At Convergence Labs we believe that much of today's software should provide a real-time collaborative user experience, and more and more users are agreeing with us. A common request in message boards and customer support systems is to add real time collaboration. So, if real time collaboration is on everyone's roadmap, why aren't more software providers delivering it already?
Well, it turns out that building real time collaboration is unexpectedly HARD and multi-faceted. To implement successful collaborative systems, a mastery of concurrency control, distributed systems, cognitive science, collaborative UI/UX, and experience building effective collaborative workflows based on unique use cases are all required. Building an effective collaborative system usually involves integrating many technologies, each of which are complex on their own let alone when implemented together. What's more, there are a lot of "real time" technologies out there. Knowing which of them will work well and scale for a particular use case requires in-depth experience. Finally, many of the commercial and open source User Interface toolkits (rich text editors, etc.) simply were not built with collaboration in mind and lack the APIs required to easily support multiple users. These road blocks are the primary reason much of today's software is not multi-user and collaborative.
Many of our clients have started down the path to real time collaboration only to find that it is too difficult, ultimately abandoning the project. We believe these challenges are holding back the "real time revolution", so we started Convergence Labs specifically to help developers achieve success in baking real time collaboration into their applications. We are committed to building awesome applications that provide exquisite real time collaboration experiences. Whether we are building the whole app, or just brought in to build out the collaboration portions, we can help take your app to the next level and provide a valuable differentiator over your competition.
To further this goal, we built a Real Time Collaboration Platform simply called Convergence, that allows all developers to rapidly develop and deploy great collaborative applications. We've used Convergence internally to build awesome collaborative apps, and will soon be opening up the platform for other developers as well. Simply put, our goals are to 1) help our customers move real time collaboration from their road map to reality, 2) provide tools that help other developers implement collaborative apps, and 3) educate the software development community on patterns and practices for effective real time collaborative application development.
