Announcing Woobius and Scribbles 5
I’m working on the part 6 of the hyperbrain series, but it’s not finished yet. It takes time, of course, and in the meantime I’m working on many things, including my business, and the future blog that will replace inter-sections.
Perhaps it’s worth finally mentioning that business here! Fancy that, I hadn’t actually done it before. Incredible.
So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce: Woobius, and its associated blog, on which I write regularly: Woobius Scribbles.
What is Woobius?
Woobius is a collaboration tool tailored for the needs of the construction industry. In the process of designing and building any sort of building, architects, consultants, engineers, and a whole lot more people have to exchange large numbers of files that need to be kept track of. If you would like more detail on this, do have a look at this article which I wrote on Woobius Scribbles: Document Control - how hard can it be?
This can become a huge problem, because there are a lot of those files and they have to be shared between dozens of companies. Most common file sharing solutions (like usendit, box.net, or even Dropbox) are not well suited to this, because they completely fail on the “collaboration between companies” part.
There are some industry-specific solutions, but without exception they’re slow, bloated monsters that try to control every aspect of the project, and end up pretty much requiring full-time staff just to deal with them. They’re very hard and slow to use, so people end up bypassing them at every corner. And they’re extremely expensive, too.
This is where Woobius comes in. It’s designed to be intuitive and easy to use, automates most common tasks to save time, and is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition.
So, this is what I’ve spent most of the last year working on. The good news, since I did follow most of my own tips, and since I work with a fantastic team (I know it’s cheesy to say it, but it’s true), is that it’s going quite well. We have a good many users within the construction industry who are using it every day for live construction projects. Growth has been steady and viral, despite the economic conditions in the construction industry, from 50 or so users 10 months ago, when we launched the first kernel of functionality, to over 2000 today, almost all of it through invitations by our users themselves.
That’s all very, very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to the next year, as we grow to profitability and help many more architects with their projects.
The only other thing I’d add about Woobius is that, like every start-up, it could use more publicity. If you know some people who work in the construction industry, let them know — not because I ask you to, but because it is genuinely useful (our users tell us that!).
And if Woobius sounds useful to you and you don’t work in the construction industry, don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. It’s a really handy tool, and although it was designed with specific users in mind, I would be the first one to be surprised if it wasn’t useful to many others too.
What is Woobius Scribbles?
Scribbles is simple the company blog for Woobius. I write there regularly, about business and technology related topics, so if you like what I’ve written here in the past, I encourage you to check it out and, maybe, subscribe. It’s got a strong architecture slant, so not everything will be of interest to non-architects, but since I myself am not an architect, and I like to write things that I find interesting, there will be many posts there which will not be related to architecture.
That’s it for this meta-announcement. There will be another one like it after the hyperbrain series is complete, about the future of this blog. Thanks for reading!
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my roomate works for a general contractor called Hunter Roberts in NYC, would they be the target audience for this?
Quite possibly. It depends what he does there. If he ever has to receive or send files to or from other collaborators on his projects, then yes, Woobius would be very useful for him.
Hummm…its yousendit and Box.net is most capable solution for sharing files between parties. Setup folder, invite collaborators. Create shared area for Clients..Not hard at all. Massive 2gig file transfer in one hit.
www.box.net
Interesting project. I have three comments, in no particular order:
1) Obviously, for the case you are designing for, where you have architects working with revisions of docs which forces you to treat a specific file as atomic, atomicity is at the correct level. But what happens for those situations where that fails to meet reality? Say, if I’m writing some code in my Smalltalk browser, I’ll have a changeset to mark additions and deletions of code, but I don’t have each version as a file as such.
Which leads me on to my pseudo-second point:
1.1) How do you map PDFs ? I mean, take the case of a file that is really a JPEG but is stored as a PDF. Sure, I can write a special case tiny PDF by hand optimization that only means the overhead is about 2KB compared with a standard JPEG. But the question is: has that problem been addressed in your system? I just signed up for a trial, but I didn’t see anything obvious to select different levels of an object (nee “file”).
2) Tracking seems to being carried out via google tracking and image tracking, but is that necessary, if a customer goes to your site, since the URL is unique? Or is this required as the system runs on flash and other similar components, so it’s hard to work out where a user is otherwise?
Thanks for reading my questions.
RH
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