How it started

April 21st, 2007

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Jonny Rein and I make PeerAware.

The idea for PeerAware came in fall 2002 while I worked as a software engineer for Tandberg Television. I had been with the company for 8 months when headquarters was moved and mass layoffs meant 60 developers had to go, myself included. But as Newton’s third law states, for every action force there is an opposite reaction force. My reaction was to find my own project to work on.

The idea that stuck was initially a peer to peer search engine. After losing my job I traveled around the world for 7 months, but kept taking notes every day. By the time I returned home the idea had evolved into a plan. I wanted to create a tool where people could share, find and discover information.

Finding the right information or people has always been difficult wherever I have worked. Communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging and intranet/wiki/blog are among the most common, but each has it’s own quirks. Traditional methods like phone-calls, meetings or lunch are great, but access to the people you need to talk to is limited. Often you might not even know exactly what you should look for.

PeerAware was created as an alternative or supplement to the other methods.
- Chat in a group when you don’t know who has the answer you are seeking.
- Chat in private when you know who to ask.
- Search shared documents when you are looking for a specific document or topic.
- Browse a colleague’s shared documents when you want to discover what he is working on.

As time passed PeerAware evolved into a tool that can do much more, but focus is still on collaboration, knowledge discovery and information sharing.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • TwitThis

Posted in General, PeerAware |

Comments

Comments are closed.