Fulfilling the promise of an officeless world

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For nearly 20 years, we’ve been made promises.  Promises that haven’t been kept.  We’ve been promised a revolution, a new way of work, a new way of life.  This is the promise of the virtual office and mobile work.  AT&T’s great “You Will” ads ran in 1993. They showed us a future where we could join meetings from anywhere, open our front door with our voice, and even send a fax (!) from the beach.

By now, office buildings were supposed to be ancient relics of a barbaric time.  We were all going to be working from home, or wherever we are, and the whole concept of “the office” would be redefined.  And yet, it’s 2013 and many of us still trudge to the office every day, buying homes near where we work, feeling chained to our desks.

What happened?

Two things haven’t happened, actually.  First, our culture hasn’t caught up with our vision yet.  There’s been a lot of discussion about how the company culture needs to fully commit to remote working.  But something else is at work here too — remote working isn’t just a change in how we do business, it’s a lifestyle change.  Like any societal change, it’s going to take time.  It’s going to take time for our culture to respect people who work from their home as much as we respect the office warrior.  There’s still a stigma when you’re the guy who works from home in his underwear every day:  

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This needs to change.

The other thing that hasn’t happened yet is that the technology just hasn’t been good enough.  Today, we get by with tools like WebEx, Skype, and Google Hangouts.  Working together remotely requires new tools that are designed not just for presentation, but for actually getting things done together.  The new tools will take advantage of the bandwidth and computing power that we have accessible to us today.  They’ll consider how work gets done on desktops today, and will get done on mobile devices tomorrow.  They’ll think about the user experience in ways that encourage and invite human connection, even when we’re not sitting next to each other.

Great technology is going to be at the heart of fulfilling the vision of the distributed workforce. With Screenhero, we think we’ve taken the first step towards a tool designed to enable remote work in ways that weren’t possible (or were too annoying or painful) in the past.  

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The revolution isn’t dead, by any means.  Teams are becoming increasingly distributed — DHH of 37signals quotes a stat that the number of remote workers grew 73% from 2005-11.  Everything seemed hunky-dory on the path to mobility, but then a wrench got thrown in the mix.  Yahoo and Best Buy banned working remotely.  This brought out voices on both sides of the aisle, from staunch proponents of the remote work vision to remote work skeptics that support the bans.

It was actually fortunate that Yahoo and Best Buy made that choice.  It opened up the conversation.  It got people thinking about where we are today, what works and what doesn’t work, and why we haven’t gotten where we want to be.  The world is becoming more distributed — in both work and life.  This is happening, and it’s inevitable.  But we need to be conscious of our culture, and keep working to build the technology that’s going to enable us to fulfill the promises of the past 20 years.

Edit: Join the discussion on HN.

Share a little love

Ben Affleck hit the nail on the head when he publicly thanked his wife acknowledging that relationships are hard work when accepting his Oscar earlier this month: “It’s good. It is work, but it’s the best kind of work. And there’s no one I’d rather work with.”  For those of us that have been through long-distance relationships, we know that they take the work and commitment of a regular relationship, magnified by the miscommunications and misunderstandings of not being physically present.

Reading Screenhero user Jaime’s story, we were reminded of the small things people in relationships can do to make every day meaningful.  Jaime and his girlfriend Catherine have been in a long distance relationship for 8 years — he’s in NYC, and she’s in Hawaii. They see each other on short breaks and are always looking for ways to keep their relationship strong and healthy.  Jaime describes the challenges of the relationship: “I get to see her when she is on breaks from medical school, when I either fly out there, or she comes to visit me in New York. It’s not an easy life - I’d say the basis of any relationship is in sharing experiences.”

That’s a great way to sum up our vision of Screenhero — enabling shared experiences.  Screen sharing has traditionally been a work tool, and it may sound bizarre that we’re talking about healthy long distance relationships — but Jaime’s story really got us thinking.  At Screenhero, we believe that the desktop is going to become social and sharing your desktop experience will be something people do as casually as writing an email.

Jaime talks about sharing a movie watching experience with Screenhero: “As it happens, we were discussing the Oscars a few weeks ago, and really regretted the fact that we both hadn’t seen some of the movies nominated this year, and that we wouldn’t be able to see them together. When a copy of Silver Linings Playbook found its way into my hands (I’m friends with a few Oscar voters), we decided it would be a good time to figure out how to share things on the computer. We downloaded Screenhero and watched the movie.”

Watching a movie together online isn’t a concept we’re used to, yet.  Like any other shared experience, however, it can be very powerful when an experience that has traditionally been disconnected becomes shared in real-time.

Jaime describes the impact of Screenhero: “The movie was, of course, fantastic, and the romance was beautiful, and we were thrilled to share the movie together. It’s silly, but when we don’t get to see each other often, it was a surprising comfort to see her moving the mouse. Really great stuff.”

Screenhero allowed them to share an intimate moment, which is particularly rare amongst people who are so far apart.  We’re really proud that Screenhero played a part in making Jaime feel like he was just a little bit closer to his girlfriend.

Screenhero for Windows is now available in public beta!

We’re excited to announce that you can now download the Screenhero for Windows beta!  You can now share any application (or your full screen) on your PC, with multiple mouse pointers for both participants in the session.

And yes — Screenhero is cross-platform compatible, so you can share applications between Mac and Windows.  When you invite people to Screenhero, you don’t have to think about whether they’re on Mac or Windows — they’ll automatically be given the right version.

Screenhero for Windows is still early in its beta life, so you might encounter issues along the way.  Rest assured that we’re continually working to fix these issues, so please keep Screenhero updated.

If you have any questions or issues to report, send us an email at everyone@screenhero.com.

Try out the new Screenhero invite links

You can now invite your contacts to Screenhero using the new invite URLs.  Before the invite URLs were available, you had to manually enter email addresses.  Now you can just send your contacts a URL of the form:

join.screenhero.com/[your screenhero email]

This is really useful if you want to invite a group of people, send a friend a link over Gchat/Skype/etc, or just want to be able to invite people using your own preferred method.

When one of your contacts clicks your invite link, they’ll be taken to a page that looks like this:

If they don’t already have Screenhero installed, they’ll be able to download it after entering their name and email.  They’ll then get a custom download that will automatically invite you to be added to their contact list. If you accidentally sent it to someone you’d rather not have on your list, don’t worry — you’ll be asked to approve before they are added to your contact list.

If they already have Screenhero, they simply need to click the “Accept Invitation” button.

You can always get your invite link, or invite people through the app, by clicking the “Add People” button in Screenhero.  Try it out and let us know what you think!

Introducing Screenhero

Screenhero lets you screen share any application with anyone, no matter where they are. It’s super simple and blazing fast. You each get your own mouse pointer, and you’re both always in control. It’s designed for collaboration, not just broadcasting your screen. It’s like Google Docs for any application on your computer.

We use Screenhero for everything from sharing XCode for pair programming or code reviews, to sharing Photoshop to iterate on the latest mockups, to sharing Google Chrome to write an email together in the browser. We know you’ll come up with some great uses for Screenhero that we never thought of.

Screenhero is designed to feel like you’re sitting next to the person you’re working with — even when you’re miles away. Right now we have a beta available for Mac. Windows is coming soon. If you’d like to be informed about big updates (like when the Windows version is ready), please sign up for our email list.

Screenhero is currently in beta, so things might break. If you see anything weird happen, please email us at everyone@screenhero.com — there are tons of edge cases that we can’t predict, and it’s only with your feedback that we’ll be able to solve these issues.

We hope you like Screenhero as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. Once you’ve tried it out, please drop us a line at everyone@screenhero.com — we’d love to hear what you think.

The Screenhero team

(Faraz, Jason, J, & Vishal)