Cotap, The WhatsApp For The Workplace, Brings File Sharing with Integrations with Top-Players

Cotap is a startup started by Jim Patterson and Jack Parker last year is a mobile messaging application for the enterprise. These two are former executives of Yammer. Yammer is used for private communication within organizations and is an example of enterprise social software. Yammer was sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

They aimed at making Cotap the ‘Whatsapp for the workplace’. Consumer-focused apps such as Whatsapp and WeChat require phone numbers but Cotap allows users to find and connect with other users who share their corporate email domain. Cotap was launched initially only for mobile users. Now they are unveiling a new version of product to address a wider audience. Moving ahead of mobile messaging, Cotap is moving into file sharing utilities and integrating with popular existing services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

“Cotap launched initially with iOS and Android but being mobile first doesn’t mean mobile only,” Patterson explains. “A lot of our usage was driven by people using iMessage before, and they would like to continue to go seamlessly between what they are doing at their desk and what they do on mobile.”

With this service, Cotap can act as an intermediate point of these storage service. User can get the advantage of synchronized notifications which means that the notes read on one platform will be marked on the other, and discussions or projects initiated on one can be carried on any platform.

“The difference between us and Yammer is like the difference between Whatsapp and Facebook,” Patterson says. “Yammer is not targeted to anyone specifically while this is very specifically about who you choose to target.”