'Forget e-mail, do business with InstaColl'

InstaColl, a Bangalore-based startup has come up with a software application built into Microsoft Office allowing several people to work on a word document or spreadsheet simultaneously.

They can do so securely, with this software and their physical location will not matter, says InstaColl.

This product for "instant collaboration" will become the next big thing after the telephone and e-mail in how people work together, says Sabeer Bhatia, a serial entrepreneur.

Bhatia, whose own blockbuster startup, Hotmail, played no small role in popularising the e-mail, is backing InstaColl.

Its promoters, Sumanth Raghavendra and Kaushal Kavale, have built a product that exploits the power of peer-to-peer technology to provide a more economical and powerful alternative to e-mail for collaborative work, Bhatia said here on Wednesday.

"Peer-to-peer technology allows computers to be directly connected up, instead of going through a back end server," Bhatia says, making products such as InstaColl less server-intensive or bandwidth hungry.

The application will be easily available to any number of users "" enterprises or individuals. It will be a full-fledged web conferencing tool and in conjunction with other software such as Skype, which facilitates voice over Internet, will be the future of "real time collaboration", he says.

Meta Group, a technology market tracker, forecasts that by year 2007 nearly 95 per cent of all "knowledge workers" will routinely use real time collaboration, he says. This eliminated the store-and-forward model of e-mail, making collaboration "less procrastination friendly".

InstaColl was circulating a beta-version for people try it out currently, at www.instacoll.com.