A group of Swedes has grown tired of emailing documents around when they need editing help. So they’ve formed a company called TextFlow that’s working on a Google Docs competitor of sorts.
Their Flash-based product is still in a very early stage, and there’s quite a bit of discrepancy between what they’ve built so far in private beta, and their vision as laid out in a demonstration video (click through to it from their homepage).
But eventually, authors will be able to drag Word documents right into the browser where they’ll get automatically ported into TextFlow. Once there, they’ll be shareable via email and editable by collaborators. All changes will show up in the original author’s view of the document as suggested changes, which can then be approved or rejected.
If you’ve already received multiple copies of Word document with changes from different editors, you’ll also be able to drag them into TextFlow and have the program automatically combine them into one file with suggested changes.
TextFlow’s certainly not the first company to help users collaborate on documents, and like other similarly-focused startups, it faces an uphill against Google and Microsoft. But it sure looks pretty, doesn’t it?
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It does indeed look interesting. Would be more interesting if bundled into a suite of tools for collaboration. They should try to partner with another startup.
How does this compare to Adobe’s Buzzword (beta)?
Look for Adobe to acquire TextFlow and incorporate the technology into Buzzword.
Wow. That’s pretty impressive. Drag and drop multiple Word docs into Flash running in a browser and parse them in under a second. I guess they have that special-secret version of Flash that supports drag and drop from the desktop.
Best vaporware demo video ever!
Why is there a policy of never mentioning Adobe Buzzword in Techcrunch? How many posts have you done in google docs or zoho? This product is much closer to Buzzword than to Gdocs, yet no mention nor link.
Why such an omission? Can someone understand or elaborate on this?
The first screenshot… that looks like Microsoft’s Ribbon, which was patented. They need to be careful
The patented Ribbon is the reason why no Office competitors (offline or web) copied it.
Too bad this won’t be available for like 6 months! Some of these sites create incredible products that will be long forgotten before they come out of beta! Here are just a few sites I’ve been waiting for like 6+ months: sliderocket.com, cloudo.com, getdropbox.com - I’ve now found alternatives for all!
@Mik
Exactly! Where are getdropbox or sliderocket??? SlideRocket works… kinda…; but getdropbox is sheer hypeware up to now…
That is actually a damn interesting product. Very powerful online collaboration tool. I could definitely see myself using that. Best of luck to them
Oh man. Microsoft is most likely buy Textflow
yahoo = textflow
to compete microsoft office and google doc
microsoft = textflow
to compete google doc and yahoo
google = textflow
will never happen. They have google doc. It’s save more money and time.
Wow thats pretty nice!
Err ok.. nifty but seems like a nice tool rather than a full blown application. Perfect candidate for some acquisition. Anyway, I don’t see them surviving for long without a proper business model. Adobe and Google can afford to release completely free products, but at present ordinary start ups cannot compete without a viable revenue model.
From what I’ve heard, its amazing and really does work!
There are already two companies that already do this, and do it well: SharePoint and Privia. Though I don’t know the correlating price point of these services compared to TextFlow.
This is rather interesting, but I’m a full-on Google services user. Why-oh-why does everyone feel the need to come out with super-spiffy products that aim to compete with Google?
Well, looks interesting but I’m not sure if it is able to compete with Google - too many scattered tools around.
I would of course use TextFlow instead of gdoc/buzzword/whatever if it delivers on its promiss to be better looking, more functional and free. Just as anyone else, I presume. Then who cares who owns/developed it…
Hi, I really apreciated this website! Thanks
Unbelievable… check out what they have done now
AMAZING
http://www.textflow.com/blog/?p=28
A great tool that a friend invited me into is Redliner (http://www.redliner.com). It’s perfect if you want team document collaboration with Microsoft Word-like change tracking. And built-in workflow so no more emailing stuff around.