Never Share A Doc By Mail Again!

I found this new utility called Instacoll this morning. It's a web-based real time file sharing utility. What this means is that you can work on a document, a spreadsheet or a presentation together with your colleagues sitting in Shanghai and Sydney, all in real time. You can deliver an interactive presentation online. You can also share your desktop or just one application, so Amit can check his mails in private while Ajay is adding notes to his presentation. And they can chat simultaneously as well.

No, you can't talk yet. For that, I recommend Skype. So you'd need to set up a Skype session, or a webconference on your IP Phones, and the like. Currently InstaColl supports only Microsoft Office applications for collaboration. And it's not bug free, indeed I crashed my Word when I tried to start a session from an icon InstaColl put there. And there's no guarantee on security yet. And I'd like to see better emoticons.

But despite the current limitations, InstaColl's utility is very very compelling, and it's supposed to be much superior to MSN LiveMeeting, and it also works well on low-bandwidth networks. My bet's on InstaColl partnering with Skype, coming out with a kick-ass all-bugs-fixed version that can talk, and getting very popular before getting bought over by one of MSN and Yahoo.

By the way, it's been developed by a Bangalore based company. Next I'm checking if they're listed :)