A Quick History of Cogi – Part 1

Cogi was started in 2007 by Santa Barbara entrepreneurs, Bob Dolan, Mark Cromack and Palmer Jackson. Bob was the founding CEO of CallWave, a local Internet Telephony company that went public in 2004.  Mark Cromack was a co-founder of another local telephony company, CrystalVoice, that was acquired by Global IP Solutions in 2007. Palmer was a seed investor and early employee at CallWave and had worked with Bob for years.We have to give credit to Bob for coming up with the original idea. What was that idea? Well, if you know Bob at all, you know that he’s constantly on the phone and even he would admit he’s got a bit of ADD (as do all 3 of us). Bob is one of those people who sees problems and wonders about how to fix them, while the rest of us just deal with those problems and wouldn’t even think of trying to solve them.So here’s the problem that Bob felt was not being addressed: how do you accurately capture the valuable content within our day to day conversations and meetings? We have become accustomed to having a searchable archive of our important email communications and our important documents, but we have no way of recovering the valuable, fleeting insights that often come up when we talk to eachother — either in person or on the phone. We try to take notes, but that can present two problems — first, our notes are often illegible, and second, we have to take our focus off of the conversation for a moment to write notes. With our backgrounds in telephony and Internet, we began to think of ways to solve this problem.

Early on we were fortunate to work with a couple of very talented marketing folks at Santa Barbara’s own Ideocore. Brett Posten and Robert TenEyck helped develop the name Cogi (a contraction of the phrase ‘Cogent Idea.’ ) Brett and Robert also helped us develop our ‘Core Idea.’ We decided that the Core Idea for Cogi is as follows: Cogi helps you capture your important conversations and meetings so you can review the content, search it, and share it with others.

Around that time there was a lot of buzz around Voicemail-to-text services such as PhoneTag and Grand Central — even CallWave had developed a so-called ‘gist’ service that would send you a text message of your voicemail message. However, we used to joke that voicemail was so 1990s and, after all, THAT’S THE CALL YOU MISSED!

What if you could have a written transcript of a critical conversation you had with a client, your boss, a prospective customer, your lawyer, your doctor? Wouldn’t that be a lot more valuable than a transcript of a voice-mail message (Hey, Bob, call me back)? YES!

So, Cogi was born. Two years later, we have a real service that does exactly what we talked about some two and a half years ago and we have customers using the service every day.

In my next post, I will detail the features of Cogi and talk about the process of how we developed them. Of course, you can always get a free 30 day trial of Cogi by visiting our site. Probably the easiest way to understand how our service works is to watch our demo here.