LumoFlow Pushes For Social Collaboration
I bumped into LumoFlow some time ago already, but only recently did I get more familiar with it. The service is a nice social collaboration site where you have the basic tools available for working in a collaborative manner. LumoFlow is being developed by Lumo Research, a company that launched the product in Slush 2008. While the product launch was initially a little over a year ago, the service has come along nicely.
The company was founded by Kristian Tanninen and Sami Linnanvuo. Bart Schrooten has also joined their ranks and is responsible for marketing and business development. Kristian Tanninen has a history of developing large scale IT-projects for powerhouses such as Logica, whereas Sami Linnanvuo and Bart Schrooten have their backgrounds in the company Leiki.
LumoFlow consists of three basic service areas; desktop, collaboration and knowledge. Desktop is the sort of dashboard view of your workspace from your point of view. There you're able to see the incoming messages from other people as well as the tasks that have been assigned to you in different projects. The collaboration area is where you have your project listing, calendar as well as all the people in the organization. The final part, knowledge, is a place where you can gather your documents and discussions. Another neat function there is the media tracker. You can set up keywords that the service will automatically follow from selected media sources. I'm not sure exactly what the use case for this is, but it could turn in handy with very specific keywords for certain projects.
In its 15 or so months of life, the service has attracted attention nicely. They currently host some 700 workspaces in the service from 10 different countries and represent all kinds of organizations. LumoFlow did not disclose the amount of paying users at the moment, but they are looking to build up the cash flow in the company soon with the help of 700 workspaces. The pricing is dead simple. You have the opportunity to use the service for free with certain features such as 100Mb for documents, unlimited users and projects. If you wish to get the more advanced features including 20Gb of space, you will have to pay a monthly subscription fee of 95 euros. 95 euros is not a lot when you have no restrictions on the amount of users. This is something I thought would have been capped in the free service as well.
Bart Schrooten tells me that where other collaborative sites such as Basecamp have a similar set of available tools, LumoFlow strives to make the tools fundamentally more social and easier to use. I believe they are on the right path and there are multiple ways you could use such a tool. The problem I personally have with collaborative tools in the end is the fact that they all try to do quite a bit, but none of them really come across as a killer service - one that I could not live without. This is not just LumoFlow's problem, but others' as well. Nevertheless, 700 workplaces in a year is not a bad result, and it implies that there is plenty of business left for LumoFlow to grab.
Are Flowdock and LumoFlow competing or what`s the relationship between those companies? Antti, do comparison between arctic project management startups so we can get some action here :)
All the best to both companies!
Antti, first of all thanks for having a look at LumoFlow!
Kai, good observation and no I do not believe that we compete with Flowdock.
Flowdock is more focused on real-time collaboration through instant messaging while LumoFlow aims to offer an online working environment where you have basic project management tools at your disposal, manage team communication plus keep all knowledge in one safe place. The activity feed makes it very easy to stay up to date on what is going on in your projects and your community (à la Facebook).
The social features make LumoFlow very transparent and easy to use thus it's easy for everyone in your team to get hooked on using LumoFlow.
Hey, this looks really simple and useful.
Do you know if in premium those calendars can be synchronized with MS Exchange calendar.
I think I'll give a try...
Jussi, the calendar supports the iCalendar standard so you can import data from any calendar that supports it, including MS Exchange. To enable integration, see the subscription link in the bottom of the calendar view. Let us know if you have any trouble with setting it up.
[...] Research aims to revolutionise the way people collaborate in enterprises. Last December, we covered them and there’s a lot of interesting new innovation bubbling under their [...]
We have just made our business model a little more attractive for small companies. You can now create a free workspace with access to all features and possibility to add as many users as you wish.
Upgrade for only 4 EURO per user if you want to get better support and workspace control.
Check it out: http://www.lumoflow.com/pricing.action
Greetings,
Bart
Co-Founder, Lumo Research