Show HN: Fed up with WebEx, so we built a way to screen share in under 20 sec. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fed up with WebEx, so we built a way to screen share in under 20 sec.

screenleap.com

402 pointsttruong130 comments

Nicely done, but there are few issues from the top of my head.

1. Security - this should really be going over SSL. In fact, the whole site needs to be SSL'd.

2. P2P - I bet you are not P2P, and you won't be able to be P2P if you keep the viewer in the confines of the browser. However, the client-to-client traffic really needs to go peer to peer. It's an absolute must. This is what keeps the cost of running the service low and this is what allowed LogMeIn to grow like a fire and eat Citrix lunch. You keep pushing all data through yourselves, your bandwidth usage and infrastructure upgrade bills will likely to kill you. Scaling a server-relayed service is a bitch of an issue, don't underestimate it.

3. Java dependency for sharing - you'd be surprised how many locked-down corporate setups have no Java (not that they are your target audience). I personally don't have Java installed either (and again, I am probably not your target user either). A fallback to Flash would make a lot of sense. Also the screen sharing on iPhone/Pad/etc would require a native app, which effectively means that you are on your way to replicate join.me.

4. Patents - I'm sure the easiest way to knock you down is through a patent litigation. Be mindful here. Try and build a bit of a defensive portfolio if you can.

All in all, good luck. You are entering a crowded market littered with failed startups... and interesting acquisitions ;)

1) This is in the works.

2) We are currently not P2P but that is one direction that we are considering for a future complementary product. We have done some calculations and believe that it is possible to make service economically viable (even with free basic usage) but it remains to be seen if we are right.

3) Unfortunately, it is not possible to implement a sharing application purely in Flash because it does not provide the necessary calls as far as we know. Our goal is to remove the pain from viewing so an iPhone/iPad/Android version would fit in with our goals.

4) Thanks for the pointer.

Thanks for all the feedback!

I think Adobe has a flash screen sharing service that uses solely flash. I forget if you have to install a client or not.

http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html

Yes there is a client

> We have done some calculations and believe that it is possible to make service economically viable (even with free basic usage)

So how do you make money?

Please ditch the generic stock photo of a lady on a broken laptop on the beach. It makes your site look like a cheap travel agency.

Go for a home computer setting or even an office setting.

Like one of these or something.

http://us.fotolia.com/id/28015494

http://us.fotolia.com/id/35919645

http://us.fotolia.com/id/27612067

We would love to get in touch with any great designers out there that can help us with this.

I'm a designer and I think I'm great.

http://www.andrew-rose.com/

http://dribbble.com/andrewfelix

Just to let you know that if I have javascript disabled (noscript) on my browser, most of your links for the portfolio don't work. Don't know if it matters in the real world, but just a heads up.

Yeh I know it's a pretty crusty build. Just relying on the cargo collective cms, as I've had no time to build something myself.

It doesn't matter in the real world.

I'm pretty sure no one even bothers checking if javascript is disabled. I know you can't access Facebook without it (or at least with Lynx); doesn't that exclude basically every web app?

Oh wow. Andrew really is great. Very nice work.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I like the beach photo.

I think the beach photo is great. It says "focus is on humans, not on computers", "ease of use". I would really not put a photo of just a laptop up there unless you are selling laptops.

Just to give you some feedback. The biggest issue I have with the site is that I'm not sure if I can trust you.

How do I know my privacy is protected?

How do I know you're not a phising company trying to steal personal data by spying on screen sharing sessions?

Those are some of the questions I ask myself. And it's also the first impression I get when I look at the site. Also, I don't see a phone number anywhere on the site I can call to speak to somebody, or to even verify that you're a real company. There's also no real explanation of how the technology works, and how the tech could protect my privacy--if it in fact does.

I'm not trying to be harsh, just giving you my honest opinion. You have to find some way to make me trust you, if you want me to use your product.

Thank you for the feedback. We wanted to get a MVP out as soon as possible so we can start getting feedback on the idea. Unfortunately, we haven't had time to add all the information about who we are and how to contact us. We will correct that in the coming weeks.

How do I report a security vulnerability to you guys?

Please email us at support (at) screenleap.com.

Just sent

The trust thing was the first thing I thought of as well.

Hopefully this doesn't come off negatively, but without any phone #, address, etc, it almost comes across as one of those splash pages for "virus scanners" that you download and gives you a virus.

Have you taken a look at the Flash screensharing functionality?

I've never actually implemented it and it seems there are some strange requirements (officialy FMS with some module only I believe,) but it would resolve the trust issue for a lot of people.

Perhaps you could try and consider adding it as a fallback or fall-forward (if that's a real word ;).

Join.me has been my goto replacement for webex.

This operates exactly like join.me - however I like join.me's shorter URLs - I would suggest copying a format similar to theirs.

However I really like the "share whats in the rectangle" feature.

Thanks for the suggestion on the URL. When we eventually support accounts, we plan to allow you to start a screen session by simply clicking on a name from your buddy list so hopefully the longer URL will be less of an issue for frequent users.

Convenience is what you should be going for. If you're able to generate a short url for convenience, the chances of someone signing up later rather than saying "Signup just to try? fuck it" are higher.

Hell, when generating the url, just make a call to the api at http://tweak.tk so that you can display the short one side-by-side with the long one. Provided your codebase is well formed, a change like that should not be astronomical.

(P.S. Tweak.tk is really awesome. At least check it out.)

If you are going to use an URL shortening service, please go with one that is universally recognised by most tech people, such as bit.ly. I've never heard of tweak.tk and I've never seen it come across my Twitter feed.

The cool thing about tweak.tk is that it's operated by the .tk-registry and you're getting a free generated .tk domain instead of just a page on the domain of the shortening service. Jdyk56.tk instead of bitly.com/jdyk56

Wow, that's simultaneously cool and means I'm not going to use it. http://ddpor.tk looks too much like a link to a scam site.

join.me doesn't run on my computer, it tries to give me a useless .exe file.

This one, screenlap.com, worked out like it said it would.

Three thoughts:

1) Can I safely assume you're working on a way to share desktop control, for things like tech support? Seems like the next semi-major logical step.

2) Out of curiosity, how do you plan to monetize this beast? Freemium, with a more feature-rich paid version (voip, desktop control, etc)? Or...something else?

3) Very cool. Great job guys!

1) We want to really nail the screen sharing experience first and make it work reliably for everyone. Remote desktop control and live collaboration are follow-up ideas that we are definitely looking into.

2) Freemium is one option that we are considering. We want to keep focusing on reducing the time it takes to share a screen and see what kind of use cases emerge before deciding on how to monetize it. Besides freemium, we think there might be possibilities for integration with other sites for support or enhancing the browsing experience. For example, a clothing site could have a stylist available that could walk users through the site and help them pick outfits that they might like.

3) Thanks!

Have you tried using PNG or GIF compression? The presumably JPEG compression right now has many artifacts.

That's something we are looking into. We think that there will be different optimal image formats depending upon the use case (i.e., are you sharing an illustration or a photo). We want to see what those use cases are before optimizing.

I imagine screen-sharing may most often be for text and application windows.

How do you see what the use cases are? Are you asking .. or watching? I'm kind of serious here, because as others have stated, this has the 'untrusted' sticker on it for now.

Otherwise: Congratulations. From my day to day 'support the in-laws' sessions: This could be very helpful.

We'll definitely be asking. The trust of our users are very important to us. If you have an interesting use case, please let us know.

We wanted to soft launch something now to start getting feedback about the product. We'll be doing a formal launch in the next couple of weeks and will have a lot more detail to share about us and the company then.

If you do so, add ability to reduce # of colors to speed up refreshes. Clients to whose machines I am connecting to often have lousy upload bandwidth. I'm not sure how hard is it to send events (window move/resize, mouse move etc.) instead of compressed image of invalidated screen region. Even if that's usable only in special cases, it's worth doing.

Great responses. Best of luck to you guys. I'll be sure to bookmark your stuff and follow the progress, and if/when I come across a screen-sharing need, I'll definitely use yours.

Another option for you for monetizing: customer rebranding. For a couple bucks a month, you can use your own logo and/or color scheme and/or stylesheet. Though I'm sure that's at least been considered.

One privacy enhancement which would be nice would be to see a list of IPs viewing the screen. Not sure how easy it would be to implement, but would give me total peace of mind to know only 1 IP is viewing (if that's what I'm expecting).

Stellar job though - no barrier to use whatsoever.

Beautiful product, dead simple and I'd use this over Join.me which I see as your closest competition for quick screen sharing.

GOOG & Skype are also getting a lot faster on their feet in this space.

I'm intimately familiar with this landscape as we're preparing to launch our FREE webinar platform, http://www.MeetingBurner.com, in the very near future after ~1yr in beta.

Our target is the "webinar" space which includes all the trimmings like registrations, invitations, bundled conference lines / skype / telephony, analytics, pay walls, etc.

But we have a solid contingent of users that just want screen sharing 90% of the time and I love your focus on "2 clicks to start a meeting" etc.

Elegant solution and good luck.

Please let your marketing folks know that there is a silent (ok, not this time) constituency of people like me who cringe at the term "webinar". Some of us even filter such terms from appearing in our inboxes.

Please call it what it is: a seminar. When people share their slides online they don't call it a "websentation" because it would be so goofy as to be insulting. Why should a seminar be any different?

I hate 'webinar' as well, but it is highly descriptive. A seminar could be a meeting in a different room in a different city; it's more ambiguous.

Shouldn't it be in your "list of uncategorized email messages" rather than in your "inbox"? :)

Interesting, I never had those connotations myself but see it repeated a few times in this thread

When we set out to put together our media plan / SEO we researched all the varieties of keywords / etc and were surprised to see how far out ahead "webinar" is from "online meeting" / "online seminar" / "screen sharing" / etc

eg:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=webinar,+online+meeting,+onl...

There is a Chrome extension by Google that allows quickly share screens without needing to install Java.

It works on Linux as well.

Here is a link to the extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhk...

Google+ Hangouts have screensharing as well.

Some users face problem as it uses 5222 port and this one is blocked at many places e.g. in our college only 80 and 443 are open.

So I had more than 110 viewers at one point, and also screenleaped into someone else who was screeleaping my screenleap: http://yfrog.com/z/oe15628524p

The product was effortlessly easy to run. Obviously there was a usage overload but otherwise, people were able to watch me Tweet and screenleap into other people's screenleaps in real time (and also watch me scroll through cat gifs). Extremely well done, bravo!

I wouldn't use this over join.me because of the compression artifacts. I use join.me to lead webinars and a professional appearance is critical.

However, I am glad to see another competitor in the space. The killer feature, IMHO, would be adding a VoIP / Telephone bridge so people could get audio either way. Webex and Gotomeeting do this, but they are clunky in other areas.

We have some optimizations in place so that if your screen doesn't change, the screen shot quality will progressively improve. As we improve the compression, we plan to increase the default image quality too.

Cool, but I couldn't close the java 'ScreenLeap' dialog without using chrome's task manager to kill the java plugin.

(I'm running Ubuntu 11.10, and chrome 16.0 if that helps)

Also, I feel "No downloads, installs" is a little disingenuous - just because it's not installed as a full-time application doesn't mean that it's not downloaded or installed.

Thanks for the feedback. Point taken on the "no downloads or installs". We wanted to convey how easy it is for someone to view your screen but I can see that it doesn't accurately describe the process for sharing your screen. We'll work to improve the messaging.

I think you're mostly there. Maybe just say "inside your browser". That conveys the wonderful ease of use that you've managed to implement.

I would be cautious about changing your marketing based on feedback here. While we understand you are really downloading an applet, 99% of the people in the world won't even care that distinction exists. A/B test on your target market.

Faced the same bug on the same os, browser. And just for fun wanted to see what happens if I open the url in another browser in the same computer ... recursion!

Thanks for heads-up. We'll look it into it.

This is also happening to me as well. I had to "ps x | grep java" then killed the appropriate pid to close the program.

So did I. The viewing browser now displays the screen as it was at the time I killed the process. I guess it hasn't told that the session has ended.

Wow, that's really slick! Any plans to license the software for use in other products? It would make a great addition to some help desk software...

That is definitely a route we want to consider. If you know someone in the space, we would love an introduction.

> If you know someone in the space, we would love an introduction.

I do - my email address is in my profile. Let me know your preferred method for getting in touch?

Looks interesting, but I do not run java on my machines so this wont work for me.

This looks nice. Is there any way to switch who is sharing their screen among participants? We have weekly meetings for product demos and WebEx allows us to trade of who is the presenter.

Presenter swap is almost done. We should have it available within the next two weeks.

Two things: 1. It was odd that you can't resize using the top and left borders. 2. I'm using 2 monitors (laptop + monitor) and I can't move the rectangle to the secondary monitory.

I have been using https://join.me/ and pretty happy with it.

How is this different from https://join.me/?

In the documentation, I didn't see where I can give control of the screen. That's a difference. But it's a good feature to have.

For join.me, you need to have Flash installed to view someone's screen. Screenleap allows you to view from any device with a web browser, whether it be a PC, tablet, or smartphone. In the same way that you don't worry about what email program someone is on before sending them an email, we want to make it so you don't have to worry about what device a person is on before showing them your screen.

Join.me does have an iPad and iPhone app... but this is a lot easier.

How do you plan to compete with LogMeIn once they have an HTML viewer? Which they either already have or will have and very soon.

join.me does not support Linux.

Just tested this. Ok so it works. Very cool! Now chances of someone correctly guessing a permutation of three 3-digit numbers are 1 in 901^3 = 732 million, but still, is that the only form of security ? I can call someone over the phone & give them my screen key ie. 3 3-digit numbers. Someone else can overhear that & also go to screenleap and enter those 3 numbers & suddenly my screen isn't private anymore...

Once we support accounts, we plan to add privacy controls so that sessions are secured from accidental viewing.

Nice - but I can't stop sharing my screen. Even if I click "Stop sharing screen", even if I try to close the popup window with that button in it.

I need these to be dead simple as I use them to help walk my Mom through simple tasks on the PC from 2000 miles away.

Thank you for helping keep the hair on my head

Just wanted to add, I just used this to show some work to a friend, and it worked really well. Had it up and running quickly, he joined easily, was able to see everything I did.

Only gripe, the window re-sizing wasn't working properly. Once I re-sized it once (width-wise), it didn't let me re-size it any more, only move it around.

Otherwise, very easy to use product

If I hadn't found http://join.me a few months ago I'd be jumping up and down right now. This is just as effortless, great job there. I'd suggest making the two options: share a screen, and join a session stand out even more from the rest of the homepage.

Join.me attempts to serve me a .exe file when on my GNU/Linux computers. Useless.

Horror!

Ah, the joy of product marketing.

The VIEWING is from any device, but SHARING is not.

Ability to view on iPad in the browser is a step up from join.me, but it appears to be the only major difference. Am I missing something? I am a long time LogMeIn user, so I am probably right smack in the middle of your target audience.

We eventually want to support sharing from any device but it won't be as painless as viewing from any device.

Being able to view from the iPad or smartphone without any install is the major difference right now between Screenleap and join.me. For future direction, since the viewer is HTML/JavaScript-based, we think there may be opportunities for deeper integration with other products to make it even easier to get a screen sharing session started. We also think that it may be easier for us to provide a branded and more customized screen sharing experience.

Just tried it. Works pretty well. I especially like the share rectangle region feature.

I have been using https://join.me/ since it allows me to control the other person's screen as well. The setup is just as simple but it requires you to run a downloaded file.

Its like the Stripe for screensharing , I love it.

As for monetization, I think a good strategy might be something like the first 3 are free, and then you pay $5 for 30 screenshares afterwards. Atleast for me, I'd be willing to pay that and it seems like a straightforward/fair way to price it.

Good luck!

My boss works in a different city, and we're on the phone all the time. The simplicity of this is priceless. I especially appreciate that the viewing side requires no setup. That makes it much preferable to WebEx or Skype when I'm dealing with less tech-savvy folks.

You'd like join.me as well.

Great product. Am I alone in thinking the design could use a refresh? Is this in the works? A really distinctive visual identity is what would turn this from "cool thing I saw on HN" to a solution that I'll remember long enough to reach for it next chance I get.

I'd like to check it out but it asks me to download java which I already have. However the java plugin does not show up in FF for me. Any idea how to enable it and could you include those instructions too ? Thanks.

I love this. How feasible would a Chrome/Firefox extension be? An icon by the URL to start a share without going to another URL would be amazing(and something no one else does as far as I know).

Great product. Best of luck! :)

Best/easiest screen-sharing implementation I've seen so far, great work!

Awesome job. Screenr.com uses the same java method to record my screen and it _never_ works, this was up and running in lessss than 20 seconds. Would love to see a recording featured added.

That is such a great app! I love how simple it is to share the link and there's no need to download anything.

Are there any plans to share the screen of an android phone? I think that would be pretty fun.

Thanks! We eventually want to add support for sharing from iOS and Android devices, especially tablets.

Two questions:

1. Right now my screen share app of choice is TeamViewer. You could own this space if screen control was added, very easy to setup and use.

2. Monetization strategy? Are you looking to monetize this app?

Very nice, worked flawlessly when I just tested it with a friend (other than having to kill the java process by hand in the end). Thanks in particular for supporting Linux!

Great product.. This disrupts all of the clunky screen sharing products I have used in my tech life. Dare I be bold and state this may be the Dropbox of screen sharing.

Doesnt seem to work on my Lion with the latest Java installed

Me either, exact same setup. This happened to me on http://keepvid.com as well; that site runs on a java plugin as well.

I'm happy that it isn't just me (I was actually scanning the comments to see if anyone ran into this problem), but I really would like a solution to this. If anyone finds one, let me know!

Please email us at support (at) screenleap.com and we'll try to help troubleshoot.

This is a great idea and very well implemented. I too would like to see an API of sorts. Maybe a white-label screen sharing service. Good luck!

TeamViewer (free) is not bad but it times out after some time and you have to relaunch the meeting with a new code. Will give this one a try.

Nice! I just shared a screen from a Linux laptop to a phone with the Dolphin browser and it Just Worked. Pretty high latency though.

Mind sharing what your particular frustrations with WebEx are? (Not that I'm defending the product, just curious)

For us, the main frustration was showing your screen to someone who you didn't frequently collaborate with. If they didn't have WebEx installed, you would have to ask them to download and install it, create an account, and then get invited to a meeting. The whole process can take more than 10 minutes which is more than enough for most people to decide that it's not worth the trouble, especially if it's for something like a sales demo.

We want to make it as easy to share your screen with someone as it is to instant message them. If we do, we hope people will start using it frequently throughout the day for all sorts of ad-hoc collaboration.

Really? It's more like "Here's a link, click on it and enter your name and e-mail address" then accept the java applet. Takes maybe 2 minutes.

I think the difference is, you don't need the java applet to view, only to share.

Thanks for replying, good luck with the product!

Does it allow me to only share a specific applications? I don't want to show everybody my email and other stuff.

Right now, you can limit what is shown to what's inside a rectangle. The rectangle is movable and resizable although that is currently not obvious from the UI. We want to eventually allow you to select the application that you want to share.

Great job guys. I love the simplicity.

How are you guys streaming the images down? Any interesting technologies or methods used?

Any chance at offering this through SSL in the future? Or does the transmission already go through SSL?

Yes, we plan to support SSL in a future release.

Is it typical for tablet and smartphone browsers to have a java run time environment? Mine does not.

Oh, I see. The java plug in is only required for sharing. So I can still view on my blackberry.

Tested and working well. This will come in handy.

This is a very usefull website with great potential. And nice and clean interface. Good work.

"No installs" - first thing it asks me to do is to install a Java plugin. No thanks.

Java is shown in the instruction screenshots, but it would be nice if it was clearing saying "share your screen if java is installed". I have Java disabled so this doesn't work for me, nor does it work trying to share my Android screen :-)

I had expected something like a cross platform browser plugin that isn't Java.

It's not safe to assume that everyone has the java plugin installed anymore.

Looks promising. I'll be using it in a meeting I have right now. Thanks.

You built that in less than 20 seconds?!!! Damn, you guys are good.

Wow, this is effortless and works well, just like Dropbox. Nice job.

I was able to view my PC screen on my Droid 3 stock browser.

Great Product ! What about the API ? And Screen recording ?

wow. i was curious if this would work on my networked machine and it did. boom! that was pretty quick. a+ guys

Awesome, works on Windows Phone.

this is a very usefull website with a fantastic opportunity to become big...

Great Job!

Do you have an API?

I just dropped you an email :)

Thank You

Awesome product!

Scary!

Works well, and yes, effortless. Impressive.

It requires Java. Enough said.

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