A pair of former Nokia-Siemens consultants have announced the launch of The Research Browser iPad app, aiming to re-imagine the way we shop, book and look for content online together.
Initially available exclusively for the iPad, The Research Browser is a cloud-connected browser for organizing and sharing web research with multiple tab-sets and supercharged bookmarking.
You can include friends, family, or colleagues via email or Facebook and collaborate directly with group chat capabilities. Display the results in a clean visual overview.
“Cloud technologies like Dropbox or Google drive are changing the way we work and communicate, but there are no good solutions for collaborative browsing,” says CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Sittermann, a longtime business consultant for Nokia Siemens Networks in Germany.
“What we wanted to do was to create a cloud-enabled browser, allowing people to conveniently look for stuff online together.”
The benefits of collaborative technology in the workplace have been born out in a recent Evolve IP study showing that 81% of businesses have deployed at least one service on the cloud and nearly 90% of respondents believe cloud computing is the future of IT.
But TheResearchBrowser does not simply replicate the success of other cloud solutions, according to COO and Co-Founder Tom De Ruysser, who has done project management consulting for Nokia Siemens Networks and T-Mobile, among others.
“Take just the basic model: the Google Doc. What you see is a highly efficient way to bring people together around a solution – using these sorts of technologies, you can interact with clients or team members to build a final product. What’s missing is everything that goes into that: The research. And that, in many cases, is where people need the most help,” he says.
TheResearchBrowser, he explains, allows people to share research streams with friends, family, and colleagues, while keeping separate projects private. People can work together on projects creating a set of supercharged bookmarks, where they can choose as many pictures from the bookmarked webpage as they like, add comments, rate and even add personalized attributes, like price.
The chat feature allows users to interact and discuss what they are looking at, which also shows a history of all the pages people visit as links, so other people in the group can browse the pages. Additionally, users do not have to be online at the same time as they can check-in on recent activity that has occurred even while they have been away from their iPad.
Utilizing SSL encryption, TheResearchBrowser’s privacy platform ensures optimal security, only allowing people within the project to browse the bookmarks and surfing history. Should anything happen to the user’s device; projects are safely stored on TheResearchBrowser cloud.
“Initially, we envisioned it being used primarily for household kind of tasks: booking a family vacation, planning a birthday present for dad, and things like that. But we’ve since come to realize that the applications for other settings are there as well,” says De Ruysser. “What we’ve built is a powerful organizational tool that allows you to enlist help and input during the actual formative stages of a project. That has big implications, even for the way other collaborative technologies are used.”
With a clean design and powerful collaborative tools, The Research Browser is poised to change the way we research content on the Internet. Launched on iPad, it will soon be available on Windows PCs, Macs, Android and iPhone.
