Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product).

When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or so (depending on how far away folks were and the speed of light).

You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

It was wonderful. Our media node supported up to 100 participants; there was no friction to conversations, meetings, standups etc. I knew who was active (could see them talking/meeting on the map) and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed). It included chat with unlimited history, persistent document sharing and on and on. It took <10% cpu time even in big meetings, <1% when not in a conversation.

I just looked up TeamSpace, this is actually a super solid concept. This kind of tool actually makes me think the casual-conversation problem of remote work could actually be solved.

That's so funny.

I wanted to build exactly this product half a year ago, didn't know it existed.

I am glad to see it exists. But they really have to work on their design.

Edit: Maybe the skeumorphism isn't so bad actually at explaining the concept to outsiders.

> You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

I wouldn’t like it if people distracted me like that. Part of what I like about working remotely is that it forces asynchronous communication on people. Send me a message on slack and I can ignore it if I’m deep in thought. If you need to talk to me over voice chat, send me a message on slack asking me to join you in voice chat.

From the next paragraph:

> I knew who was active... and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed)

But that's also what makes remote working less effective in many cases.

Hey, may I ask why you decided to leave the company eventually? My email is [email protected]

Sure! New financing meant the old leadership was out and a new group. They were all open-source and WebRTC. First meeting they were "Hey we can use open source and save a lot of effort!" and I instantly replied "We didn't write it ourselves because we weren't 'smart enough' to use open source. We did it because we needed performance guarantees. If we switch to open source, you'll have to tell us what we can give up".

Silence from them. Then a managed exit for me!

That's a bit sad. I wish the company all the best luck. The world needs their product. But just from looking at their website, I am worried about the quality of execution.

Unfortunately my company uses a product that we got in an acquisition that is not very good. (It's actually end-of-life right now but the new product isn't much better.)

There are good meeting solutions that make meeting remotely a lot easier. I happen to work on Webex Teams (full disclosure) but we dogfood our solution and having video meetings call participants in when it starts makes us jump into the meet without the old "wait till quorum is here, can you hear me, etc". Best, that happens by just adding @spark or @webex in the location of the calendar tool (Mail.app, Outlook…).

Phone is good as a backup to poor internet connection but HD video with good audio is so much better.

I think the point was that they're using their PCs, not phones, and that the meeting is PC-native, e.g. the meeting is conducted on the PC, as opposed to having an in-person meeting where someone is on the phone looking at the same thing on a PC.