StartupSquad at Wordpress

Earlier in the week I got a chance to talk with Greg Nuyens from Qwaq and take a deep dive into the collaboration metaverse for enterprise really has to offer. Previously I had written about Qwaq when the startup had just come out of stealth mode to talk about it’s core product, Qwaq Forums. When I had written the article, I was not really sure how Qwaq works out in real. As we say – seeing is believing. After being in the metaverse for about an hour, checking out its features and capabilities, I am convinced that WebEx and the Conferencing et al will have lot to worry about pretty soon.

The complete experience is very difficult to put into words, still I will try. Qwaq Forums’s most amazing feature is persistence in state. Users join the collaboration session, jump off anytime, and come back to resume from the same spot they left. Such a setting works perfectly for corporate users who would want to collaborate on ongoing projects or work on evaluating 2D-3D designs. They no longer need to recall the point where they dropped of last time. Enter the Forum and get going again. And than there is the ability to drag Microsoft Office docs right your Forum to make them available for sharing. Persistence aspect of Qwaq again comes handy in this case where users can be editing the document at the same time, leaving the documents behind in the forum once they are done with the collaboration session, and resume from the same point when they return.

When you move your docs or videos or 3-D format files(ASE, Collada from Google Sketchup) or images into a Forum, they showup on one of the screens at the wall of a 3D space. Experience is somewhat similar to what 3B, but with more controls. Talking about controls, Qwaq completely does away with the “hand-off” procedures of typical conferencing tools. The output shows up in real-time to everyone with each user having the ability to modify the Forum environment.

Another major feature that comes standard with Qwaq is the Always On VoIP. Consider a scenario when you jump onto one of your Forums. To start talking you just hit a small talk button and everyone in the Forum can hear you. You want to turn that off, just hit the same button again. In other words the conversation is always ON. No numbers to dial, No softphone client to bring up, no nothing. Instead – plain and simple – start talking when you want to. I think Qwaq can very well crush some of Skype’s belated enterprise dreams. Not to mention instant messaging is also built into the product.

Qwaq has built a smart access control around the Forums. Users can be part of many different forums – imagine for each of the project you are working on. But users can be restricted to the forums they are able to access. Basically you need to authenticate yourself before you can access any other Forum as you roam about the 3D space.

Eventually spread and uptake of any collaboration app depends on pricing. Although Greg didn’t mention about the final pricing they are looking at, but he did hint that Qwaq will be competitively priced as compared to WebEx and might as well come cheaper. Qwaq is already working with few Fortune 100 companies as part of it’s private beta program, while going with “a large computer manufacturer” for a major distribution partnership. Qwaq will be looking to get onto Fortune 1000 companies through the regular sales process while also enabling smaller teams to signup for the product/service online.

Links:
Qwaq