@bentossell Great question! Existing solutions are based on “old” design of IRC. We built the solution from the ground up to power the modern work environments in several new ways:
1) Introduce a new way to communicate and collaborate around work with your team and external contacts:
1.A) Allowing you to communicate on anything on the web with Skarpline Cards (a card = File, Link, Integration you add to Skarpline). Not commenting, but fully fledged team messaging with integrations enabled on all Cards. With this approach, it's not just a matter of inserting a file in chat but making it the center of the conversation. See http://bit.ly/1PQ8MLF and http://bit.ly/1ii787F. Imagine sharing a whole work conversion to a new colleague with a single drag-and-drop because the whole conversation is on the card. Or passing some design to an external designer or freelancer in one go.
1.B) Group cards in folders. Mix Microsoft Word files with Google Docs links and call it Documents. Create a folder with Twitter cards and track competitors. http://bit.ly/1MTQxj1. Mix and match cards as you’d like.
1.C) Drag a card to share it http://bit.ly/1kb7NJt internally in your team or externally with contacts you’ve added.
2) Making communication more efficient:
2.A) Aggregated notifications. Get card notifications aggregated to multiple levels. http://bit.ly/1MUcLkW
2.B) Mute all notifications (incoming chat, real-time notifications) and get efficient with time boxing (pomodoro style) http://bit.ly/1KBikCZ and http://bit.ly/1WiNGoK
2.C) Instant Typing. See people as they type instead of “Ben is typing….”. This can be disabled/enabled.
2.D) Visual Cards + Powerful Search allows you to quickly and intuitively find cards inside and across folders.
And bunch of other stuff such as expanded writing fields for long-form/e-mail addicts, one-click permission view (to see who has access to your cards, inline card preview etc. ;)
@storbaek Wow! Nice!!
With the whole 'card' approach - did you previously use trello and get frustrated with how it worked?
Did you take any features from there and improve based on what they were doing or did you completely design it from fresh?
@bentossell Love Trello and we have an integration with them in Skarpline. We re-thought it from scratch. Lots of solutions work around messaging, e.g. Slack, Hipchat and others. We think there is a huge gap around files and attachments, links and url’s, integrations - and making it all seamlessly work together.
So, just like Trello works well for tasks (because it makes every task the center of communication), Skarpline is a platform that makes anything you need the center of communication. This can be direct chat with your colleague, conversation on a file or a link, or a 3rd party integration, such as Trello.
We don’t actually take features from other great apps, but integrate with them to fill in the gaps between everything on the web.
In short: We have chat and integrations like Slack, have Files and Links like Dropbox and look somewhat like Pinterest (cards) + bunch of unique stuff ;)
Thanks for the hunt @bentossell!! Delighted to be on PH.
We built Skarpline after scraping a product we had built. We focused on solving our own need and the challenges we saw in modern communication and collaboration.
One of our early users made a pretty good description what makes Skarpline unique right here http://bit.ly/1YXzy8L (former Slack user).
And, we’re doing a small announcement with “PRESS RELEASE: We are now a Unicorn Startup”. http://bit.ly/1MOgxw8
Take the web app for a spin. I’d be happy to answer your questions.
Ask me anything ;)
I really like the product, it's beautiful and easy to use ... so much so that I really want to find a reason to use it ;-)
But I am not sure for what I should really use it, if I want to share a mock-up or a design proposition to my team, I will use InVision, if I want to work and discuss on a google doc with a colleague, I'll do that directly in the comments of the document, if I want to share a link to an interesting articles, I will either use hangout or if it is more important and I want us to be able to find it back, I'll go to Podio where I can organize items in different categories and tags....
But I'll keep searching because I really want to use Skarpline !
@pbriod Haha. Thank you for the nice question Pascal! I'm still laughing ;)
Each one of the great tools you mentioned works well for its purpose, but things get tedious when you need to combine many tools and many projects in a modern and effective workflow. You'll need to check everyone of those websites for other people feedback, you can't organize things together (you might want to group a couple of PSD files, with your InVision links, Trello board, and related resources for your mobile app developer project for example).
Add that to the rest of the features, and you'll get everything you need in one place, or a perfect quiet time (Focus Mode) when you want to keep working on everything without being periodically distracted.
We first built it to our own needs, but now our baby has grown so big, so we want to share her to the world ;-)
I’m not sure how big your team is, but here is how it works for us.
We meet everyday in Skarpline 8.15 for daily standup. We have a Link card that starts a Google Hangout. We chat and make fun here with giphy and varios integrations we have.
Work gets uploaded as files (e.g. design) or articles pointing to Google Docs or anything else. People ask for review and we document all discussion right there on the card. We keep track of the status, e.g. code commits, scrum workflow via pivotal tracker etc.
We organize it however we want. Skarpline looks totally different to me than to a designer and different to a back-end developer. We all work on different topics and with different things.
Also, we have some external freelancers attached to the company. We share work with them from Skarpline as well. Both cards and chats.
Happy to jump on a call with you or continue the discussion in Skarpline ;)
@storbaek Very interesting ! thanks for the detailed answer !
I do see the value of having all in one place, I am not sure yet that Skarpline could be this place, as it doesn't seem to cover important feature of the different tools that we use.
I'll find a specific project that we could use to give it a try !
@pbriod Interested to hear more about your workflows! If you don't mind, I'll ping you tomorrow when we have PH settled. Incoming requests from everywhere ;-)
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