In the same social enterprise space as Yammer and Podio, the Adobe-funded Scrybe Labs is launching its basic collaborative product today, available at Convofy.com. As identified in a lot of the pre-launch press hype, Convofy wants to go beyond being a private Facebook and Twitter to let companies collaborate around content like web pages, images PDF files, Powerpoint files, Word Files and Excel. “We’ve enabled the activity stream to work in the context of your work,” says CEO Faizan Buzdar.
The desktop tool uses Adobe Air and the HTML5 browser Web Kit to provide users with an separate interface to have realtime discussions around images, articles and third party apps like Twitter and Google Maps. A lightweight mobile app is also available at http://convofy.com/m/.
In addition to manually uploading them into the app, Convofy allows you to drag and drop files and links into a Quick Add field in the upper left of your desktop. New comment notifications appear in the top right of your screen.
When discussing context, Convofy gives users a Markup tool bar where they can select, underline and drill down into specifics like the RGB and CMK of colors in images as well as comment on their selections.
Right off the bat there’s one niche use case where I can see this being valuable, and that’s in product or other types of design. While Convofy could probably be a godsend in situations where you need to be able to interact with content in order to communicate, I’m not sure the same utility applies to companies who do not need the heavy image and document support.
Convofy has a lot of potential, especially since the Enterprise 2.0 space is in dire need of disruption. But as of right now the product itself is quirky, with plenty of behaviors that might be hard for new users to learn. For example you have to manually type in who you’re addressing into a “To” field in the comment stream (CEO Faizan Buzdar tells me this will be fixed) or each user has a “presence bubble” that expands in the right hand corner, signifying how much they contribute to the group.
The company, which has just under $2 million in funding, plans on monetizing by offering companies a premium version for $5 per user per month, with administrative features like content moderation, the ability to block domains and users and a custom TOS. Convofy also plans on integrating with non-web app companies, and has a partnership announcement coming up with a major player in the oil and gas vertical.
