Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttruong | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com