InstaColl to launch co-browsing product

InstaColl, a Bangalore-based startup building products exploiting peer-to-peer technology, is now ready to launch its next set of products. Last month, the Sabeer Bhatia-backed firm launched InstaColl an "instant collaboration" product that will run on Microsoft Office.

The new products, along with the first, will make a suite of applications built on Microsoft Office allowing business users to work simultaneously on projects, company sources said.

The new applications will leverage the power of instant messaging and offer co-browsing access to users. One of the products is to be called "Insta Assist", but details of what exactly it will do weren't available.

The other will be the co-browsing product. While there exists products that offer similar functions as InstaColl, the company's promoters were confident their own versions will become popularity.

The firm recently said that InstaColl garnered some 10,000 registrations a month form when it was launched as a beta version, available for free testing for a limited duration.

Co-browsing, short for collaborative browsing, allows its user to work with a client's web browser. Imagine wanting to buy a jacket on e-bay and not knowing how to do it.

So if e-bay had a call centre enabled with co-browsing, a customer can use it to ask an agent to demonstrate the filling up of an online order.

While that is an illustration of a possibility, the application is likely to be more useful if both (or more) users are enterprises rather than individuals. The advantage of the application is, it can work with e-mail, fax and any kind of phone. Some day perhaps various departments in the state and Centre will make life easy for the lay person, with such software.

The first product, InstaColl, allows users in different locations to work together at the same time on, say, a spreadsheet or a presentation, using Microsoft Office. It will become the next big thing after the telephone and e-mail in how people worked together, said 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.

"Peer-to-peer technology allows computers to be directly connected up, instead of going through a back-end server," Bhatia said, 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 like Skype, which facilitates voice over Internet, will be the future of "real time collaboration", he said.

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, Bhatia said. This eliminated the store-and-forward model of the e-mail, making collaboration "less procrastination friendly".