Google Ventures-backed mobile app startup Kibits Corp. has introduced its first offering: Collaborate.com, a mobile collaboration platform that lets distributed teams work together on projects. It also plans to build a VAR program around the offering.
With Collaboration.com, business managers can acquire, configure and deploy a team collaboration environment – including integration with popular cloud services from Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and Apple iCloud—to enable unified document sharing and task management environment for a mobile workforce. Clients are available for iPhone, iPod touch, Android and the Web.
According to CRN, the company hopes to create “five solid partnerships during the first one to two quarters of fiscal year 2013.”
“In our 2013 State of Collaboration report, we estimate the worldwide market for collaboration software and services to be $40 billion in total, but found that more than half of all businesses surveyed are in need of easier-to-use collaboration tools that are both affordable and can be used for multiple projects,” noted David Coleman, founder and managing director of analyst firm Collaborative Strategies. “In our experience, Collaborate is the first vendor to build a comprehensive mobile collaboration platform that matches the market’s requirements.”
Collaborate enables real-time access to people, documents, tasks, links, locations, photos and videos, as well as chat, comments and ratings. The Collaborate mobile apps let users perform a wide range of actions, including creating a room, inviting a team member and sharing a file stored in a third-party cloud service. The apps are secured by 256-bit SSL network encryption.
“While it’s second-nature to manage our personal lives via our mobile devices, overloaded team leaders are in need of a similar approach to manage their teams and their day-to-day projects,” said Matt Cutler, Collaborate.com co-founder and CEO. “We have crafted our platform to extend familiar mobile conventions – like instant push alerts and automatically organized conversations – to the comparatively complex domain of day-to-day team and project management.”
Built for business teams that are not desk-bound, Collaborate.com has been adopted by a diverse range of businesses from automotive dealers to real-estate agents, from large animal veterinary clinics to personal security services, and by distributed teams within small businesses and large enterprises. Usse cases include field sales force management, field service issue resolution and warehouse inventory control.
“Collaborate has completely changed the way we work,” said Justin Chelf, CEO of Splash Digital Marketing. “Unlike other solutions we have tried, Collaborate lets us do everything we need, all-in-one place and all while keeping everything organized. Simple features like push alerts let us stay focused on getting the job done, and as a result our communication is faster, decisions happen more quickly, and we get more done in less time. The ROI in terms of team productivity is off-the-charts.”
