Moped Launches Desktop Messaging App in Pursuit of Businesses

By David Knight |

You build a great app, make it look slick and easy to use, and you put it out there and starting racking up users. But making money out of it is a different matter altogether. It’s a challenge faced by many startups in Berlin, and one proven path is to start targeting your product at businesses. 6Wunderkinder has seemingly found success this way in recent months with Wunderlist 2, and now Moped is planning to reciprocate that.

The messaging platform has launched a desktop app for the Mac as part of efforts to shift focus towards businesses and teams. The new app makes it easier to use Moped as the main method of communication within a team, without having to open a web browser and log in.

Moped is an open web platform for messaging with integrated services such as Dropbox and Foursqaure, and works seamlessly on multiple devices across web and mobile. Like email, Moped allow you to instantly send messages from anywhere to anyone. And it says that unlike rival business chat apps like HipChat, Chatter and BaseCamp, users aren’t confined to their individual organisations.

They can also send and receive messages via email and find contacts through Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. Other integrated services include web of things platform IFTTT – connecting to Evernote, stock market alerts, weather updates etc – and Google Chrome.

Founder Schuyler Deerman said the company’s new direction in looking towards the business landscape is part of a broader trend in the tech world. He said: “We’re building things that [businesses] want, like desktop apps. … Business users spend a lot of time at their desks. The desktop app lets us get closer to users, and also makes a much better messaging experience by tapping into the Mac’s desktop notification system. Some people just prefer to have an app on their desktop, makes the service feel more solid for them.”

Schuyler also revealed plans to make it possible to integrate with other apps used by businesses, and to roll out the ability to upload files directly from Dropbox which is currently only available on the iOS Moped app.

Having launched an overhauled version 2.0 in June, Moped future plans will apparently include tackling the privacy issue brought to the fore by the Prism scandal.