This past Saturday I attended BarCampNYC with Oren, Rian, and a few other friends. Not as many people were in attendance at this BarCamp as were in attendance at BarCamp Rochester last month. Though some of this had to do with the fact the TC Disrupt Hackathon was taking place at the same time. Nonetheless, we had a great day spending it listening to a variety of stories shared by dozens of entrepreneurs.
We had ample opportunity to meet and speak with several interesting startups. One person we spoke with during the event was Spindows (@spindows) founder Clay Hebert (@clayhebert). Spindows, a service currently under development, is going to be a 1-on-1 video chat platform for large-scale organizations. Spindows promotes social interaction amongst employees who otherwise may never come into contact, but could benefit from a tool designed to help them find each other. This disconnect might happen due to the sheer size of the organization or as a result of the organization having decentralized office space. Company outings, weekly corporate updates via email, and those sort of approaches promote connectivity amongst employees only to an extent. To my knowledge Clay thinks a greater source of connectivity rests in task or interest based outreach generated by the employees themselves. In a lot of ways this makes a great deal of sense.
Given how difficult it can be to align numerous independent schedules, the idea for employees to search for each other and connect 1-on-1 on their own terms could amount to heightened levels of interaction overall. Spindows reminds me a lot of Yammer (think Twitter for organizations) in that it too can be used to improve the flow of experiences contained amongst internal human resources. This may include experience of working in a particular role, or knowledge of customer acquisitions and partnerships about to bubble. One core difference between the two services is Spindows places significantly less emphasis on solely text based interactions. Much greater emphasis has been placed on video feeds instead, whereby alongside each feed users have the option to take notes throughout the course of any discussion and rate the quality of their interactions with other employees. You might be thinking what is to prevent companies from making better use of the already widely popular video platform Skype.
The main reason you’d use Spindows instead of Skype is that employees assign unique tags to their account to describe their location, organization, interests, and work experience. This enables Spindows users to search based on a set of contextual parameters that describe employees more accurately than personal contact information alone. This distinction opens up a number of possible reasons for why one employee might quickly search for another employee. Tags help to structure compatibly relationships for a number of useful applications, including group level invitations where attendees are invited to participate in a series of timed video sessions. Those of us at the presentation engaged in conversation over the kinds of scenarios in which Spindows would serve as a practical tool. In a matter of minutes we established more than a dozen cases for when the service would come in quite handy.
Take as one example the common scenario you or someone you know is a new employee inside of a large corporation. In the first few weeks you’re focused on quickly learning the ropes of your new position. To perform well and make a strong impression early, you might benefit from having access to a tool used to locate more experienced employees within the company. On a lot of occasions email might not be the best format to undergo the kind of instruction you seek, nor is there any guarantee the employee you need is based out of the same building, nor are concrete reasons always present for why the company should expend the time and money needed to connect two employees in person. You might find it useful instead to use Spindows to search the enterprise wide network to discover the best employees who can help ramp up your skills to be competitive in the new position.
Video can be a very powerful medium when used in the right context. Spindows is a tool organizations of all sizes could benefit from, however, the applicability seems remarkably greater for larger organizations who struggle to effectively connect the right employees for the right purposes. I think Spindows offers a compelling solution to a repeat problem I’ve heard from all sorts of people across a number of industries. As they proceed to finish the beta development of their platform, I know they’re very open minded to hear about and learn of new environments in which the technology might add value for an organization. They have started talks with a few large organizations who are eager to demo the service once it is ready. Expect to hear more about this startup in the future.
