Cool Beans

Congratulations to Outspokes for a successful launch on Sept 15, and the cool demos in the Demo Pit of TechCrunch 50.

For those not familiar, let me quote their site:

With Outspokes, you instantly gather the feedback of your entire team by doing nothing more than sending them a link to your site. No more arduous screenshot annotation or endless email ping-pong. Empower your team to express their feedback about your website the easy way: on the site itself.

Outspokes.com in the TC50 Demo Pit

I've beta tested it, and thought the web application service quite impressive. The ability to collaboratively change elements and annotate while looking at the live site is something I've never considered and yet so common sense. And, just like any Google widget, it takes only a line of html code to enable it for almost any website. At TechCrunch 50, I overheard one attendee say, "When working with webdesigners on my site, I'd have to take a screen shot, copy that into a Powerpoint, then add highlights and comments for what I'd want changed."

With Outspokes, you can directly receive site feedback from QA, beta-testers, developers, designers, and even marketing without burdening anyone with screen shots or mockups. Change the look-and-feel, report bugs, modify text formatting, add comments, and even agree or disagree with other users' feedback.

So why do I post about it? I once worked with one of the founders, Jerry Cheung, at UC Berkeley (I hope to say that often in the future when he's famous). I am amazed that co-founder Arthur Klepchukov's CS 169 software project has taken off into its own company. I wish them success in their new startup, and encourage you to incorporate Outspokes if you have any kind of website.