Presenting Jeanie, a FriendOS product
The collaboration space is now fairly mature, and as always, the Big Players are saturating the market with a bottomless pool of features and services. In such a busy space, is there a place for a new collaboration platform? We think YES, and here is our alternative!
From Teams to Slack, complexity seems to be the name of the game. In order to satisfy many different work flows, each platform has grown their feature-set to suit everyone. Now, you get all the features you need. But can you find them?
Complexity leads to cluttered user interfaces, or complex workflows. Additionally, dominant platforms start walling their users in. Did you ever experience that one of your contacts was prevented from entering your online meeting — because he didn’t have a Microsoft account? Or because he couldn’t figure out where to log in in the first place?
As the space is standardizing, there’s a need to keep innovating; and we know that innovations appear outside the silos and gated communities. In our particular case, we believe that we can make a contribution by offering simplification — we are simplifying how collaboration is done online.
That’s why we developed Jeanie App. It’s a light weight alternative to the other solutions in the market. It is focusing on the basics such that you can find yourself around its features more easily. We believe that “less is more”.
With Jeanie, we offer team driven Chat, Storage, Video Conferencing and Office — combined in one browser tab. Additionally, our business model is straight forward. We’re selling you a service that will reduce the complexity in your digital life; which is our mission. We’re not mining and selling your data. And that’s all, nice and easy.
Friend Software Labs was founded in 2014, and has since worked on FriendOS — a Meta Operating System (not to be confused with the company Meta). FriendOS is a flavor of technology called “Deep Tech”, which is defined by Wikipedia as:
Deep technology (deep tech) or hard tech is a classification of organization, or more typically startup company, with the expressed objective of providing technology solutions based on substantial scientific or engineering challenges.[1] They present challenges requiring lengthy research and development, and large capital investment before successful commercialization. Their primary risk is technical risk, while market risk is often significantly lower due to the clear potential value of the solution to society.[2]…
You can read more about Deep Tech on Wikipedia here.
In Labs, we understood early on that FriendOS would be hard to sell as a product. And it would turn out that funding the development of the technology would be very difficult, as the major investment funds shied away from supporting the platform “this early”. It was the proverbial chicken and egg situation; we were pre-revenue, but needed a big ticket in order to launch the platform into the market.
Anyway, that’s a story for a different day. Let’s fast forward to today. The current version of FriendOS is v1.3.0 (soon to be released), and the development is continuing, especially on the scaling part of the equation. As the founder and architect of FriendOS, I’m very proud to see that the technology is working, and that my ideas were realized. Right now, the platform is driving real workflows online. So I guess we’re in the “potential value of the solution to society” part now.
FriendOS is not a product. It’s an enabling technology — an operating system and engine for cloud services. It unlocks user accounts, file management, network integrations, real time communication and much more, with speed and efficiency. It’s a perfect starting point from which to build something new, up there in the cloud. Let’s say it could be the Unreal Engine for internet software service developers.
Commercially, we’ve pivoted. We’re not trying to sell FriendOS anymore. At least for now. Instead, we’ve gone ahead and built Jeanie App— a digital platform that can be marketed, monetized and supported entirely online.
We came up with this concept based on a process of analysis, brainstorming and quite a bit of soul searching. And thus, with the help of some amazing advisors, we created a super simple version of FriendOS for the mass market.
Jeanie was first created “on paper”, and then implemented quite quickly by our in-house tech team. This was quite a feat, but also attests to the power of FriendOS as a platform on which to build new solutions. Since the core features of a generic cloud app are built into Friend, teams who develop apps derived from it can limit their focus to concentrate on their unique features and vision. And as an additional benefit, FriendOS allows developers to stay independent from Big Tech infrastructures — if they so desire. FriendOS even runs on a Raspberry PI.
For Jeanie, we looked at the most popular features that collaboration platforms offer users, and identified features in FriendOS that matched. Thus; we ended up with chat, storage, video conferencing and office in a combined solution. We built a dashboard that would give the user a quick and interactive overview of all active tasks on their account. And we put everything in an interface design that is familiar to users. You won’t have to re-learn anything to start using Jeanie App.
So right now, we’ve launched the first iteration of Jeanie online. It inherits Friend’s focus on privacy and end-user freedom, but it’s not free beyond the free trial. As Jeanie doesn’t monetize user’s data, it is simply sold as a product and service. But it’s not expensive, so we hope users will accept a small fee.
We have a lot in store for Jeanie. As it’s based on FriendOS — we have a huge library of features and apps yet to introduce! We’ve got tools for developers, artists and gamers alike. Remember, we’ve been building and experimenting with cool ideas for FriendOS for almost a decade. So we’re quite excited about what kind of features users will prefer next.
See you in Jeanie App! And see you in the next article.
