Video Archives

InstaColl

Product Name

Live Documents

Market Segment

Enabling Technology

Funding

Angel funding from Sabeer Bhatia. Venture funding from Softbank’s Bodhi Fund.

Competitors

No direct competitors

Product Description

Live Documents provides a “software-plus-services” application experience, seamlessly combining the richness and familiarity of desktop applications with the collaborative capabilities of the Web. Live Documents consists of a plug-in that sits within Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint and adds synchronization, access-control and contextual collaboration to your documents—complemented by an online service that allows users to view/edit documents within a Flash-based version of the desktop application. All changes in either version are automatically propagated to the other side.

Market Opportunity

InstaColl operates in the “connected productivity” market space, where content management, communication and collaboration overlap. The current market size is estimated to be $20 billion, according to Wainhouse, Datamonitor and Ovum.

Demo Says

Live Documents is a clever approach to document collaboration, tapping the XML capabilities of Office applications to facilitate group editing and review. This approach is lightweight in design but significant in impact because it doesn’t ask individuals to change work processes or tools in order to get the benefit of collaboration. As importantly, we think, Live Documents sets hooks that will support a range of document sharing and publishing applications.