

PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing - siong1987
http://powwow.cc/

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

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

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trimes
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.

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

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jsherwani
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 :)

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jordo37
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.

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shravan
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?

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Wump
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)

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vdm
> P2P, VP8

So is Chromium Remoting.
[http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=remo...](http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=remoting)

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davidcollantes
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!

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elsif1
It is peer to peer when possible (>90% of the time). Otherwise it is relayed.

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rockyj
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).

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rogerbinns
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.

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rogerbinns
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.

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protomyth
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.

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joshchan
<http://i.imgur.com/RbPQ8.jpg>

PowWow is trippy.

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

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

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watty
> 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.

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intelliot
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.

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mosfet9
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?

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Wump
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.

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kstenson
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/>

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yeet
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.

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georgespencer
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.

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mgillett
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.

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frk1206
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!

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Scaevolus
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.

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frk1206
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!

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

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Wump
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.

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nXqd
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 :)

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

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jsherwani
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.

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tabulatouch
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.

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warmwaffles
pair programming with this has the potential to be awesome

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bahman2000
favicon.ico for my label-less bookmarks please :)

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jsherwani
Fixed :) Thanks for pointing that out!

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666_howitzer
I wish someone thought me code with this.

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

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bosky101
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.

~B

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the1
no linux, android, ipad support

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

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

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equator
Very impressive! I can see myself using this someday!

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mparlane
Two mice but surely not two cursors?

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solox3
Two cursors. However, only one application can be active at any one time, so
two people can't type at the same time.

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propercoil
any version for ubuntu/other debian derivatives?

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jczhang
this is awesome, any chances for a PC version?

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jsherwani
It's in the pipeline :)

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saiko-chriskun
awesome!!! been wanting something like this ;)

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zillwc
Very cool.

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89a
"You are both always in control"

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

