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Tag: Site9

Better than the back of a napkin: Site 9 lands half-a-million dollars to accelerate ProtoShare

It’s always nice to see companies getting a little extra cash to help them further their business opportunities—especially when the companies are already profitable. Such is the case with Portland-based Site 9 which just closed $500,000 in funding to continue the development and marketing of its product ProtoShare. Read More

ProtoShare promises collaborative prototyping for Web designers

ProtoShareThere’s always a bit of miscommunication between clients and Web developers when it comes to prototyping. And that causes more stress for both parties than it should.

To compound matters, there’s usually a bunch of internal disagreements and miscommunication, too.

If only Web developers—who work day-in and day-out creating applications that solve problems for others—had a tool to help them solve their communications problem around wireframes and prototypes.

Now, they just may have that help with ProtoShare 2.0, the latest version of the interactive prototyping tool from Portland-based Site9.

What does ProtoShare do?

[ProtoShare] enables your entire team to communicate in real-time on clickable wireframes and creative designs. Team members can review work and provide timely feedback in order to keep projects moving ahead with better input. You can invite as many reviewers as you like and display comments in a wiki-like manner.

This “we built it for us and now we’re letting you play” reminds me very much of the Chicago-based 37signals guys, who built a number of apps to help them around the shop.

Turns out, those apps were so useful that now thousands of people use them everyday.

And if ProtoShare garners even a small percentage of the users that Basecamp—which is currently tracking more than 1,000,000 users—has managed to attract? That could be very interesting indeed.

In fact, ProtoShare may already be on starting its way down that path. You see, they’re getting some positive strokes from folks who might know a thing or two about online collaboration: the Wikinomics team:

“ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholders, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers, “ writes Wikinomics team member Will Dick. “By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.”

Both Team and Network versions of ProtoShare are available for a monthly subscription. Pricing runs $25 for Team and $49 for Network.

Site9 is a developer of collaborative web development software from prototyping to deployment. Founded as an interactive agency in 1999 by web designers and programmers, Site9 transitioned into a software company to address common problems and pain points in the Web development process. For more information on the company, visit Site9. Or head to the ProtoShare site to see ProtoShare in action.