Convofy Turns Work Collaboration into a Visual Experience

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Name: Convofy

Quick Pitch: Convofy is a private social network for enterprise, designed for visual thinkers.

Genius Idea: Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and focuses on detailed annotations for images, video, links and documents, making it ideal for firms that collaborate on a lot of documents or multimedia.

Bringing social networking to businesses is, well, big business. Salesforce Chatter brings groups and news feeds to internal teams while Yammer has managed to win more than 80% of the Fortune 500.

Convofy, built by the team behind the Scrybe task manager, differentiates itself through its focus on multimedia, drag-and-drop interface and real-time information stream. These features are made possible because Convofy runs on Adobe AIR and not in the web browser. And because it’s an AIR app, it can be placed in a convenient and always available area of your desktop.

It offers the features you’d expect from a social network built for the enterprise: a newsfeed, groups and file-sharing all fleshed-out features. Its newsfeed is extraordinarily visual, displaying documents, photos, slides and links inside the stream. Adding files to your Convofy network is as simple as dragging and dropping the files onto the app. It also comes with a series of notifications for when your co-workers comment on something you’ve added.

Convofy has a few tricks up its sleeve to differentiate it from the enterprise social networking crowd. One of those tricks is the ability to markup uploaded documents and add conversational notes. It makes collaborating on documents rather simple, although it’s nowhere near as robust as Google Docs. Convofy also includes annotations for videos and photos as well, and these annotations include timestamps so it’s easy to see the history of a conversation around any given piece of multimedia.

The app takes annotations one step further than most of its competitors. A team within Convofy can even annotate the web. Say you read an interesting article and want to point out a key phrase to your co-workers; Convofy lets you comment on that item and gives everyone else in your network the chance to comment and converse on the link.

Convofy is also mobile via a mobile web application built for smartphones that can run HTML5.

If you’re already using Chatter or Yammer, you may not find a lot compelling reasons to switch to Convofy. The enterprise app really shines though if you’re a company or team that shares lots of images, videos and documents. Design, research and consulting firms are the ones who will most likely find it useful, especially if they are willing to learn the ins and outs of the system.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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