Only a few days after Huddle, a UK enterprise 2.0 startup, announced it had raised $4m in a Series A funding round from VCs Eden Ventures, another UK startup is gunning for the ‘team collaboration’ space. Phuser has turned its formerly consumer focused site 180 degrees around to face towards the working world, promising to bring together presentations, conference calls, videos, files, whiteboards and more all into the one space.
Next week it launches the first of several integrations with other Web 2.0 properties. Essentially, Phuser is going to become a mashup of other Web 2.0 services and applications, bringing it all into the one space and making it all trackable. When a new application comes along, Phuser will grab the API and integrate it into the service, and because it will sit in the middle it could also generate a potential income for its partners. This means your team doesn’t have to sign up for every separate Web service – in theory Phuser will handle all the sign-ons. Other players in this space include Basecamp, Huddle, Wrike and Goplan.
Next week Phuser adds Slideshare and del.icio.us, after that it will add Web 2.0 apps for conference calling, shared whiteboards, online document editing, transcription, translation and others. They are styling the new site as ‘Basecamp meets Facebook Apps’ but a more original feature of Phuser than some will be its use of SMS to update teams about new materials.
Obviously basing your entire business model on other people’s applications is not always the stablest of business models. However, I daresay they will be adding applications which tend to be best of breed and aren’t going anywhere, like the Yahoo! owned del.icio.us.
Founders George Black (CEO) and Simon Kinsella (CTO) have previously worked for the Swedish start-up Sendit which was bought by Microsoft in 1999 for $130m. But they are boot-strapping Phuser, hence they currently work out of an old Fire Station on Dunsfold park, an old aerodrome in Surrey where the Top Gear TV show is filmed. Here’s a Slideshow explaining Phuser’s offering.