Margret Anne Hutaff points is to this Tech Crunch article “VCs Stop, Collaborate And Listen To Teamwork Tech” by Christine Magee. Magee crunches the numbers to show where the money goes. In this case, the money is flowing toward collaboration platforms and apps. Why?

Magee gets one very solid money quote from Santi Subotovsky of Emergence Capital

“The adoption of mobile devices is creating a huge opportunity,” says Santi Subotovsky, partner at Emergence Capital. “Eighty percent of the world’s workforce is not sitting in front of a computer, but now they have mobile devices,” Subotovsky says.

Yes that’s why #nomail is the solution. The workstation is gone. Your work is where you are and more likely than not that’s not at your office, desk or Krishna-forbid a cubical.

Slack is the big bear but there are many competitors — looking at specific audiences, price levels and varieties of integration. Included in the Magee article, besides Slack are Remind (aimed at education), Quip (coming out of wordprocessing), and Zoom (coming for video and conferencing). But, as you see in the chart above, there are many others that are solidly funded and mature.

Soon after I tweeted about the Magee article, I heard from Jeff Strinko of Glip (not to be confused with the above Quip) which offers secure chat and video conferencing as well as the usual integrated calendars and the like. Glip is aimed at mobile and at getting you and your team out of the Inbox and into productive activities — rather than just planning those activities.

Peter Pezaris, Glip founder, compared his product with Slack here on Quora recently. I haven’t test driven Glip (yet) but it looks like he makes some good comparisons and contrasts.

Good engineering underway and a good selection of #noemail options are emerging. Soon we’ll have something(s) that are: highly collaborative, mobile preferred, whitelisted, terse, quick, highly interactive, context appropriate, available to all devices, and with highly manageable and customizable communications streams