Ekkli was a small startup where I was one of the Founders. We built a collaboration tool for decision making.
Lets say, you want to buy a car and you need to choose between 3 or 5 models. But in order to make the right decision, you want to consult with 1 or 2 million people and base your decision on everyone’s inputs. More than that – you also want to have a decision in 2 days.
That was one of the problems we tried to solve. In such problems it’s really hard to communicate in chats or any other communication methods because it will usually create very long threads in which it will be very difficult to operate. So we built a tool that allowed you to solve that kind of problem in just 1 screen – because 1 picture is worth a thousand words. On 1 screen you can easily see the status of the discussion, no matter how many people are involved and get to the conclusions in a few seconds.
In order to do that we separated our product into 2 parts:
- Semantic engine which could get any messages as inputs in many different formats. It compared all the messages it got and calculated similarity between them. Then we had a grid where the engine could track all the messages over time. Similar (semantically) messages tended to come closer to each other over time and the distinct ones went in opposite directions from each other. That way in a large amount of discussions we could give the user recommendations like: “In 73% of similar discussions, the people get to this conclusion: …”
- Different visualizations for different kinds of discussions. For example, when you compared between 2 or 3 alternatives, we were showing you the discussion as 2 or 3 bars that go up and down and you can easily see which alternative is better than the others. If you choose a car to buy, we showed you a flow where every case leads to something else and eventually leads to the final solution which is accepted by the majority of the participants
It was a very warm and friendly startup. We were a group of 7 friends, we met for multiple overnight coding sessions at home, cafes, shared offices and had a really good time together. It was a really long time ago but I still remember those days with great pleasure.
