Lots of students come to my office to talk about ideas for cool and useful technologies. Very few walk in and show me one.
Abraham Murray and Tijan Watt, two second year HBS MBA students, have developed an intriguing technology.1 It’s called Doodleboard, and it’s a multimedia online whiteboard. This is freeform collaboration taken to its logical extreme; users can draw, type, upload and paste images, insert shaped, and include links. It’s also synchronous, so several people can work together and see each others’ changes in real time.
Its inventors describe Doodleboard as follows:
Harvard Business School students. Doodleboard is an infinite, real time and
multi-user whiteboard written in AJAX. The hosted web application allows
multiple users to directly collaborate in the same shared whiteboard. Users
can add text, shapes, images, or draw directly on the board, and changes are
immediately synchronized among all users. A simple use case might involve a
project manager annotating a screenshot of an application under development
so that contractors understand the changes desired. The company recently
launched their public alpha. For more information you can visit
www.doodleboard.us or read their blog. Also, check out their screencast."
I can imagine many enterprise uses for this technology, on its own and as a complement to other collaboration technologies.
Abe and Tijan would love to have people visit their public beta, experiment with Doodleboard, and share their thoughts and comments. Please do!
1I’m supervising Abe and Tijan on their field study this semester, but have no financial interest in their venture.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Have you guys seen the Flash whiteboard app from GE?
http://www.imaginationcubed.com/LaunchPage
It has limits, but I’ve been using it for about 9 months to visualize ideas with other people.
Hi Andrew – Abe from doodleboard here. We have seen GE’s Flash whiteboard – in fact, we’d love to hear from you how you are using it, how frequently, etc. (email me: abe (at) doodleboard.us).
My frustrations with it were the limitations on both size and “ink”, as well as an inability to zoom out to see the whole picture. Plus, the board is synchronous only, whereas we provide an asynchronous feature as well (you can revisit earlier sessions, for instance).
Andrew, you mention the enterprise usage. Have you suggested they look into some of the features in enterprise ready products such as Lotus Sametime, and see how their ideas and plans for the product match up? I know there are a few web meeting / conferencing products and services out there that offer this kind of thing, I’m sure they’d want to differentiate somehow!
Ive just registered to try it out but I got this error msg. “the servers are at peak load. please come back later”. I hope they fix it. It looks promising.
There are a lot web conferencing platforms out there, I use Elluminate, but others like Webex or Gotomeetings are all good.
Finally, it has arrived… and it works like magic. Basically with this plugin, we can just highlight the folder and trigger the Windows Explorer screen by using a shortcut key -> Ctrl + Alt + E. (Just in case you http://www.geonlineservice.com do not know.. the Microsoft Key + E is the traditional way of triggering a default Windows Explorer.. so I find this new arrangement very intuitive… )
They also don’t need to be configured up front. The second reason that Enterprise 2.0 looks good during lean times is that its component technologies don’t need to be populated with data and business logic then extensively tested before they go live. The whole point of emergence is to start with something close to a blank slate, then see what… emerges. It makes sense, of course, to seed the platforms with initial content that will be compelling, draw in http://www.geonlineservice.com users, and encourage contribution, but this is entirely different than setting up CRM, ERP, SCM, and the other technologies that impose structure on collaborative activities. It takes a great deal of time and money to get these structuring technologies ready to go live.
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