Pixelcloud on VentureBeat
VentureBeat covered Pixelcloud, the design collaboration tool I built. Here is what went into it.
A few days ago VentureBeat covered Pixelcloud, the design collaboration tool I’ve been building with Chris. He pitched it as a private Dribbble for your team. Somewhere design teams can share work in progress, collect feedback, and actually track what decisions got made.
The framing in the article is right. Feedback on design work ends up all over the place. Same comment from five different people, no record of why something changed, nobody outside the core team knows what’s going on. Pixelcloud is an attempt to fix that.
Chris handled product and design direction. I built the stack. RESTful API, a processing queue for uploads and thumbnail generation, a websocket server for real-time updates, and the client-side JavaScript app that ties it all together. Loosely coupled so we can scale pieces independently. About 30 companies in alpha right now including Disqus, Adobe and Zappos.
The space is getting crowded. LayerVault launched around the same time with a heavy focus on version control for Photoshop files, basically GitHub for PSDs. Pixelapse is a YC team doing automatic revision tracking synced with Dropbox. Both are going at the version control angle. Pixelcloud is more about the feedback loop and team visibility than file history.
Still in alpha but invites are going out. If your team is deep in “final_v3_FINAL.psd” email threads, sign up.