Ex-Skypers launch a collaborative blackboard program

A Skype's former employees team assembled a promising startup to deal with the challenges of online collaboration. The result was the Deekit, a program that can be used for almost any market player (works via browser too) and play on your screen a blackboard (which nowadays is always white) that can be changed and tweaked by any participant in real time.

The company was named The Tallin, being located in Estonia, founded by Kaili Kleemeier, former Head of Operations Skype. She and three other former employees decided to leave the company when it was acquired by Microsoft and spent almost a year researching ideas that they could invest in. The virtual frame design came to them after the group reflected on the difficulties of working remotely with each other.

"Working with remote teams is challenging in many ways - cultural, linguistic, make all the time people talk about the same thing in different ways, sharing this information to all locations. So far so good, but at a time of an incident, you need to put steroids in the whole process, explain faster, solve faster, be very transparent and etc. This experience literally literally led me to create a team to research how we could remotely collaborate more effectively. "

The solution they found was to bring back the old blackboard, now accessible through browsers and applications. The Deekit name comes from Romani to look at the idea behind the project is that often show it's easier to talk (the famous understand or want me to draw?).

The model to use for the commercial sector of the company.

"Simple conversations are not as effective when dealing with a complex problem solving, sharing knowledge and making the brainstorming new ideas. For example, when developers are discussing an architectural change in the program, a framework is the most natural way to do it. With simple boxes, arrows and drawings that make you able to prove his point in a few minutes. This also applies in design, sales, almost all involving larger teams actually. "

The Deekit not be the first program to fulfill these functions in the market, far from it, the idea is that can stand out to contain a simpler tool set. The impression that the developers have is that their competitors have programs that are very close to a kind of collaborative Photoshop. The idea here is to look much more with Paint, ie an affordable and usable by any program that works almost intuitively.