Cola, a New Start-up, Introduces Ways to Do More in Text Messages

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Cola is an attempt to make it easier to accomplish many kinds of tasks in text messages.Credit

For better or worse, text messaging is the app people spend more time using than any other on their smartphones. A new start-up, Cola, believes it can make it a bit better.

The start-up, based in San Francisco and staffed by engineers who used to work at Apple, Nest and other companies, will begin a private test of the iPhone version of a new messaging app, also called Cola, on Thursday. The company has raised an early round of funding from Naval Ravikant, the founder of Angel List; Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL; and others.

The premise behind Cola, according to David Temkin, the company’s chief executive, is that smartphones have primarily become texting devices for many people. Still, Mr. Temkin argues that a lot of the communication that occurs in text messages — planning where and when to meet, telling your spouse what to get from the supermarket and so on — is unnecessarily inefficient.

Cola is an attempt to make it easier to accomplish those kinds of tasks in text messages and to give other app makers the programming hooks that allow them to expand the abilities of text messages even further.

Someone scheduling a picnic with friends, for example, can text a to-do list to recipients that allows them to claim certain tasks — like buying sandwiches, bringing a Frisbee and getting beverages. Cola users can share live maps in a text message that update their locations for selected times.

Mr. Temkin says his company wants other companies to link their apps to Cola, too. An airline or a maker of a flight tracker app, for example, could let Cola users share the location of their planes through a text message. Mr. Temkin, who worked at Apple in the 1990s on Newton, its early mobile device, likens the product to a messaging “operating system,” in the sense that others can build software on top of it.

Whether people will be willing to download a new messaging app to replace the basic one that comes with their smartphones is the biggest question for the company. Mr. Temkin believes Cola can succeed by bringing the functions people can get in apps like a calendar and mapping programs to text messaging.

In a survey of American smartphone owners conducted last November by Pew Research, 97 percent of respondents said they used their phones for text messaging, while 92 percent said they used them for voice and video calls.

“This is where the users are,” Mr. Temkin said.