Real-time collaborative platform HALL.com is announcing $580K in seed funding today, from Founder’s Collective, PivotNorth and others. Founder Brett Hellman quit his job at Inuit and joined both Sunfire Offices and AngelPad in order to build what he holds conceptually to be an online assembly hall, a place whether people can get together and share real-time intelligence.
“HALL.com is about collecting knowledge from a group of people to solve real problems,” says Hellman, which is why HALL.com is divided into various topics. For example a quick visit to the TechCrunch Hall shows realtime rankers around ancillary subjects like, “Rank the Top CEOs in Technology” and polls like “What’s the best app for photo sharing?”
Hellman says he is focused on creating a space where people can assemble and easily participate in discussion, which is why he considers his closest competitor Google+ and NOT something like GoPollGo. While right now the platform is doing that through its two apps, Ranker and Polls, Hellman eventually hopes to release additional apps like To-Do, “In the near future you’ll see us disrupting products including Skype, Survey Monkey, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and many more.”
Hellman tells me that the fact that you can enter HALL.com frictionlessly, through Facebook Connect, without having to register or create a group is what differentiates it from other services that offer similar products, “The problem we solve is collecting group intelligence … You don’t have to create a group or project, add people, signup. We’ve eliminated all the pains to make it effortless to engage in the hall.”
A week after receiving the funding, Hellman hired,”two of the smartest engineers [he's] ever worked with.” Many more apps that effortlessly collect intelligence are in the platform’s future.
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