Kwin, co-founder of Pluot here.
Pluot is a small, affordable video conferencing device that sets up in five minutes in your conference room. We've tried to make video conferencing super easy to do: starting or joining a video meeting takes ten seconds.
We designed Pluot for people like us, people who work on fast-paced projects with small, distributed teams. We’re career startup-ers. As collaboration tools have gotten better and better, we’ve seen more and more of our friends hire people in multiple locations and open small offices in multiple cities.
Old-school conference room video conferencing systems are expensive, hard to set up, a pain to administer, and have frustrating user interfaces. But big-screen video conferencing is really, really useful. Crowding around a laptop to have team meetings with remote colleagues is no good.
We think we can fix all that. We are really looking forward to hearing the feedback from the Product Hunt community.
We are running a launch special: the Pluot hardware is FREE. We send you everything you need for big-screen video conferencing, except the TV. (You just pay $50/month as long as you’re happy using the Pluot service.)
We’re also running a *Product Hunt launch special*: a special edition “ghost white” production run of our Pluot device. Also, anyone who chases this link and orders a Pluot by the end of the week -- whether you order the standard black Pluot or the Product Hunt ghost white Pluot -- gets a *Product Hunt Kitty in High Definition* velcro patch. https://pluot.co/?utm_source=pro...
@kwindla Really interesting. I always deal with remore teams and for some reason Skype and Google Hangouts are not the best solution. I've a couple of questions for you. 1) Why do you need a hardware device to make video conferencing? 2) Do you have screen sharing integrated in Pluot?
@massimosgrelli Thanks for the questions!
1) You don't need the Pluot hardware if you just want to do video conferencing from your laptop or desktop computer. Here's a link to start a new Pluot meeting ... https://pluot.co/new
Open that in Chrome (we only support Chrome for full meeting participation, right now). Your browser will redirect to a new, unique, Pluot meeting URL. Copy the URL and send it to someone else, and they can join the meeting, too. That meeting URL stays usable forever.
So, that's pretty much like Hangouts or Skype. But making Pluot a hardware device is how we provide big-screen video conferencing -- video conferencing on a conference room TV -- that "just works." We're trying to ship a product that is as easy as possible both to set up the first time, and to use every day. Defining both the hardware and software helps us make sure that the big-screen usability is as good as possible.
2) Yes, we do support screen sharing. In fact, screen sharing is one of the ways Pluot is unique: two people can screen share simultaneously in a Pluot meeting. Also, the Pluot hardware supports plugging into two TVs, so you have a lot of pixel real estate to see the screens people are sharing. We want Pluot to be the best possible tool for engineering and design meetings, and when we have team meetings we often find ourselves wanting to see a couple of screens at the same time. For example, in a sprint meeting it's useful to keep a tool like Trello visible on one screen, and on the other screen to go through a series of feature prototype mock-ups and demos.
Hey there, I just checked the intro video on your website.. In my opinion you should have focused more on how this compares to Skype and Hangouts - those are your closest competitors, right?
Pluot reduces the friction of starting and keeping a remote meeting going without all the weird hang ups of Skype or Google Hangouts. It's nice to see a company realize that this problem should be solved with both hardware and software. If you've got a remote team and want better collaboration, get Pluot!
We have been using a prototype Pluot box for conferencing with our distributed team for about six months. It has been awesome. The difference in quality of meeting between this and everyone gathering around a single laptop with a hangout open is remarkable. We leave our pluot meeting open all day, and remote employees are encouraged to leave their connections on as well.
This service (and hardware) is well worth the $50/month
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