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Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

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Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#71

Post by sokoloff »

ironmagma wrote: post #49
errantmind wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, ignoring someone stopping by your desk is very different from not answering the phone. A phone call doesn't have the same degree of immediacy nor the same expectations of a response

How is a phone call not the highest form of immediacy? Short of an actual pager event implying downtime and process, what could be higher priority to someone working out of office?

If you treat every inbound phone call as your highest/immediate priority, you have ceded all control of your priorities to other people. Unless you’re working in a call-center type of role, I can’t see how that could possibly be optimal.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#73

Post by goatinaboat »

ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

This is very common in some industries to have always-on two-way screens connected to workers in another office. A company called Tandberg was the main maker of them. It’s owned by Cisco now but everyone still calls them Tandbergs.

Typically you would have one at the end of a row of desks to “extend” that row to another row physically located in another office and vice versa

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#74

Post by 6510 »

jonas21 wrote: post #65
tommoor wrote: post #21

I have worked remotely for 10 years and raised VC funding for an idea very similar to this in the past – we failed to build a sustainable business, although the product did have a couple of hundred teams that swore by the product. In hindsight I believe it's because we were following the startup mythology of "building a solution for the problem that you have" a little too closely. We failed to realize that this is re…

Oh, you built Sqwiggle! A couple of friends and I used to work together remotely and we used it every day. It was awesome -- just the right balance between being unobtrusive yet easy to have a quick discussion when needed. We loved it so much, we even made a (much less-polished) clone after you shut down so we could continue with the same workflow.

I think many to one eventually becomes the real challenge. IOW how to get the message to the lowest ranking person able to deal with the issue depending on its content.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#75

Post by 6510 »

Gave me a funny idea (its terrible I know) point a web cam at each remote worker (you) then give the boss a traditional remote control with all 20 "TV" channels. If the boss is looking an indicator light goes on and you get to have a one way conversation with the boss in listen only mode. (extra points for steampunk design TV/RC)

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#78

Post by Aloha »

On the face of it, it looks like Voice IM, with that I'm trying to figure out who needs this product or why its better than other options?

I don't understand where this fits in the hierarchy of human bandwidth (From Lowest to Highest):

Text Message

IRC/IM/Teams/et al

E-Mail

Phone Call/Conference Call

Video Conference

Face to Face meetings

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#80

Post by jasonkester »

Back in the 90s I once worked at an office that had a phone system with no ringer. You’d dial the extension and just start talking. Or you could “ring” them by saying something like “hey Jeff!”

As a new guy in that office, never having met “Jeff” before, this was really difficult for my introverted self to get used to. I was glad when I finished the trip and flew back to the home office where phones worked like phones.

This seems a bit like that, but with at least the ability to set some boundaries around who could start talking to you. If my current team adopted this I bet I’d spend my whole day in “focusing, don’t interrupt me” mode.

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