If you haven’t yet heard about Nureva, prepare yourself to be amazed.
It is quite literally, one of the coolest awe-inspiring innovations I have seen in a long time.
Imagine projecting an image on a wall, that responds to your touch, allows for quick virtual whiteboards that you can draw pictures with, AND a keyboard for text entry for those that tend to scribble hieroglyphics instead of legible letters. Powerpoint slides? No problem. Creation of boxes that could represent stories, tasks, or any other concept of your choosing? No problem. Drag and expand? Drag and minimize? No problem.
Stitched Virtual Views that can scroll across multiple walls? Yep. And its Cloud based??
It is a technophile’s dream.
As people approach it, they smile. It doesn’t seem real. They look giddy with excitement, waiting for the illusion to be revealed as a hoax. But it is not. Its very real. And its a game changer.
As a Coach who has worked with highly distributed teams, Nureva introduces a slick way to collaborate, share ideas, and promote the idea of “presence over proximity”. With Nureva, we can jointly create process flows or draw diagrams, and persist those ideas for team members living halfway across the world so they can contribute and interact with it.
There are lots of videos demonstrating its collaboration prowess, all available on Youtube.
While Rally, VersionOne, leankit, Jira, axosoft and dozens of other tools give us virtual stand up boards, backlogs, and release plans we can all see and engage with, they also limit us to existing feature sets, or require we leverage other mediums to draw or demonstrate other complex ideas. Im not in any way suggesting Nureva will replace these tools, but I am excited at the possibility that all these tools could (one day) become integrated with Nureva’s underlying technology.
Our Enterprises are becoming more global each day. The days of only hiring local talent within 50 miles of a brick and mortar office are gone. The one challenge I continually hear from these distributed organizations is about collaboration. Every meeting with video cameras requires 5-8 min of repositioning said camera, or the ever present “is there a webex? I can’t see what you are doing.” Or the always hilarious freezing of the video camera while someone makes a face that gets captured with a camera phone, and distributed throughout the office.
As much as technology connects us, it also fails us. What used to be a phone call, is now an email. What used to be an email, is now an IM. We are impatient with the amount of information at our disposal, so we cut corners – which creates degradation in the quality of communication. There isn’t always the option of flying 87 people into the “home office” for a release planning session. And most importantly – sharepoint, confluence, or other information repositories are NOT “Big and Visible”.
Nureva has the potential to change all of that.
As its new, its not without its limitations. Its not priced for the average personal consumer (yet), but certainly not cost prohibitive for a company looking to engender collaboration across states, countries, or continents. While I initially thought it could not reflect changes in real time, I had some folks at Nureva fact check me; here’s what they said:
“There is client software that runs on Android, IOS, or web browser. You log onto the canvas, once you are invited, and it is persistent. You can interact in real time with your team or work on the canvas in your own time. It is true collaboration.”
If you’d like a break in your day to spend a few minutes imagining what the future will look like, go check out Nureva. And then smile when you realize how close the future is to NOW.