LUNARR

This morning I went to a LUNARR event in the Graduate School of Business South building. They are amazing, in the sense that they can come up with unique ways of doing things. The meeting is supposed to be about design stuff, but I learned a lot more than design.

LUNARR is a new Web-based platform for team collaboration. When a group of people coordinate work on a particular item, they often find it difficult to keep track of changes made to the item by different people in the team. The (very) old model of so-called cooperation is simply email exchange. One would make changes to the item, attach it to an email, and mass-send it to others. The problem with this approach is three-fold. First and foremost, it's ultra-difficult to do version control on the item. Basically there can be multiple versions scattered around different computers, and there is no simple way to unify them. Second, it is unclear how a single person, say, the manager of that group, or a person struggling at night to make a presentation for that item, to identify the changes and, more importantly, how those changes came to be. For a word document, you could still do annotations, at the huge cost of having to manually combine the incremental changes in the final version. But for a general item, such as an image, a Powerpoint presentation, or a Web page, it is unclear why those changes have been made. Third, the ideas that went into the item might have been inspired by resources outside the team. It is very troublesome to incorporate those resources, such as Web links, pictures, documents, into a coherent view, if all we have are emails and minutes. This model is the so-called "shared model".

Something needs to be done about this. Well, instead of distributing all these nasty multiple versions of a file (maybe each under a different name!), let's just have one visible version, and have an automatic version control system help keep track of the changes. Then everyone in the team can simply make changes to this newest version, save it, and have those changes recorded by the system. This is the model used by Wikipedia. Obviously it solves the version crisis. Unfortunately, we are still unable to capture the communication between the team members in a Wiki page.

And hence, Lunarr introduces a third solution. An item under development can be thought of content written on a sheet of paper. What is wasted is the *back* of the paper. The ingenuity of Lunarr is that by the symbolic flip of the paper via a simple mouse click, virtually everyone can instantly understand the purpose of having a back page for an item - to record the collaboration and changes made to the item. Every email exchanged, logs for every chat session, changes to each version of the item, etc. are all recorded on this back page. Better still, the back page is tailor made for the individual user. So for any given item, the back page may be different for each team member, but any incarnation of it serves to give a clear, concise and complete view of what has been going on in developing that item.

The value of Lunarr can be tremendous, especially when a team consists of people who are not tech-savvy enough to edit Wiki pages or even annotate changes in documents. Its focus on adding value to the collaboration part of the innovation cycle is what makes the service stand out.

Apart from learning about it, I also got to talk to Lunarr's founders, Toru Takasuka and Hideshi Hamaguchi, two modest geniuses who have the vision and courage of going beyond what is comfortable and taken for granted. Toru left Cybozu, the number-one group software company in Japan he founded years ago, to pursue a dream that gives no easy guarantees on success. Hideshi quitted his long-time and high-ranked job at Panasonic to join Lunarr, a startup with untested ideas. This kind of vigor and enthusiasm is truly astounding.

Hideshi also told me something about their marketing and service provisioning strategies. Since they are a Portland-based company, there is little chance of tapping into the innovator pool in Silicon valley through normal means, such as advertising in newspapers, Web sites, etc. What they did was this. They bought billboards along the busy 101 freeway and put up hand-written ads that have nothing to do with Lunarr. They even occasionally made mistakes on some of the ads, and when people called in about it, they made changes by crossing off extra letters, punctuation, etc. This relaxed, friendly, funny and intriguing series of ads caught San Jose Mercury News' attention, which advertised for Lunarr freely by including an article on their service.

Lunarr chose to employ Google-like centralized architecture for its services, instead of leasing or selling the platform to companies. It appears that companies nowadays are less adamant about storing all data on their own servers, and are starting to see the benefits of using a cheaper centralized Web service. Hideshi noted that a US company divides the data into different security levels. Data at lower levels is allowed to be put onto public Web services like Google Docs and Facebook. Surprisingly, the company actually encourages employees to use free Web services for business purposes.

One would expect such a fast-growing technology company to be based in Silicon Valley. But it's not. Lunarr's headquarters is in Portland, Oregon. The reason, explained Toru and Hideshi, was that they wanted to get away from the distractions of the Valley, and concentrate on their products. They are, however, adamant about building the company in the US, since "it is so far the (only) best place to take your technology company global."

All in all, Lunarr is a fascinating company. They have a small but great team of engineers, a clear vision of what to work on, and a good start in the collaboration arena. I can only wonder what future products Toru and Hideshi were hinting at toward the end of the presentation.