Online collaboration service Huddle announced the addition of Web conferencing, an iPhone app, and a Microsoft Office plug-in to its service on Wednesday.
The company's new Web conferencing feature is fully integrated into Huddle. Users will now be able to schedule recurring meetings. They can also share content with outside participants by providing viewing privileges to a member's desktop. A limited number of minutes will be made available, depending on the user's plan. Unlimited conferencing can be purchased separately.
For now, Huddle's Web-conferencing feature is only available to its high-paying Enterprise plan-holders. It plans to roll it out to other paid members over the next few weeks.
On the desktop side, Huddle offered up a new plug-in for Microsoft Office users. The feature will provide access to Huddle files from within Microsoft's office productivity suite. It also lets users save local files directly to Huddle. Users will have the ability to view and edit files, request task approval from other team members, or send notifications. Huddle's Office plug-in is currently in beta testing. The company hopes to make it available by early October.
Finally, Huddle announced a new iPhone app, giving users the ability to access documents, project tasks, and discussions within the group. It's available now for free in Apple's App Store.
Huddle competes in an extremely crowded space. Several companies, including Clarizen and OfficeZilla, provide similar services. Huddle attempts to carve out a niche in the market by making the service affordable. Users interested in Huddle can start using it for free, provided they need just one workspace and no more than 1GB of storage. Plans go up from there to $200 per month for larger organizations.
An online social network for high school athletes launched Wednesday. Dubbed FirstString, the service connects athletes in the same conference and division, providing them with access to competitors' rosters, opponents, and schedules. According to the company, its network will allow users to post photos, videos, and awards, while providing them with tools to converse and stay up to date on player stats.
Each athlete profile is viewable by all teammates, approved friends, and opponents. It includes personal details, along with stats, team information, and a comment board. The site itself features a sportscasting function, which constantly updates users about game outcomes, as well as a highlight reel of photos and videos uploaded by teams or players. The network is live now and ready for teams and players to start using the service.
FetchDog.com, a site that sells dog gear and provides articles on man's best friend, announced Wednesday that it has closed a $4 million round of funding led by Borealis Capital Partners and Harbor Light Capital Partners. The company will use the funding to "develop new content, entertainment and philanthropic initiatives." It also plans to expand its executive team and announced that it has hired former Ziff-Davis Media executive Claude P. Sheer to help the company "rapidly increase its scaling efforts."
Pollsb, a company that provides polling tools to help you learn about yourself, announced Wednesday that it secured $1.3 million in a series A round of funding led by Tamir Fishman Ventures. The company's executives hope to use the funding to continue the site's evolution to one that "deals with the user and their identity."
InterCall, the world's largest conferencing provider, plans on giving all of its customers an account with social collaboration service Huddle, reports TechCrunch. According to the report, InterCall customers will be able to schedule meetings with Huddle and share dial-in information through the service. InterCall users should have Huddle accounts soon.
The Office 2.0 conference (more) opens up in San Francisco tomorrow. As it did last year, this show will push the Web 2.0 concept for business as far as it can go. I expect that a lot of activity at the conference will center around groupware and work-flow applicatiosn. In the past few days I've talked to the founders of four companies competing in this space--Central Desktop, Sosius, Huddle, and ShareMethods -- each of which is aiming to use Web 2.0 concepts like simple design, hosted services, and a-la-carte pricing, to knock Microsoft's Sharepoint off its peg, and take on Web 2.0 work-flow stalwart 37Signals' Basecamp as well. Not to mention blocking upstarts from big companies, like Webex's WebOffice, before they can get major traction.
A good Web 2.0 work-flow application integrates task lists, file management with approvals, a calendar, and permission controls. Central Desktop shown here.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's going to be a tough battle for these products to stand out from each other. The founders I talked to have similar pitches. They talk about low-cost, bottom-up (as opposed to IT-driven) sales, and the fact that they're not trying to replace office products like Microsoft Office or even Web 2.0 suites like Zoho, but rather trying to bring collaboration and workflow to every business with a Web connection.
The one area where these products all need to develop the most is in their integration with these online office productivity tools. At the moment, all of these applications will help you check in and manage files that you create on your PC, and they'll handle approval cycles, discussions, and project plans. But these applications really need tight integration with tools like Google Docs to truly free users from the shackles of local software. That's not just a philosophical perspective--working half online (for work flow) and half on a PC (for productivity applications) is confusing and will slow adoption of these products.
That said, I like all these services. They fill a need that e-mail and wikis can't, and that traditional software is too heavy for. Most of the products look great and aren't over-featured, making it fairly easy for users to get up to speed on them.
The differences between these applications are not immediately obvious...
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