Virtually!

The crunchies are here and we are right in it. After all the ups and downs of product development we have got the product in some shape( I think we could do lot better) where we can start getting feedback on our new real time collaboration platform Same Page. This is not the real time collaboration application that one would expect doing video conferencing ,blah and etc. This is a very lightweight platform that can be extended with newer applications. The idea is that there is a lot of productivity that can happen using simple ,small and targetted applications by throwing them all into a real time collaborative paradigm.

We are using plain ole Javascript and the server push technology which recently got rechristened as comet. We have used python and twisted for our serverside. Other client side technologies (flash , silverlight) can be exploited but they are in our list of “coming soonz”.

The apps that we have right now are pretty basic but we are working hard to add more. I personally like the note taking and task management applications that we currently have. Its a major departure from the prevading approach to task management and capturing notes during conversations. But then its a new way therefore I am keen to know what the users think. We have also introduced a new concept called “Gestures” which would infact be completely new to real time collaborative platforms. We have tried to incorporate the same non verbal communication pattern that exists among humans to applications. Although the implementation is currently basic, this would start manifesting in a big way helping our users get on the samepage intuitively. More on gestures later..

I have been reading a lot about the pitfalls of product development. It is so easy to loose track of the users. We just swerved through that and I think the best way forward for us would be just put it out there and brace ourselves for the feedback. May be the product would be trashed by a few .. may be it will appreciated by a few .. maybe it wouldn’t be understood at all. But I guess its better to find it out now than later.

The ability to scale up has been one of the main concerns that I have had for a while. Its time that we have been running out off but we finally decided to experiment a private beta approach where we could slow down the number new of users hopping on board so that it will give us time to scale. The application cannot be scaled horizontally easily as we have live user networks whose presence information we utilize in our applications but I guess I have my task cut out.

Finally here is the listing of the company on crunchbase. I will give an update soon about the event and the kind of user traction that we have begun to get on the site.