Install launches second collaborative tool InstaAssist

Sabeer Bhatia to raise venture fund for firm

Sabeer Bhatia, serial entrepreneur, is looking to raise venture capital funding for InstaColl, a Bangalore-based startup building products exploiting peer-to-peer technology.

InstaColl, which released a "collaboration" tool earlier this year, has just launched its next product, InstaAssist, a remote customer helper. InstaAssist could, for instance, help a buyer fix a bug in his computer by establishing a chat session with an engineer at the computer maker's site.

While other such tools are commercially available, Bhatia says, InstaColl and InstaAssist will be sold at "one-tenth the price offered by competition". To build the company and market the products Bhatia plans to raise "about $5 million", he told reporters on Wednesday.

Bhatia's Hotmail became synonymous with the entrepreneurial jackpot when he sold that free email startup to Windows operating system maker Microsoft for several hundred million dollars. Thus far, Bhatia, who now has a string of tech-startups, has backed InstaColl with his own money.

"I am talking to all my friends on Sand Hill Road", he said, referring to that cluster of technology venture funds in Silicon Valley, California. InstaColl is an "instant collaboration" product that will run on Microsoft Office.

InstaAssist and soon a co-browsing tool will make a suite of applications built on Microsoft Office. They will allow business users to work simultaneously on projects. Large firms can also use these tools to keep track of customers, and help them if required.

The firm recently said that the software product InstaColl garnered some 10,000 registrants in a month since 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 could use it to ask an agent to demo the filling up of an online order. Or an airline ticketing call centre could help a customer go through the motions of buying a ticket.

InstaColl, the first tool, allows users in different locations to work together at the same time on say a spreadsheet or a presentation, using Microsoft Office. When it was was launched, three months ago, Sabeer Bhatia said "it would become the next big thing in how people worked together, after the telephone and email."

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 email for collborative 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 softwares such as Skype, which facilitates voice over Internet, 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 eliminates the store-and-forward model of the e-mail, making collaboration "less procrastination friendly."

It works for B2K

Business process outsourcing firms are a prime target for Bhatia and his InstaColl team. When they ran a pilot, by offering a beta version of the collaborative tool, over 10,000 people downloaded it and tried it.

It was also piloted with B2K Corp, a BPO firm here, run by former IT department bureaucrat, Vivek Kulkarni. "We have investment bankers and chartered accountants as clients in the US and some in the UK," Kulkarni said.

With InstaColl, B2K's agents are able to show the clients the research they have done, seek clarifications, fresh instructions and so on.

They (the US clients) can send us spread sheets and ask specific models to be tested. For instance, if some parameters are changed in a set of cells, what will happen to other which depend on those.

"Imagine doing this with email and phone. With InstaColl, we are able to handle many of these tasks almost at once".