Apeer, a media collaboration tool, is not a WebEx killer as claimed or even much use as an instant-messaging client, but it is pretty nifty when it comes to sharing digital media.
Launched today by the San Francisco start-up of the same name, Apeer is more akin to Microsoft’s NetMeeting/Windows Meeting Space on performance-enhancing drugs.
The desktop application allows users to drag presentations, photos, video and music into a window they share with other online participants. Anyone can play around with the media – resizing, zooming, pausing, rewinding, annotating – while discussing it in a chat window.
What distinguishes Apeer is that there are few other effective options for collaborating with video and music and manipulation can take place without any noticeable lag. Apeer gets rid of such latency issues by distributing the files to each participant’s computer and then just sending small packets of instructions to move them around and change them.
Bob Goldstein, chief executive, told me this resolved a chief WebEx complaint:
“What people tell us all the time is ‘I tried to do a WebEx session the other day and I was on slide 4 and the other guy was on slide 7 and somebody else was on slide 10,’ with us, you’ll never have that.”
Of course, Apeer does not run Powerpoint, so presentations have to be contained in PDFs. It also takes place in a secure window, so other participants cannot see your desktop as can happen in WebEx.
Apeer lacks the live integrated voice-over-IP of WebEx and the webcam capabilities of instant-messaging clients. That could come in later versions, although Mr Goldstein says such features could slow performance and Apeer could run alongside instant-messaging web-conferencing anyway.
Apeer is aimed at businesses, with a monthly subscription model that can be adjusted on a per-seat basis. Mr Goldstein says it is being offered at a low price point that is “extremely disruptive” in terms of undercutting the competition. A consumer version could follow in the future.
