PALO ALTO, CALIF. – March 13, 2007 – Qwaq, Inc., the creators of virtual spaces for the enterprise, today announced Qwaq Forums, the world’s only secure virtual workspace application. Qwaq Forums significantly enhances the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in a virtual place, as if they were in an actual physical location, and providing them with all the tools and collaboration capabilities they need to work more effectively together. With Qwaq Forums, users can work together to establish workflow steps, create or review information in software applications, and evaluate designs in 2D and 3D, all while discussing topics using built-in text and voice chat. Further enhancing employee productivity, Qwaq Forums virtual workspaces are always available so users can return to a forum at another time to access and view changes that have occurred since they last visited the virtual space.
“Qwaq Forums is the first of several applications we’re building to provide enterprises with virtual spaces for real work,” said Greg Nuyens, Qwaq’s CEO. “We’ve received a fantastic response to the Qwaq Forums deployments in the energy market and by distributed industrial research teams. The virtual workspaces are allowing critical resources to collaborate more frequently and achieve better results.”
Qwaq Forums is easy to set up, use and navigate. Users can “drag-and-drop” content into a workspace from desktop and laptop computers, corporate servers or other locations. Information can be created, edited or reviewed using Microsoft Office and other productivity tools; corporate applications such as SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce.com; design and 3D modeling tools; web browsers; or Enterprise 2.0 applications. Qwaq Forums provides GUI controls that enable users to access remote applications and portals to other environments.
Unlike traditional collaboration tools, which only work while a session is in progress, Qwaq Forums is persistent, meaning it is accessible to authorized users all the time. Users can work with others in real time; enter Qwaq Forums any other time and see changes made by other team members since their last visit; and create or modify content, and hand off work to each other as needed.
“Our industrial research affiliates are scattered around the globe and Qwaq Forums enables us to easily bring these key players together in a virtual workspace,” said Charles House, executive director of Media X at Stanford University. “Qwaq Forums allows us to discuss and collaborate on critical research themes and make better decisions by reviewing intermediate research results more frequently.”
Qwaq Forums uses the Croquet open source software development environment, which enables the creation and deployment of large-scale, distributed multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses. The Croquet architecture, supported by the Croquet Consortium, provides synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and devices.
Qwaq’s founders, executives and advisory board members are all seasoned technology industry veterans and thought leaders with extensive experience working together to build successful companies. The Qwaq management team and key technical staff all share a deep background in developing and bringing to market highly scalable, distributed systems and have been involved in key industry developments such as graphical user interfaces, persistent networked objects, web services and Croquet. Qwaq’s team includes founder and CTO, David Smith, a 3D pioneer and chief system architect of the Croquet Project; Nuyens, former CEO of instant802, chief technologist at Inktomi and Xerox PARC alumni; and Vice President of Enterprise, Remy Malan, former marketing vice president at AtWeb and director at Sun Microsystems. Qwaq Advisory board members include Alan Kay, founder of the Croquet Project, winner of the Kyoto Prize, Turing and Draper Awards, and one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces; and Internet pioneer and Croquet architect David Reed.
Qwaq Forums is available immediately as a hosted service. A version of Qwaq Forums that can be deployed in the enterprise, behind the corporate firewall, will be available in the second quarter of 2007. For more information, visit www.qwaq.com
About Qwaq, Inc.
Qwaq, Inc. is creating virtual spaces for the enterprise that enable collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Qwaq Forums, the company’s first product, is a secure virtual workspace application that significantly increases the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in virtual places, as if they were in an actual physical location. A highly interactive and persistent environment, Qwaq Forums enables users to work, collaborate with others, and identify and solve problems.
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