Lots of students come to my office to talk about ideas for cool and useful technologies. Very few walk in and show me one.
Abraham Murray and Tijan Watt, two second year HBS MBA students, have developed an intriguing technology.1 It's called Doodleboard, and it's a multimedia online whiteboard. This is freeform collaboration taken to its logical extreme; users can draw, type, upload and paste images, insert shaped, and include links. It's also synchronous, so several people can work together and see each others' changes in real time.
Its inventors describe Doodleboard as follows:
Harvard Business School students. Doodleboard is an infinite, real time and
multi-user whiteboard written in AJAX. The hosted web application allows
multiple users to directly collaborate in the same shared whiteboard. Users
can add text, shapes, images, or draw directly on the board, and changes are
immediately synchronized among all users. A simple use case might involve a
project manager annotating a screenshot of an application under development
so that contractors understand the changes desired. The company recently
launched their public alpha. For more information you can visit
www.doodleboard.us or read their blog. Also, check out their screencast."
I can imagine many enterprise uses for this technology, on its own and as a complement to other collaboration technologies.
Abe and Tijan would love to have people visit their public beta, experiment with Doodleboard, and share their thoughts and comments. Please do!
1I'm supervising Abe and Tijan on their field study this semester, but have no financial interest in their venture.
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