For those of you remotely collaborating during Coronavirus I wanted to share a new innovation with you. Vibe digital whiteboard.

This past January I was at WeWork Labs to present to a group of maritime startups.  Just before I stood up to speak, my sponsor Elizabeth Scallon casually mentioned that I would be presenting using a digital whiteboard.  She told me I should just mark up the board with comments, and she’d send everyone the meeting notes with the full discussion.

Now normally I misunderstand or break virtually anything even vaguely mechanical.  So I was not expecting this to go well.  But the overall experience proved incredibly intuitive.  I asked Elizabeth where she found the whiteboard.  Turns out the company, Vibe, is another WeWork Labs startup; they had launched in July and were looking for user feedback.  So I wrote and asked if I could try one out.  They very kindly delivered one portable smartboard to my house for me to play with (break).

I’m sure many of you have been following the news about the spread of the Coronavirus, and the resulting advice being offered businesses.  Avoid travel, avoid in person meetings, work from home.  But the need for collaboration doesn’t stop.

I was planning to play with Vibe more before writing about it.  But given these recent headlines I thought it made more sense to let you know about the company now.  You decide if this is something you might find useful.

Didn’t mean to erase that

Whiteboards have been around since the 90’s and are used to solve problems, visualize ideas, and define workflows.

Vibe board was designed from scratch to fill a gap left behind by Samsung, Microsoft, and Google whose solutions tend to be expensive and/or restrictive. Vibe features a digital whiteboard, video conferencing, wireless screen-casting, and integrates with a wide range of third party applications (e.g. Slack, Google Drive, Office, Dropbox, Zoom) to allow teams to collaborate remotely and seamlessly at a more affordable price (under $3000).  Teams can share Vibe boards easily through a simple code – no Vibe device necessary – and Vibe keeps the content safe in the cloud.

Here’s Vibe’s take on how they compare.

Vibe feels your pain

Source: Vibe

“The problems we set out to solve were the same problems that we faced ourselves. Before Vibe was created, we used a stack of independent apps and software to collaborate across China and U.S. We wanted to create one tool – an immersive virtual environment that could enable effortless communication from anywhere, all with a dash of magic — kind of like our product’s namesake, the “vibes” of the Harry Potter universe.”  Charles Yang, founder and CEO

Vibe is actively working with customers on new feature requests.  So if you have been considering using a digital white board for collaborating during Coronavirus, now might be the time to act.

*This Nobel Prize winner wrote Love in the Time of Cholera which is well worth reading.

 

 

 

 

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