PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing | Hacker News Reader

PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

powwow.cc

225 pointssiong198772 comments

I remember the PowWow McAfee founded that did collaborative web browsing.…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

That was my thought, is this a renewal of a 90s brand? The original PowWow was something that our QA people used for reasons I can't recall.

Probably because it had the PowWow Robot Voice to read your chats for you. Not that it was super useful, it just sounded funny.

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.

> I think this was also one of the first applications that could qualify as an instant messaging tool

I would certainly consider IRC to be an instant messagig tool, and that has been around since around 1988, while the orginal PowWow seems to be from 1994, which would make it 6 years late to be first. The most well known networks like ICQ and MSN came some years later, so they were still early.

I suppose you could consider IRC and IM to have some significant feature overlap, but I'd still regard them as essentially different things. IRC's core feature is larger-scale many-to-many conversations, and IM's core feature is one-to-one conversation, and this in turn leads to significant differences usage patterns, interface conventions, network protocols etc. that even further differentiate them.

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.

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...

Interesting on how no replies have been received on how it works. Mind it, I have not installed it, but, is there a server(s) to connect to, is it peer-to-peer? Care to provide more details? Thanks!

It is peer to peer when possible (>90% of the time). Otherwise it is relayed.

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).

Teamviewer supports Linux but I'm interested to see if this does the sharing the screen and pointing thing better.

I kind of hate to say this but I'm glad there's at least one other person out there who has troubles with TeamViewer on Linux. My remote coworker uses Ubuntu with two screens and we're unable to make the mouse work on the correct screen consistently. That and the screen won't update properly.

Honestly I'm amazed it works at all. They run it in WINE.

It has always worked pretty well for me but I only share one screen.

I've never had a problem with TeamViewer on Linux and I'm grateful that they made a Linux version.

Just to be clear - their Linux version is really windows one running under wine.

I am constantly surprised by that. http://dozeo.com has screen export (we don't do screen sharing) support for Linux and its been the easiest implementation of all three. It is not official, as in "not our main business", but we do have CI for it and it should work in the future.

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 daemon/service).

It works really well in both modes, and supports Linux (which I use), Mac (also have one of them) and Windows. The viewer and sharer can both interact. The viewer is a tab within Chrome which you can also make fullscreen.

If you don't need to remotely interact then Skype works just fine and again has cross platform support.

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.

While I have no experience with screen sharing, letting other people on a skype conversation see your screen works quite well even with the old Skype 2 client on Linux. (Well, at least it used to - the last couple of weeks had Skype conference quality deteriorate horribly, on all of Linux, Windows and Mac.

Google hangout's built-in screen sharing actually works perfectly for me. (Ubuntu 12.10)

You know, you probably could have chosen a better name. If for nothing else you are competing on searches with all of the actual Pow Wow websites that tribes and dancers have set up to catalog their events.

http://i.imgur.com/RbPQ8.jpg

PowWow is trippy.

inception :P

why would you upload to imgur when you have droplr running?

You're looking at the menu bar of my screen sharing buddy.

screenception

> It's like Google Docs for any application

Isn't this a bit too misleading? The appeal of Google Docs is that two people can work on a spreadsheet at the same time. They can be working on different cells or even different sheets of a workbook. PowWow allows one person to work on a spreadsheet at a time but allows you to quickly and seamlessly switch who is working on it. In other words, only one person can type.

I agree, it's not a perfect comparison. It's appropriate, though: I can quickly understand what it's about. And they do use the word "like" - it's not exactly Google Docs, but it's LIKE Google Docs and can (for certain apps) be a great alternative.

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.

Are you guys aware of powwownow? it's has voice/video conferencing. Although not exactly like your product, it does share some similarities.

http://www.powwownow.co.uk/

I've been using powwow since early development days. It is a great product, been useful to me many many times. it is good to fix your mom's computer or to help your peer programmer across the sea.

Looks great. There's a UK company with similar branding doing conference calling (they advertise all over the tube with really terrible posters). Called PowWowNow.

Really like the concept and the product feels great. I'm curious as to why voice chat was not included though. Is that planned in an upcoming release, because it seems like a pretty big setback. You may not be fighting over a single cursor anymore, but you're still fighting for control, and it's hard to coordinate that without talking to one another. I don't want to have to use up additional resources by entering a Skype chat either.

I'd guess that voice chat is a completely different expertise than this.

Additional resource would go to their homebrew implementation as well.

Not worth developing for an MVP, in my opinion.

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 agrees that Voice chat is a must have it'll definitely be there in the general release!

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.

Do you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!

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!

We cannot work parallel with this screen sharing right ? So it just looks juicy with cursor look like google docs :D

That's correct, two people can't be doing 2 different things at the same time (i.e., there is one keyboard). However you do have 2 mouse pointers and you can move/point/click with them independently. We found that in practice we actually preferred this because it's valuable to know that everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time.

yeah, that's why I say it just looks juicy because when using teamviewer or another screen sharing, we still talk discuss. Then knowing each other mouse is not necessary anymore :)

Does this differ from Goinstant (http://www.goinstant.com/ )? It was aquired by Salesforce in July 2012 for $70MM.

Absolutely. GoInstant is for the web only, and is meant for tech support rather than collaboration.

I thought GoInstant was for sales mainly.

I'm one of the co-founders of PowWow. We're a lot like GoInstant — in fact their demo video does an even better job than ours does of explaining the concept to a layperson. It's interesting that while their product and ours have very similar use cases, the technology stack is completely different. They have a browser-within-the-browser, while we have an interaction layer over the OS — and we both do crazy hacks to make multiple-mouse live collaboration work. We've met the GoInstant guys, and they're an awesome team with a great product, and we're definitely fans of theirs.

That's great hacking guys. I am waiting for the Windows version, where i think you'll have a hard time escaping the "only one window has focus" dogma. Btw, if you need beta testers i am here.

It looks like a total copy of the concept/interactions to be honest. Hopefully for Powwow GoInstant hasn't patented this stuff...

Good artists copy, great artists steal perhaps?

pair programming with this has the potential to be awesome

favicon.ico for my label-less bookmarks please :)

Fixed :) Thanks for pointing that out!

I wish someone thought me code with this.

Cool product, not so great name. Using pow wow like this can be considered offensive to native peoples.

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.

no linux, android, ipad support

Mobile support is on the horizon, though Windows is coming first.

I am glad its coming to windows first, I hope you mean windows 8 for touch ( read RT )

Very impressive! I can see myself using this someday!

Two mice but surely not two cursors?

Two cursors. However, only one application can be active at any one time, so two people can't type at the same time.

any version for ubuntu/other debian derivatives?

this is awesome, any chances for a PC version?

It's in the pipeline :)

awesome!!! been wanting something like this ;)

Very cool.

"You are both always in control"

First thing you see in the video is that this isn't true

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