In 2011, three IE Business School MBAs created Mashpan, an online tool that organizes messages, documents and links scattered over different web services including Gmail, Dropbox, Facebook and Linkedin and presents them in one intuitive view.
Mashpan is the brainchild of Israeli national Liad Rubin, who worked for an internet company in his home country prior to IE; Canadian Zubin Chagpar who had worked for the likes of Google and VeriSign; and US born Geoff Gibson who has over seven years of experience in software development. The IE MBAs were later joined by Belgian Computer Scientist Phillip De Smedt.
Liad Rubin, one of the co-founders, said that, “The idea of Mashpan was born out of the frustrations of working in groups as an MBA student and having to share files and information via various different services all the time”.
“It’s hard to see the entire information picture online so Mashpan was born a a web and mobile service to present information from different sources such as emails and social feeds and show it to users in one intuitive view”, says Liad.
The awesome thing about Mashpan is that it groups your information into themes, making it easier for you to use. It even brings to your attention important information in your social feed that you might not have been aware of.
Liad highlighted that IE Venture Lab was instrumental in the development of the product. It was there that the team got their first vote of confidence and the motivation to continue working on Mashpan.
Venture Lab forced Mashpan to develop quickly and transform into a more solid business idea. The Venture Lab advisors were so impressed with Mashpan’s progress that the firm was voted "Best Online Venture" by a jury of highly recognized entrepreneurs and investors.
When BusinessBecause spoke with Liad earlier in the month, the start-up had been running in Madrid for nearly three months but asgetting ready to move to Barcelona to participate in Wayra. Wayra is an accelerated programme for Latin American and European start-ups, backed by Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica. Mashpan was selected as one of the companies to benefit through mentorship, funding and programme development opportunities in 2012.
The team plans to add more services from which Mashpan can gather information. They envision students as one of their key target markets and hope to :“Create such an amazing service that the users can also be the marketers!”
We’re looking forward the service being rolled out and will keep you posted on how Mashpan grows at Wayra. The video below explains how you can use the service to keep tabs on your online information.
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Interested in how Facebook got started? Check out our interview with Divya Narendra, one of the site's original founders
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