Team Apart (YC S08) hits the right price for collaboration: $0.00

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/06/team-apart-hits-the-right-price-for-collaboration-000/

by whather • 17 years ago

64 30 17 years ago

whather12• 17 years ago

Hey guys, I have 50 invites for hacker news. First come, first serve: http://teamapart.com/signup/hackernews

wave• 17 years ago

whather, I am not sure if you can get into the details of your technology, but does your service use Adobe’s Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP)? Is that the reason you can provide a free service?

whather12• 17 years ago

Yes, we do support RTMFP for Flash 10 clients and we've been very happy with the performance as well as the cheaper server costs. We plan on having a paid, premium account later on.

paulbaumgart2• 17 years ago

Any chance you could throw us a couple more? They're all used up.

How about if I promise to give constructive feedback? :-)

whather12• 17 years ago

Haha, sure: http://teamapart.com/signup/hackernews2

tdavis• 17 years ago

As someone who beta tested this numerous times, I can tell you this is some ridiculously slick virtual meeting software. It reminds me of the Microsoft Surface a bit, the way you can manipulate stuff in and out of focus and so on. Very cool stuff.

whather12• 17 years ago

Thanks for all your testing Tom. Appreciate it!

joez• 17 years ago

What market are you guys trying to target? Enterprise?

The workspace did not load for me on Chrome or IE7 from my corporate computer. (Blue bar loaded the whole way and then did not render any changes). I don't know if you guys are using any nonstandard ports but if you are then just know lots of corporations block off ports.

whather12• 17 years ago

Joez send me an email at wes@teamapart.com and I'll try and help you sort it out.

joshwa• 17 years ago

FYI-- same results here FF3.5 OSX behind corporate firewall. Interesting side effect of resizing the window is that I can see and interact with the little chat widget in the bottom right of the screen.

carterschonwald• 17 years ago

I have to say I really like this, very pleasantly lightweight. When you have a tutorial, you might want to make clear that minimizing does the role of controlling whats maximized rather than whats visible. What are the synchronization etc constraints on collaborative simulataneous white board or notepad editing?

whather12• 17 years ago

Thanks Carter!

I agree the minimize, maximize and close buttons are a little confusing. We plan on making another pass on the layout code soon.

ktharavaad• 17 years ago

Ok. So we've had Thinkature, Yvew, Dabbleboard, dimdim..etc..etc and a bunch of others. Did any one of them really make MONEY after webEX was sold? So whats so different about this one besides a nicer interface?

That being said, Congrats on the execution, its a very nicely done flex app. However, you might want to set

horizontalScrollPolicy=off

verticalScrollPolicty=off

for the itemRenderers of the HList of your Camera chooser page, because on my mac, the Label control overflows and cauese the scrollbars to popup.

Good luck guys!

jasonkester• 17 years ago

We're not up against WebEx (at least Twiddla isn't). They can't hang in the quick & easy department, which it seems is the area this thing is targeting too.

And yeah, we're making money. Maybe not MONEY, but money, which is all I really need.

zhyder2• 17 years ago

Dabbleboard is making money, just with the whiteboard. And we started well after WebEx was sold; thankfully WebEx doesn't care about the whiteboard.

We're working on a broader solution that'll compete more with the likes of WebEx (coincidentally our focus -like TeamApart- is also on 'few-to-few' rather than 'one-to-many'). To differentiate, we're considering adding more Asynchronous collaboration features (inspired mostly by wikis and less so by Google Wave).

whather12• 17 years ago

Thanks for the heads up on the scrollbars, I'll fix this.

apsurd• 17 years ago

Really love the layout of your marketing website. It is beautifully simple. I'm taking notes!

weaksauce• 17 years ago

I like the service a lot. Any plans for an undo feature? That is a fairly essential feature. Maybe have it configurable so that the undo history can be shared or it is per user.

whather12• 17 years ago

Yeah I think undo/redo functionality would be super helpful. I believe it would be more intuitive to have it per user instead of shared.

zhyder2• 17 years ago

You're the guys behind meetcast right? meetcast.com is 404'ing right now. You should probably do a 301.

whather12• 17 years ago

Yeah we are. Thanks for the heads up, we'll forward to teamapart.com.

paulbaumgart2• 17 years ago

Just a heads-up to anybody who's using this and is running PeerGuardian: they don't play nice together: the initial connection to a workspace is extremely slow and works maybe 1/5 of the time.

And also, don't be stupid like me and figure that ending the PeerGuardian process stops it from filtering your connection. :-)

Anybody have experience with this? Does PeerGuardian just not like RTMP? Or is it something about certain AWS IPs?

domodomo• 17 years ago

This reminds me of Adobe Connect in terms of the UI, but way slicker and doesn't have Connect's outrageous enterprisy pricing. Nice.

Team Apart (YC S08) hits the right price for collaboration: $0.00

Related Stories