When your team hashes out an idea, chances are they do it on a whiteboard. But what if you don’t all work in the same office?
“After a good decade of not having a solution to this problem, I decided to make one,” Joe Lemay, Rocketboard co-founder and CEO, told BostInno.
Rocketboard lets you share your whiteboard – all that half-baked brainstorming and on-the-fly diagrams – with people around the world. The startup, which is based out of Boston, created an app that captures and transmits whiteboarding sessions in real time. On Thursday, Rocketboard is launching a Kickstarter campaign for $75,000 to take its tech to the next level.
Though the seed for the startup had been planted many years before, Lemay officially committed to turning Rocketboard into a reality two weeks ago. Serendipitously, his last day on the job as an account executive at Salesforce.com was the same day that he had the opportunity to pitch as a Side Dish startup at WebInno.
His goal is to make Rocketboard as intuitive as possible to use, leveraging pre-existing technologies.
“I hate the idea of having hardware or weird interfaces,” explained Lemay. “We thought, ‘Why can’t we just use the phone in our pockets and the whiteboards that are on our walls already?’”
Here’s how it works: After opening the app, place your smartphone in view of a whiteboard and draw small triangles in each of the four corners of the board to help the app get perspective. Then, get to work. Rocketboard will grab the information as you go, regardless of whether you are blocking the phone camera’s view. Step aside from the board for a few seconds, and Rocketboard will refresh its image in the app, as well as online for those tuning in. To snap a still picture of the board, slide your hand in front of the camera and remove it. Rocketboard also plans on integrating with Twitter, Evernote, Dropbox, Box and other applications to save photos.
An engineer by training, Lemay aims on using the funds to make Rocketboard’s tech even more “beautiful and interactive,” not to mention speedier. According to the chief executive, it currently takes Rocketboard three to five seconds to update its image; he wants to cut the refresh time to one second or less. Working out of Brooklyn Boulders' co-working space in Somerville, the company is getting feedback in an alpha test with 20 people.
Among the perks offered to backers are complete color control and a 75 to 93 percent discount (depending on how much money is donated). Backers will play a crucial role in the company deciding its priorities. For example, with the application integrations, “our backers will decide which ones we’ll support first,” said Lemay.
Check out the Kickstarter, and take a look at the video below to learn more.
