Frameable, Inc.

I've been with the nimble crew of wonderful humans at Frameable (formerly Plectica) since 2017. We build collaboration software products and take them to market.

Our first product was a realtime whiteboard and mind mapping tool called Plectica, whose most recent eveolution lives at https://beta.plectica.com. At Frameable we use Plectica boards to build and maintain shared mental models of our goals and the work we're doing to achieve them. Our working style is transparent and collaborative, and Plectica boards are foundational to our collaboration and visibility.

During the pandemic we built a suite of video calling products atop a bespoke WebRTC video calling infrastructure. Our first take on a virtual office was team based video rooms with collaboritive agendas and notes, multiple screenshares, talk-time statistics and emoji responses. We abstracted away the WebRTC engine bits and made a service out of that. We built a beautiful, feature rich virtual events product that had great attendee, host and speaker engagement. In order to work most effectively we needed video rooms with shared collaborative whiteboards, multiple screen shares, and visibility into who was doing what in which room, along with the ability to summon or join them with a click. That all ended up in our product Rehive, which we lived in. Of the products we've built that didn't succeed in the market, Rehive is the one I long for the most. Discord is some salve for that wound, but isn't perfect.

Along the way we built a flexible in-house task management experiment that was a purpose built re-imagining of some of our whiteboard systems and ideas that we launched as a product. It was a great take on task management, and well received. I miss it in these days since it was sold in a private sale.

The virtual events business slowed down when global pandemic eased up, but distributed work was here to stay. We had a hypothesis that enterprise workforces would see the value in the kind of tools we used if they were built into Micrsoft Teams as extensions. The hypothesis was backed by data, the most common "no" we heard in Rehive sales calls was that folks couldn't add another video provider to their technology budget, so we decided to take the tools to their video call provider of choice.

We invented a way to share multiple screens inside of a Micrsoft Teams call with creative use of their APIs and services. We embedded a real-time whiteboard inside of the Teams toolbars so people could collaborate on a live whiteboards inside Teams before, during and after their calls. We made a Teams dashboard that provided visibility to where team members are (A channel call? A group call? A call attached to a calendar event?) and join them with a click. It also untangled the hot mess that Microsoft made of chats, activity and files, and laid them out in a customized view that let you see all of what you needed to see and nothing else, from one screen. With our Microsoft Teams extensions we learned how tough it is to sell improved visibility and collaboration without being attached to a critical budge.

Our current endeavor is Overlook Maps (https://overlookmaps.com/map). Overlook helps you discover, organize, visit, memorialize and share places you have visited or want to visit. It comes with a curated set of layers from trusted sources, and lets you build a network of other inspiring humans who value experiences, so you can learn from them.

Overlook began as an experiment to see how hard it would be to break out of Google and Apple maps for navigation. They both hoard and sell your data, and either plan to or already do show deceiving advertisements. We then developed some custom layers and routing options, including a "scenic" option whose graph weights favor designated scenic byways. We wanted lists of places we had visited or wanted to visit, and added that feature.

As Overlook became our daily driver and we talked to more beta users, it became clear that the existing workflows for discovering, saving and sharing places and experiences span many cumbersome tools. It also became clear that there is a gaping hole in the app stores waiting to be filled by a map with GPS navigation and social sharing.

So here we are, on an adventure! We're early in this one, and I'm looking forward to the ride of my life.