Startup of the Day - Redliner
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The company of the day is Redliner, a division of Eridon Corporation, based in the US. Redliner is a premier online word processor that directs your entire team through the editing process. You will find below an interview with Eric Schneider, President of Redliner. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Website: www.redliner.com.
Great! Being recognized by Microsoft, even for day, provides inspiration to a team that has spent years working with Microsoft’s tools and more lately, Silverlight.
Redliner offers breakthrough document collaboration—it’s an online word processor that truly simplifies the entire group editing and document approval process. Redliner allows you to instantly bring together a collaborative team, without having to install new software or engage in time-consuming training. Redliner’s accessibility—to anyone, anywhere—and intuitive features make it an overwhelming improvement to traditional change tracking and emailing multiple versions back and forth.
Today’s collaboration process is stuck in a vicious cycle of email attachments and integrating traditional change tracking. Working together on business agreements, contracts, sales and marketing copy, articles or other professional documents—especially under a tight deadline—can be inefficient and chaotic. When several individuals are working on a single document and accessing various versions, how many times do they find themselves asking, “What has changed?”, “Is this the latest version?” or “What do I need to respond to?” Redliner eliminates those headaches by automatically processing exactly what each person needs to do next and directing him or her to it. Redliner’s unique user dashboard prompts individuals whenever they need to take action on a specific document while also tracking what they require of others, all of which keeps the edit, review and approval process moving quickly toward completion.
Originally angels funded the company, joined later by VC and corporate funding.
Yes. One to two million.
It sounds like an interesting program that we are exploring.
An on-line collaborative word processor and approval system, where driving the workflow behind getting things done and approved takes center stage.
Redliner is not yet commercially available but will be offered as a Software-as-a-Service on a subscription basis. It is a Silverlight-base collaborative application delivered through a user’s Internet browser.
Do you have any Software IP? More specifically, is there something unique you are doing in the marketplace?
We represent a significant application written as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that will be delivered (without any installation) to anyone using a browser. We are leveraging the Internet to deliver more than storage in the cloud, but an interactive environment that directs and truly simplifies the entire group editing and document approval process.
• small law firms and solo practitioners
• SMBs
• PR professionals
• newspaper, magazine and book editors
• freelance writers
• project teams working on documents
We are adapting our core workflow/word processor to the particular needs of various verticals.
Under ten.
We anticipate starting another round of hiring in the fall.
Microsoft Silverlight/SQL Server.
Many people have responded to our demos by saying that they have always dreamed about a tool like Redliner. As we are just now engaging customers in real trials, we look forward to sharing their experiences.
It goes without saying that Bill Gates was the symbol of success for most software engineers during the last twenty years. However, it has been the small group of supports and investors over the years that helped us along that have been most influential.
We did many projects over years, including the widely used “GoBack” PC utility.
It doesn’t matter how cool your product is, or how in love you are with it. It needs to, in a compelling way, solve a real problem for a well defined audience. Notwithstanding, much of creating something new is working through unknowns and discovering unanticipated opportunities.
There are many opportunities around systems that add their value by leveraging a connected world and the social changes that occur as people adjust to how one lives in a connected world.
I would like to share the following which I wrote to a friend:
It is interesting how one holds on the ways things were as the new presses in. Me too—I originally wanted a cell phone that had a rotary dial. But then suddenly you realize that it is not just an improvement, it is part of a new world; it’s not just better than Edison’s first microphone and a speaker, it is a portal into a different space. When you are traveling, you don’t look out the window or engage your chance neighbor on a bus, but click on your “portal” and slip deep into a world oblivious to your physical boundaries, a place more abstract than ever, yet with its own culture and limits (much of which is not learned but discovered—ideas too fluid for a textbook). It is all changing—we have all been fooled by Darwin, mislead to look for evolution as longer arms and bigger eyes in an adaptation to our environment, but our evolution is in our heads, in thought. I remember being glued to the screen watching Lawrence of Arabia twenty years ago, but now couldn’t finish it with the kids because it was too dated, and limited by the skills, techniques, and technologies of the times. All this “new” threatens to turn our hard earned status as wise adults into fumbling children trying to figure out and navigate unfamiliar experiences. No, I don’t want to learn latest operating system—the last one made me feel lost and helpless enough. On the other hand, you can only watch an old movie so many times. Life is in the new.
Published: 5/29/2009 9:01 AM
Company: Redliner