One step closer to one click collaboration: Octopz is CNET top 5
Congratulations to Octopz on ranking in the CNET Top 5 after last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
From among the large field of companies exhibiting at this year’s event, Octopz™ was selected as one of the top 5 services, where it was described as a “really, really slick flash-based application for collaborative sharing.� The full review is posted here.
Erica Ogg, Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn
While the Octopz product is now getting some serious attention from the mainstream web community, Octopz founders Barry Fogarty and Paul Nykamp and their team have been hard at work in the MaRS Centre Incubator in Toronto building this latest version for a large scale market introduction. Both Fogarty and Nykamp, veterans of the digital media industry, have won awards for their design and server-side scripting work –- much of it focused on industrial CAD formats and 3D photography. It’s this experience that helped shape their thinking as they started to build a lighter and more functional online product that could address a wide range of enterprise-grade collaboration requirements –- yet still work for small business customers.
What’s particularly exciting is that the Octopz team has addressed a key issue with online collaboration –- allowing users to collaborate on a full range of media from a single web-based application. The simple toolset and interface for Octopz is designed so that anyone can be up and running in minutes. With the ease of file and video sharing on Octopz, you can invite anyone, anywhere to join you in a richer, more interactive meeting — all with a single click.
And while there is a lot of buzz surrounding the ability of the Octopz application to “democratize� online collaboration, the company is getting significant traction at the high end of the market with larger enterprise wins. One major market factor that’s driving this is globalization. As more and more organizations develop increasingly complex, disaggregated supply-chains around the globe, there is an acute need to meaningfully connect people to engage in creative, collaborative work that spans multiple languages, time zones and of course, computing/network platforms.
Here’s to the global village – and the companies such as Octopz who are seeking to bring us closer together.
Peter Evans advises entrepreneurs and high growth companies in ICT markets, specializing in corporate strategic planning, marketing and channel development.