The Hindu Business Line : Sabeer Bhatia offers instant info-sharing

HOTMAIL co-founder Mr Sabeer Bhatia has launched InstaColl, an Indian independent software vendor (ISV) with an instant messaging solution of the same name.

The company has released a beta version of the product and is also running pilot tests at a few corporates and plans to take the product to world markets in the next month or so.

"InstaColl lets a group of people share information, graphics, spreadsheets, word documents, Powerpoint presentations and video clips in real-time, and lets all of them work on the activity at the same time," said Mr Bhatia, who is joining the board of InstaColl as Chairman apart from having invested an undisclosed sum in the company.

The Founder and CEO, Mr Sumanth Raghavendra, said the company has partnered with IBM to offer the product with its X-series servers.

InstaColl is an online collaboration solution that is designed to expedite the task of sharing documents and information across multiple users and locations.

The solution is available to be run on MS Office applications and can be made available on others, said Mr Raghavendra. It uses a hybrid P2P and client server architecture and can support a large number of users.

It can also be extended to non-users, reducing the barriers to its utilisation, said Mr Bhatia. "We are even ahead of Microsoft on this," he said in response to a question on InstaColl's likeness to MS applications on collaborative meetings.

While e-mail is the de facto business communication mechanism, its `store-and-forward' nature introduces latencies and delays in an Internet-centric business environment, Mr Bhatia said.

"InstaColl has been built so that there is immediate sharing, editing and collaborative efforts possible on the task."

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