Telecom Review organized an exclusive interview with Edgard Tawk, CEO and co-founder of Hiverse. Tawk shared deep insights on the benefits of the new platform and the services offered to companies as well as the future they expect for this tool.
Can you tell us more about the idea behind creating Hiverse and who will it benefit?
Hiverse, which stands for the universe of hives, started right from the beginning of the pandemic and its conception comes from two facts. The first is that so many employees are now scattered, working in hybrid models, some from the office and others from home. This situation has had an impact on the communication between employees themselves and the employees and the company, creating communication chaos, limiting employee engagement and forcing people to start using many different software and tools. Consequently, the communication between them was lost.
Second, in a lot of companies, people don't know each other. So, the idea of Hiverse came from this specific situation. It is a platform that allows to solve all these problems, by being the company, organization or club’s online Intranet. Imagine it as having Facebook, Slack, Whatsapp and e-learning all gathered in one platform.
What are the ranges of services Hiverse offers to companies?
Hiverse will offer a lot of services for companies while having its main focus on people. Hence, it is the people 360 for the company. The first major feature is the social wall, whereby companies can publish their news, events, documents, memos, videos and polls. When talking about a social wall, it means that everybody can comment, like and share. Also there's the possibility to create groups that we call colonies. Each colony is a group of people, could be a department or a team, or simply a group of people that are connected by a common topic or interest, and have their private social wall where they can post pictures, news, documents, etc, and communicate together. The second feature is the e- learning which allows companies to publish courses and to attach quizzes. Those courses could be anything that enhances the employee’s career or for general knowledge and fun. Once an employee finishes their courses, they can get loyalty points, badges and certificates.
The third feature is the organizer, which allows employees to organize their meetings, events, tasks etc, and will all be synced automatically to the calendar. A powerful aspect of the organizer is the ability to attach tasks to specific tags (topics, projects etc.) and auto-generate daily reports. This will provide intuitive insights on the amount of time spent on each tag, and hence better understanding of the spent time & cost.
The fourth feature is chat. Hiverse provides group chats and one-to-one chats, all end-to-end encrypted and fully private.
The fifth feature is the library, where companies can publish their internal documents. All companies, banks, insurance companies, have a lot of documents to share with their employees or with specific departments. These documents can be managed and stored in the directory.
The sixth and final feature is the directory, which allows exploring all members or employees within the organization, view their contact details and search by skill. Imagine you want to find someone to play tennis with, the directory would definitely simplify your quest.
How do you differentiate yourself from other competitors in the same field?
There's a little bit of competition in the area. You cannot find a one-stop-shop that has all of these tools in one place, rather you can find a lot of scattered apps around it; so the first differentiator is that everything is in one place. The second very important aspect of the platform is its maximum security by creating hives. Once the company registers on Hiverse and creates a hive, we automatically create their own cloud environment and their own dedicated database, which they fully own. The third important aspect is that institutions like banks, financial institutions or governments which do not allow to have their data on the cloud, can by a click of a button, create or move all their data to their servers.
Plus, only the organization has access to this hive created. The data is secure, encrypted and no one else can have access. It is noteworthy that the organization can invite guests to its hive but they will only be able to access the social wall or check the courses accomplished. The invitation will be for a limited period of time, and it will be very specific to certain areas that the administrator allows the guests to access.
A final advantage is the very competitive pricing model, which is much lower than any of the popular platforms, even though these only offer a single aspect of what Hiverse offers.
Hiverse will soon be launched publicly and officially. What is your vision for this product in the future?
Our public launch will be in Q1 2022. As Hiverse is a software-as-a-service, we are going to provide initiatives for startups where many features of Hiverse will be free to use for startups that consist of up to 10 employees. We are going to provide also specific setups for healthcare companies, financial institutions and bigger organizations. We want to attract them to use Hiverse and our target is to reach 100,000 active users by the end of 2022.
