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PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

powwow.cc

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#61

Hey all! I'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. This has caught us all by surprise, but we're thrilled to see the response we've been getting so far. If you guys run into any issues, please let us know. We're in very early beta right now, so your feedback is very important. Feel free to reply in the comments here, or email us at everyone@powwow.cc. Happy PowWow-ing :)

Great looking product guys! My old life was as a Collaboration Researcher and this is far better than many of the enterprise tools I saw in my day. The get-started quick aspect is great and a tremendous decider in which, if any, of these kinds of tools actually get used.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#62
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone a…

Have a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis. It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.

Yup - we are actually using webRTC under the covers for video/audio RTP and webRTC itself uses Opus (or recommends) so we'll probably be switching to that for audio chat when we go that route. Thanks!

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#63
post #2

Looks nice! I wish it gives support for Linux as well. Good screen sharing tools for Linux are virtually non-existent (and I am often ridiculed for it).

Have you tried Chrome Remote Desktop? https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop It has two modes of operation. One is where you work with a different person - whoever shares their screen starts Chrome and it generates a random access number which the other party enters. The other mode is accessing your own machines which means there is no other party and chrome doesn't need to be running (the desktop is exported as a d…

One clarification - CRD turns out not to support exporting a Linux machine that is your own (unattended). They do not have the daemon/service code for that. Sharing with other people works fine.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#65
post #60

Looks great! The two-cursor feature would also be extremely useful when two mice are connected to one computer. We do pair programming at work and I could see a tool that allows two people sitting at one machine to each have their own cursor totally transforming the way we work. Is this a feature you plan on developing?

We've found that since we've starting using PowWow, we don't need to sit at the same computer when we're working together. In fact, we prefer to stay at our computers, even if we're sitting next to each other :) Being able to use our own screen, with our own particular hardware setups is really nice. It also avoids having to reach over the other person to use the keyboard, or squint at the screen because it's too far.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#67
post #15

I remember the PowWow McAfee founded that did collaborative web browsing.… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool. I remember it coming out well before ICQ and AIM.

I hope the guys working on this project don't end up mired in trademark issues.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#69
post #57
post #11

This is super slick. Just played around with it with a friend and there's almost no lag. My CPU spun up quite a bit but nevertheless color me impressed. I'm curious how this is implemented though?

The networking is P2P (most of the time). The screen sharing is VP8 video compression. Presence is XMPP. The multiple mice, separate dock icon, and a lot of other little things are the result of a lot of hacking :) We're going to be working on making the encoding more CPU efficient. (btw if anyone has any expertise in real-time video codecs we'd love to talk to you)

> P2P, VP8

So is Chromium Remoting. http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=remo...

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#70
mixergy has a great interview with the founder talking about hitting $1M+/year for the product that started it all (ios), and a phd's journey from pakistan to the bay area.

just search for "iteleport mixergy interview"

very inspiring story. congrats to J & team.

~B

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