That was in the back of my head…
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Without seeing the books, or knowing revenue numbers outside of extrapolating based on active users it’s hard to know. $41M doesn’t seem too far fetched if the numbers are accurate though.
As far as the software is concerned, I don’t think TE does anything remarkable. I think the enterprise market has moved beyond canned response use case as a standalone product. Most of those types of responses are being automated with chat bots and built into CRM’s as mentioned above. Personally, I think the market has passed them by in some ways. Text expansion seems more like a feature than a product. Look at a feature like the suggestions offered in Gmail when you type out a response. Will be interesting to see if they can pivot to a true platform offering and continue to grow.
With all of that said, someone with A LOT more money than me thinks otherwise. Will be fun to watch…
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OK, that will be the point for me, to consider throwing TE from my systems!
I have zero interest in TE using my snippets (and the possible sensible information within), as a “suggestion” to anyone else.
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Really makes one scratch one’s head doesn’t it? When a straight forward coder like Peter Lewis can make an app that, from the point of view of nearly every user, does the same thing on his own as it were.
In my view does it better by far too.
I probably don’t want to start up a discussion about this though as it will take us into "open source’, ‘who made the web’, ‘who should benefit and how’, that kind of thing.
Really my dilema is how to protect the regular developers while at the same time frankly taming the patent jockeys, hedge funders and so on. What is a company worth? Seems to me ‘real’ value has somehow vanished into a labyrinth of speculation and value unmoored from anything. Like housing for example.
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I wouldn’t worry. They’re talking about analysis and recommendations of snippets from within your own account. For example, if you have 100 people on a social media team, you might want more tools to see how the snippets are being used, which are correlated, etc. And you might want TE to help you train new team members on what to use. A small team or individual wouldn’t use this kind of tool. (Not saying this initiative is necessarily going to be successful.)
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Is there a way to create auto replies for when things like Text Expander or 1Password are mention so we don’t get 20 replies of the same 5 people complaining about it having raised money?
Please can someone explain this for a non-techy person? I’m guessing TextExpander is literally just offering… text expansion? Is it more sophisticated than what Alfred offers through its Snippets function? Or are they basically the same thing?
I am baffled, but I probably don’t use text expansion as much as I could.
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Text Expander lets people and companies use pre-done content to make their communications faster and more accurate. For example, David used to talk about using TE for legal contracts. He could put boilerplate in TE, and when he was drawing up a new contract his TE expansion (coded by him, obviously) could ask him questions and include appropriate boilerplate text as was appropriate to the situation. TE snippets can be incredibly complex things, with conditional logic, script embeds, etc.
TE also offers team collaboration features. Let’s say that Omni was using TE, and that the email support people are always being asked when Omnifocus 4 is going to be released. Somebody with that knowledge could continuously update an “Omnifocus 4 Release” template with whatever the current understanding was, and the email reps would just have to type something like ;ofrelease to put the current version of the template into a reply. This makes it easier and faster for Omni, eliminates errors from reps that don’t know the current info, etc.
When they’re talking about analysis and suggestion in the context of this funding, I have no knowledge of what they’re talking about, but I could imagine something on a larger level where they can look at what people are typing, then use AI to say “your email support reps keep typing in information about the Omnifocus 4 release date - would you like to create a snippet for that?” And then when the user is replying to an email regarding OF4’s release, TE could suggest the snippet.
That last paragraph is complete and total speculation - but I could see a value add for something like that. It would allow companies to have actual humans that could reply to detailed questions, while being able to learn what questions they’re being asked and encourage leadership to develop snippets accordingly.
Can you point too, where they talk about this.
The Article in post #1 only speaks of “popular” Snipets, with no point toward Teams only?!
The clear inference is that this data would be analyzed for Snippet Groups, for which a system of sharing privileges already exists:
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The user interface makes it easier to add/edit/manage/import/share large numbers of snippets.
If you only have a couple dozen snippets that you regularly use then Alfred or Keyboard Maestro are fine.
But if you want to create a more robust set of snippets - potentially with dropdown menus, Javascript capabilities, database retrieval - then it is much easier to do it with TextExpander or Typinator than with KM.
There are also Windows and Web versions of Textexpander available (unlike Typinator).
On the other hand, Typinator allows you to format your snippet output in rendered HTML (basically Rich Text) - that is not possible with TextExpander and I do not think it is possible with Keyboard Maestro.
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I used KM to paste formatted text, including an embedded image or two, into emails several times. You can’t style the text in KM, but you can style it elsewhere, paste it into KM, and then KM will happily insert it properly formatted.
The “most popular snippet” thing — in the case of corporate support teams — could be useful analytics to confirm/predict/identity “issues” for
management, or your developers, etc., surely?
As in, TE will now “know” that your team is constantly having to explain A/B/C (using a snippet(s)) to clients with support queries, since the release of v6.1.2 of your app or service (or new product/widget etc)…
That then serves as a further/different data point to what would usually be used for that sort of thing, which I presume could be quite valuable in a big corporate setting?
Just more speculation, though. 
This makes some sense. The data could be valuable to the organization using TextExpander and not the company TexExpander.
Consider the implications of this. TextExpander has gone from being a utility to automate writing to a system which has access to, monitors, and stores data about all (for some value of “all”) of your company’s email. I would be very curious to see the security model and access levels for this. As well as where this monitoring system would be hosted.
If this is true in the general sense, then the folks at TextExpander may believe they have identified a very large market for such a product.
Currently the website is not very well protected (only password), which could make this a real security thread for many companies (and individuals) indeed. For companies/users working with sensitive data a text expander tool is probably something you never want installed, unless you can be certain the software is very secure and you can trust the company enough. Text expander tools are essentially key-loggers…
I don’t know enough to even know what I don’t know — but a keylogger scenario like this would surely be maintaining a buffer of typed text only to the extent that it checks to see if a specific trigger is called?
In other words, if triggers are typically “xsig” or “;sig” — then what is being logged is at most a string of 20 characters, that is continuously being overwritten on device, as it monitors for those triggers?
AFAIK, TE “only” sees what is already in your snippet-library (so to speak), since you put it there (and it is kept on TE’s servers) — but not anything significant being typed/created on your device?
If I am completely misunderstanding that, then this would certainly give me pause to reconsider!
That is what we would assume… but it still only is an assumption. I do not think TE wilfully gathers more information than needed. The issue is that we: think, and assume… but do not know for certain.
Just to clarify i do not distrust TE! It’s just that when talking about security it is always difficult to determine how secure a (closed source) solution is, software is complex and bugs are always there. In many cases we can only hope/ assume the software is safe, but as shown in practice we know that even companies with massive budgets and development teams can make critical mistakes. My point in this case is that software loggin keystrokes always is high risk software.
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If it’s monitoring to suggest snippets, it’s going to need more than 20 characters in its buffer.
True, and this also means it is storing these snippets somewhere in the meantime, the questions is where does it store these snippets and how are they stored (plain text, encrypted; online, offline). Maybe this information is available, i did not search for it. So in reality TE could be storing sensitive information in a way and on a location where you would not want it stored.
And those are the two conflicting viewpoints on TE vs similar open source products. I think it’ll likely depend heavily on the company as to which tradeoff is more viable.