Lunarr: Simple Collaboration

In the myriad of collaboration tools springing up all over the net, Lunarr favors simplicity over features. The Lunarr story began 10 months ago when two Japanese players in the high-tech sector set out to create the ultimate idea sharing platform. As one of the most successful young entrepreneurs in Japan, Toru Takasuka has created a healthy amount of buzz around his baby. His partner, Hideshi Hamaguchi, is a creative and management guru that met Takasuka while they worked at Matsushita, a tech conglomerate. The two men created one of the fastest growing software companies in Japan, but for Lunarr they face international pressure.

Unveiled this September at a lavish launch party, Lunarr is betting that simplicity will win over its feature laden competition. Although the site is only in its alpha stages, invites have been given out to key press members and businesses to give the service a test run before it opens to the public. Takasuka has a lot of money and plenty of buzz, but he's going to need a spectacular product to compete.

A quick Google search reveals a number of players, large and small, that are trying to reach the business audience through collaboration software. These sites are defined as web-based tools that allow workgroups to create and edit various documents in a central environment. IBM, Microsoft, and even Google themselves are attempting to gain share in this market. As a start-up it's going to be difficult to compete, but Lunarr has been taking a different path from the beginning. The company is intentionally located in Portland, Oregon, over 700 miles away from the fabled Silicon Valley. The founders say the location gives the company perspective from the status quo, and I think they're on the right track.

While their homepage is rather mysterious, only showing a centered login box, the link to the about page fills everyone in on the company's story. Once logged in the interface only has a few buttons to press, most notably being the 'document-flip'. Lunarr's big difference is that it's document centric, meaning that all files related to the document, from e-mail to editing notes, are located on the reverse side of the page. Having all the contributions to the document attached to it is definitely a feature that makes collaboration more efficient. Another cool feature allows team members to import a full web-site and make comments on it. While the simplicity is nice, there are features that are sorely missed.

The biggest missed feature is the ability to export files. Another negative is that it can't import Word documents, instead creating a link to the original file. These problems are serious, but forgivable for alpha-level software. Overall, I still believe this site can help the creative process. While this is an internal tool, it will allow better communication within the team of content creators and therefore help create better communication with the audience. Lunarr will allow more people to contribute to the creative process and allow work to be approved much faster.

What, if any, is your experience with online collaboration software?
Do you think that online collaboration software will become the standard over face-to-face meetings?

Posted by guest author, Nick Naber.

Comments

[Chris Stadler]

Great post, Nick. I think online collaboration is the wave of the future. As fuel prices go up, and international business increases, leveraging the 'net is a no-brainer. And it's not just for international business, either. My department used Brand Activation Management software, ostensibly to “activate the brand,” but we used it for every project. It was the cornerstone of our workflow, and it removed a lot of the ambiguity from the approval process.

In fact, I'm looking for a better way to collaborate online for projects with freelancers. And most freelancers I work with are in Eugene. It's just so much better to be able to work online for some things.

The exception is for brainstorming. Some brainstorming can be done over IM, but it's best if it's in-person. That's because you get the sense of what's going on, including body language and all those x factors that could really amount to a lot of information you'd otherwise miss.

[Victoria Stephens]

Second Life is an elaborate online collaboration software that is gaining popularity among a large diversity of audiences.
It is the hot MMORPG for educators, sales, marketing and players.
I've heard some people are getting wealthy with their not so virtual financial investments there.
I think that online collaboration software will become the standard over face-to-face meetings in a lot of areas.
As the generation Y's increasingly become the consumer base all kinds of digital media and virtual realities will replace a lot of the events that were more possible before the upcoming fuel shortages and other pre-Armageddon-like global events kept us locked in virtual worlds of cyberspace for their safer remote pseudo-human interactions.
The Gen Y's cut their teeth in virtual worlds and social networks.