While Watchitoo itself isn't exactly a new company, its focus on small and medium-sized businesses is, comparatively, just that. To that end, they've recently launched a new product specifically geared toward the small and medium-sized business market called Watchitoo Playground. Despite the cheerful name, it's still all business.
Based at least somewhat on its earlier releases geared toward giving mostly teenagers a chance to connect online and talk, as well as play games and the like, Watchitoo Playground looks to help businesses make connections among their remote workers and help keep everybody on task. Aside from the usual suspects that commonly make up such a system—file sharing, screen sharing, chat and messaging tools and the like—Watchitoo Playground steps things up a notch by providing elements for the online education market like the ability to construct webinars and other live events.
It works entirely in a browser, which in turn eliminates the need for plugins and complicated engineering. It even offers sufficient capability for up to 25 participants to chat at the same time, providing not only sufficient space for most any work group, but also, room enough for a small college class, making it a prime target indeed for the online education market.
Watchitoo is even going to go sufficiently far to offer up a version of Playground for free, that pretty much anyone will be able to use, even if it doesn't open up the full features set. Those willing to pay, however, will get access to the full version for the highly unusual price of $3.80 a month, per user. Users can go through the Playground website to sign up, but there will be plenty of Watchitoo partners out there—ISPs and other retailers—who can help users get in on the ground floor.
Naturally, there's a market for these kinds of tools. With more businesses starting to get behind initiatives like mobile workers and the BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—concept, having a way to easily connect with other employees on a face-to-face basis, inexpensively, provides a lot of extra power to accountability and transparency, giving the best chance possible that those highly-trusted professionals that a small and medium-sized business hired are actually getting their jobs done instead of sitting around the house all day watching television and collecting a paycheck.
Watchitoo Playground is a great example of how a product can be repurposed and, with a little marketing help, turned into a highly valuable resource for a wholly unexpected market.
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Edited by Brooke Neuman