The History of Swarmteams
18 Aug 2006
Forget email and phone!
Visualise working with a dozen or more owner/managers - just imagine how much time you could spend trying to organise dates for meetings and conference calls!
What I discovered is that email co-ordination was effectively useless - getting about a 20% response at best and having to wait a few days for some of them.
Ringing them all up was not too good either - you only get to speak to them 20% of the time otherwise you have to leave a message - very frustrating to try and check dates out like this!!!
So I had an idea - why not try co-ordinating with them via 2-way text messages?
Bingo - response rates now up at 80% - and generally all responses received within minutes.
Learning from nature!
At the same time I was indulging myself in a kind of research sabbatical which had taken me into studying how teams work in nature and what we might learn from them.
For example, one of nature's most successful teams is Ants who communicate mostly by laying chemical trails with different kinds of pheromone - some which indicate good news such as food and some which indicate bad news such as predator being spotted or the arrival of a rival colony.
These chemical trails have certain important characteristics:
- they are broadcast - one-to-many rather than one-to-one communications
- all the ants do them - not just the leaders (as ants dont have any leaders) - its a peer system
- they are delivered instantly in situ whereever the receiver is (they are no in-boxes in an ant colony)
Suddenly it all became very clear - messaging (instant and text) could be the human equivalent of ant pheromones - e-pheromone if you like
Putting it together!
Bringing these two discoveries together I realised that in todays environment we need a new way for groups to communicate based on messaging rather than mail.
Also it needs to allow peer communications as well as the traditional star communications ("command and control").
So the three basic design goals were:
- The messages need to be able to be sent, received and replied to from phone or computer.
- You can't expect the sender to have to guess which device each of the receivers are using
- The system must be truely multichannel and span the worlds on mobile phone and internet messaging.
This was the 'spec on a napkin' for Swarmteams!
Many months later we are delighted to release Swarm-it!™ our first Swarmteams product.
We really hope you like it and look forward to your feedback to help us make it better
Ken Thompson
Founder
Swarmteams Ltd
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