If there is one aspect of the traditional bricks and mortar business that seems to have hung by a thread, despite the technology boom, it’s the good old paper trail! It never ceases to amaze me how much paper human beings churn through in the corporate world.
The web 2.0 revolution, however, has provided the first real opportunity for humans to genuinely move to a paper-less professional society. Collaborative work-spaces are the opportunity I’m talking about, and I recently had the chance to review a new site offering this service. It’s called ReviewBasics, and it already has a great rep!
ReviewBasics is pitched as a service for designers, photographers, writers, consultants, analysts and pretty much any other professional who wants to get opinion or feedback on a specific piece of information that they are working on. The information is provided to third parties securely by ReviewBasics, at which point these third party ‘editors’ can use an extremely slick and simple interface to make visual and/or textual suggestions to help improve the information they were asked to review.
Like I say, the ReviewBasics interface is definitely a strength of this new service. When you think about it, this will need to be a core strategic competency for the Sharp-Style start-up. For this service to be sticky to the point where it will be recommended and spread, it will require a edge in interface and I think that these guys have started off on the right foot.
In terms of what content can it handled by ReviewBasics, you are in with a grin for information in rich text (RTF), Microsoft word (DOC), Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT), adobe acrobat (PDF), flash video (FLV) and image (JPG, GIF, PNG) formats. The team at ReviewBasics are also happy to consider offering new formats should the demand suffice.
For me, the most special of the features offered by ReviewBasic is the video editing suite. ReviewBasic actually converts the video file into a user friendly web format that can be edited at any level, even frame by frame. Coupled with the aforementioned sexy interface, this feature is all good.
Although ReviewBasics is still in beta, the service has been awarded some great feedback by some well respected sources. Competition is definitely hot in this space with the big guns such as Google docs providing similar services, particularly in the textual document space.
All in all I think ReviewBasics has a great future. Go ahead and try their free beta account offering which is currently available….I’m pretty sure you won’t be disappointed
