy paste a link directly into the Cube.
6. The process of finding stuff to save is also made easier with our in app global search. You can search through YouTube, Maps, Wikipedia (for starters) from inside a Cube, and add content directly without having to switch outside Cubeit. This works particularly well if you’ve shared a Cube with a friend, and you want to quickly send the latest Psy video you saw somewhere to him.

Who are the competitors?

1. Evernote (organize all your content)
2. Dropbox (collaborative folders)
3. Slack (communicate on content around you).
4. Vurb (In spp search, sharing, and collaboration)

There are multiple other apps like Kifi which allow social bookmarking for links on the web.

How are we different?

1. Content types — We support a lot of content types which are only available on apps on your phone — save tweets, maps, YouTube videos, Zomato reviews and more.
2. Better interface — Cards intelligently show important information up front and make content actionable.

We’ve launched a beta version on the Android Play Store which you can get here, and a web and iOS apps are on the way.