“What Google has created is an accessory for Google Apps customers,” Sinha said. The Hangouts team, for instance, spends engineering resources building silly widgets like hats and fake backgrounds while the business version of Hangouts suffers. When I asked Sinha why he and Roy didn’t just build Highfive while at Google, he explained that the company’s enterprise products are “largely an afterthought” to their consumer services. Interestingly, Google has released its own video-conferencing platform, Chromebox for Meetings, since the pair left. Sinha decided to start Highfive after seeing the improvement in productivity that came with the video conferencing setups outfitted in every Google conference room. Sinha went on to serve as a group product manager for Google Apps for Enterprise while Roy worked as the engineering lead for Google+ for Enterprise. Highfive CEO Shan Sinha and CTO Jeremy Roy founded DocVerse, which became Google Drive. The startup’s co-founders come from Google’s enterprise division. An upcoming pro plan will cost $10 per active user per month and offer additional features like phone minutes, single sign-on, custom branding and a town hall feature. The basic version of the cloud service is free for companies that own at least one Highfive device. You can include up to 10 people on a single conference. Highfive supports wireless screen sharing, so you can easily beam a slideshow or demo over to other participants on your call. If someone’s dialing in remotely, they can do so from another Highfive or from their own laptop. You can start a call on your phone as you’re on your way to the room, then easily send it to the Highfive device once you arrive. The Highfive service extends beyond just the hardware to also include the devices we already use: smartphones, tablets and laptops. Instead of the connected home, this is the connected office. It’s a business-focused service, but one that is built with individual consumers in mind. If I had to draw an analogy, the Highfive experience feels like Dropcam for the enterprise. It looks like Apple made it, down to the packaging. That’s a fraction of the cost of existing conferencing equipment providers, which charge as much as $20,000 to outfit a room. Highfive’s hardware is a $799 device that sits on top of a TV or mounts to a wall and includes a wide-angle 1080p video camera, microphone array and HDMI and ethernet connections.
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