Drafting a communication protocol: opp.io

Those following my career know that I am deeply interested in the social, cultural and technological aspects of collaboration. This is why I did many co-creation projects; this is why I enjoyed coordinating projects at Kitchen Budapest where collaboration was the common baseline; and this is why we recently launched The Format Project. Earlier this year, with a friend of mine, Gergely Borgulya, we started to brainstorm whether we could imagine a better tool for collaboration. Both of us rely heavily on tools for collaboration and communication. He works at Graphisoft as a software development project manager, I organised and curated plenty collaborative projects, like Subjective Atlas of Hungary, where effective tools are essential in making the process manageable and the project done. What we realised that even though we have several great tools at hand for collaboration, think of Google Docs, etherpad, wiki or even Sparkleshare or Dropbox, in the end it all comes down to one thing: email. Gergely receives 100+ emails every day, and I dare to expect that there is not a single project manager running below 50 emails per day. And email, as we all know, is painfully outdated.

Therefore we started to brainstorm and came up with an idea to create a new communication platform, or even protocol, that would blend collaborative features, like task and project management, with simple text messaging. We called it opp.

We pitched our idea at Startup Weekend Budapest to test our idea. We received great response on the very first day as 5 other participants, with backgrounds of design, business, project management and finance, joined us to elaborate on the project management aspects of such a communication tool.

Our 7-member-strong team won the 2nd prize at the final pitch session on Sunday and got invited to the Global Startup Battle.

And that was when things speeded up. We entered the Global Startup Battle's Champion's Circle, hosted by Google for Entrepreneurs, and after few days we found ourself on the top (!) of the leaderboard. No, we are not fond of public voting contest, either. But suddenly, this position allowed us no other choice than to go for the contest and push it hard.

Today it is the last day of the voting, so if you want to help, make sure to vote at globalstartupbattle.agorize.com/en/juries/11/votables?votable_id=630.

But more importantly, check out our video on the link above and tell me what you think. And if you are interested, sign up for opp.io. Now we only have to make it happen.