Workstreamr: Work Made Social

It's time to start letting people in on the backstory behind Workstreamr, a new start-up I started with two other founders, Sam Huleatt and Ben Schippers. Sam and Ben are two young, NYC-based entrepreneurs that approached me in mid 2007, leading to the formation of a company and a product under development, and where I am serving as designer.

Workstreamr is Work Made Social™. The three of us have been motivated by a core idea about collaborative work: we are better together. So we are trying to build a social tool for work management that gets out of the way, and lets people interact to get work done.

Workstreamr is that tool, designed to apply several complementary principles to project-based work. The combination of social media, professional networking, and 'streaming'—information being directed from applications to the user proactively via a desktop client—we call 'workstreaming.' I believe that Workstreamr is the first application specifically and uniquely designed to support workstreaming.

We have been working together since last summer to nail down the design of Workstreamr. I have been thinking about the ideas that underlie its design for a long time, and I am excited that we are now pretty far along in development.

Workstreamr has three overlapping focus areas:

• Projects are where work gets done in business, and this is true in Workstreamr as well. Users can invite others to collaborate in projects, where tasks, milestones, events, and discussions are shared in a blog-like way, although password-protected.
• Users can publish personal profile information, and can remain in contact with others about project work and professional interests by 'following' friends, colleagues, and organizations. Any project you are involved in is automatically followed.
• Organizations—companies, non-profits, universities, and so on—can likewise publish profiles, allowing users and other organizations to remain aware of activities, events, calls-for-proposals, and hiring or consulting opportunities.

There is no application on the market today that unites web-based project collaboration and professional networking in this way, and none of the leading competitors in those two areas are stream-based.

Workstreamr will be judged principally on its project collaboration merits, and we believe it is a highly innovative and productive tool. Unlike earlier, 'Web 1.0' work collaboration solutions, Workstreamr is not a collection of largely unintegrated capabilities—with message boards in one silo, a calendar in a second, and tasks in a third. In Workstreamr, all project information is managed in typed posts, and by managing information in a consistent, integrated fashion, Workstreamr offers both a simpler but more powerful context for getting work accomplished collaboratively.

We have been working with GlobalLogic, as our development partner, through their innovative Version 1.0 program. [Note: I am also working as an advisor to GlobalLogic on this program, and I will saying a lot more about that in upcoming posts.] The development team is doing great work (thanks, guys!), and we are moving ahead very rapidly, after a week long kickoff in February in New Delhi.

I suggest that anyone who is interested should register for the beta at www.workstreamr.com, which will also register you to get updates on the project. We will be rolling out in a controlled beta, so register as soon as possible, since it will be a first-come-first-served arrangement. Also keep watch on our new Workstreamr blog, where we will be disclosing more information about Workstreamr in the coming weeks.

As you can imagine, I am extremely excited about Workstreamr, and will be talking more about it here, and releasing screen shots in the next weeks.

Comments

[Doug Hadden]

There are compelling reasons to bring Web 2 into the workplace for project and coordination. The tools for coordination are too expensive, too siloed and inflexible. My only concern in the name given the existance of a company called Workstream (http://www.workstreaminc.com/) that provides HR SaaS.

[kosmar]

hey, nice logo ;)

[Johannes Kleske]

Just discovered workstreamer and so far love everything I read about it and the thoughts behind it. So is it kinda like Basecamp meets Facebook meets Twitter or am I totally out of line?

[Sam]

@Johannes. You are right on the money. It draws on architecture from those three, but we do have a few more tricks up our sleeve as well...

Sam

[Christopher Herot]

Your idea of combining project data with streaming reminds me of the way Lotus Notes integrated data with email. Unlike Exchange/Sharepoint, in Notes the email, database records, appointments, and contacts were all instances of the same class, i.e. email was just another thing you could do with a document in addition to storing it in a database or replicating it to multiple locations. It seems entirely appropriate in the 21st century to update that notion to include more proactive, realtime information delivery, i.e. streaming.

[Cobb]

Here's an application for you. Big pain in my neck. I'm doing ERP integration into a BI interface. Got to crank through multiple ETL iterations and intermediary data stores. For what purpose? Reconciliation. I've got about seven different places to check amongst a half a dozen functional and IT people, each of them only know their little cloud. I need to coordinate them in an ad-hoc manner (because I'm the only guy who understands how to debug the data stream scientifically), so it would be GREAT for me to put together an ad-hoc workflow monitor and have people check through with twitter frequency.

[Leon Benjamin]

If this platform, especially when used by corporations, can "tell me something or somebody, I didn't think I needed to know", then it could quite easily become a de facto means by which companies execute all their projects. Furthermore, if it's able to identify available resources to work on projects both inside an outside the company, then it can enable fractional work or the next small thing! That is, people on demand. The value to companies of all sizes is almost incalculable because it can dramatically reduce the salary bill - making it kind of 'just in time" - a variable cost, rather than a fixed cost.