Kivo (YC S13) Uses Git to Make Collaborating on Documents Easier

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/kivo-uses-git-to-make-collaborating-on-documents-easier-starting-with-powerpoint/

by zefi • 13 years ago

127 27 13 years ago

Oculus• 13 years ago

I remember either Asana, Stripe, or Quora suggesting to build a similar program to help your application when applying. I always thought it was a super cool idea, but never got around to building one.

I'll try and find a link later today.

vladaionescu• 13 years ago

Nice!

6thSigma2• 13 years ago

How does merging work? It didn't cover that in the video.

pea2• 13 years ago

Hey 6thSigma! I'm Leo, CTO @ Kivo:

There are two things you'd merge: changes to the whole presentation (i.e. new slides), and multiple changes to the same slide. In the first instance, we slot together the slides and alert the user. In the latter instance (if you sync a change and I sync a change to a single slide), they will both appear chronologically in the list. It is up to the user to merge these versions together.

Automatic merging works well with code because you can move locations of functions and -- to some extent -- chunks of code (although git usually will require some merge resolution); as we are merging something (a slide) which, unlike code, has to appear a certain way visually, this approach doesn't make much sense. Auto-merging together two slides with different content would not have a desirable result. I'd love to hear your ideas on what you think the best UX for this is.

6thSigma2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I get what you're saying. This is what I was thinking:

Say Person A and Person B are working on a slide that has the text "Hello World" centered on a white background.

Person A makes a change to the slide by changing the background to red and moving the text box up 10 pixels.

Person B makes a change to the slide by changing the text to "Hello World!"

They both sync at the same time.

Ideally, Kivo would be able to differentiate the changes as non-conflicting. For some reason I doubt Microsoft's Powerpoint API allows you to differentiate between those changes, however. :)

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

One thing, which may be sort of a special case, that you should probably try to handle is merging 'document wide' style changes (such as changed color schemes or whatever) with content addition/removal. So like:

         version a
        /         \
       /           \
  add slide    change style
       \           /
        \         /
         version b

If there is a way that version b could have the new 'document wide' style change applied to the new slide automatically, that would be great. This is an issue that I very frequently run into when collaborating on slides, one person is working on adding unstyled content while the other is working on the look-and-feel of the slide deck.

Of course a style change could include things like font size changes that could break the layout of the new slide...

spion• 13 years ago

Interesting. We applied with a very similar concept (except starting with Word instead of PowerPoint and with more focus on email and tasks doable on mobile devices) in winter 2012 and got immediately rejected. Our pitch was probably not good enough...

We're working without YC's help anyway and hoping to launch soon :)

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

Kivo was previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6023423

I think it's an idea with a lot of potential, if executed correctly. Great to see they're YC S13!

jaksmit• 13 years ago

it should probably detect that I'm on a Mac and not direct me to download a .exe file...

zefi5• 13 years ago

sorry about that, we will do. There's a mac sign up link in the top bar to add to be added the mac beta.

chrisgd• 13 years ago

I can immediately see use for this product. As a former investment banker, the majority of your time is spent in powerpoint sending different documents back and forth between analyst, associate and VP. Track changes always worked fine in word for the majority of my purposes. I imagine there are a number of investment banks, both bulge bracket and otherwise that could benefit from this.

zefi5• 13 years ago

great to hear Chris, some of our very early users were at Investment Banks. Drop me your email on zefi@kivo.com, I'd love to get your advice on approaching the large ones.

charleyma• 13 years ago

Definitely seconding a clear use-case for bankers, I've done basic versions of git repo doc sharing;

however the primary concern that I always have with any sort of version control programs is the fact that the documents must be completely internal and within our firewall, any sort of external hosting is usually not secure enough, and most solutions seem to lack easy implementation due to the speed of technology at large banks.

zefi5• 13 years ago

We will be offering self hosted deployments behind the firewall. All we need is a Git server and you're away. Would be good to chat more, I'm zefi@kivo.com

omegant• 13 years ago

I´m working from the air mac but I´ll give it a shot when I get home. This is exactly one of the ideas that I have been wondering with my friends (don´t worry we are with another project right now), git-like collaborative editing, but more centered on docs, as we where working on documentation. Working with several comments and version on the same document is a pain!, good luck with this. Some questions: -is there a version map? like a facebook timeline but with all the lines of the branches-users. Where I can see the last commits by user, but also the diff on a slide basis.

-is there a project owner, the one that accepts commits (I suppose there is one)

-I really like sigma´s idea. Be able to split between visual updates and content updates (but not a priority)

-how do you express-print the diff function on a slide? have you considered about a toogle button, or a slider to change between different versions of the different branches?.

-Is the document´s owner able to merge a single slide from a branch(user) that he likes, and then at the next slide choose from another branch(user)?

-How do you manage annotations?

I´ll defenitely check it when I´ll get home, there is a big oportunity here. Personally we have tried with google docs, office 365, and the like, they just don´t work. On a side note if you happen to need distribution for SaaS on a IT basis and want to be able to control how people uses your product (and charge accordingly), just contact us at apparly.com .

MarcScott• 13 years ago

I work in education, so I looked at this with interest (PowerPoint is a teacher's staple, although I personally prefer Reveal.js).

I think a closer model to GitHub and the Windows app would be more useful to me. The Github Windows app is able to pick up differences in Word documents without any trouble already (although probably just text changes).

When working on a project, we normally have multiple files in a directory. A PowerPoint or two, a couple of Word docs and maybe an Excel file. A standalone app, rather than a PowerPoint plugin, would be able to look for all changes in the directory such as the addition of image files.

More importantly I would like to see pull requests. I like to share my resources with other educators, that aren't part of my 'team'. It would be nice if they could make improvements to my resources and then submit a pull request, so I could review what they've done and then accept it.

Just my thoughts. I've long thought we need a GitHub for teachers, but I don't have the skills to implement this yet.

ahtomski• 13 years ago

You should check out this http://www.teachhub.meliordevelopment.com/. We built it in a weekend exploring exactly that problem in schools.

guynamedloren• 13 years ago

Marc - I'm building something I think you'd find interesting and would love to chat with you. Shoot me an email? lorendburton [at] gmail

kamweti2• 13 years ago

off topic but there is a brand mix-up here, did Cove http://getcove.com/ rebrand to kivo?

zefi5• 13 years ago

wow! great spot. We used to be called Verse(.io) and wanted to change to a .com. Cove was one of our options but we didn't go with it in the end. Need to add a redirect. How did you find the url?

kamweti2• 13 years ago

it was unanticipated, I was happily doing a google search for the first guy in your testimonials and it came up

minor_nitwit2• 13 years ago

Wasn't this problem already solved by Sharepoint and SVN? If I do a diff from SVN at work, it automatically brings up the compare documents screen in Word.

If your company is of any decent size you have a server of your own, so what's the advantage of putting the repository on Kivo?

Microsoft is always going to have an edge over anyone when it comes to Microsoft Office documents, so even if some of this idea becomes successful, I don't see how it stays out of office for long.

djtriptych• 13 years ago

Please let me borrow your time machine.

minor_nitwit2• 13 years ago

Just install Tortoise SVN. Create a repository on your shared server, and then add a folder on your local machine to the repository. When you commit a file, you'll have a diff option, as well as locks and everything else you get.

ajaymehta• 13 years ago

Absolutely awesome product, congrats on the launch!

Kivo (YC S13) Uses Git to Make Collaborating on Documents Easier

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