A collaboration app designed to spark joy

In addition to making communication between remote team members easier, this new app is designed to foster spontaneous collaboration

Spotted: When Alex Schwartz, former CEO of award-winning VR game developer Owlchemy Labs (acquired by Google in 2017), founded his new development studio, absurd:joy, he was faced with a problem. All of his colleagues worked remotely, but Schwartz felt that the tools for remote working, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, were too impersonal and constrictive to foster a true team culture. In response, absurd:joy conceived of a solution: Tangle, a virtual office platform that aims to make remote collaboration easier and more human.

The platform includes a virtual office, and each remote team member has their room, with a door icon above a live-streamed window. If the door is open, that person is available for visits from colleagues. When a team member wants to focus on a task, they simply close the door. 

Tangle also allows documents to be shared and worked on collaboratively, and ideas can be jotted down and pinned near rooms; messages, images and videos can be also uploaded and posted for everyone to see. Meeting rooms can be generated for team gatherings and brainstorming sessions, and team members can drop in and out of meetings with just one click. Absurd:joy is currently building in features such as animated avatars and virtual rooms for socialising.

Over the past 9 months or so, absurd:joy has been working with hand-picking partners in a closed beta test of Tangle. At the same time, they have secured €4.5 million in seed funding to help bring Tangle to market. According to absurd:joy’s co-founder Cy Wise, “After months of building games as a team with Tangle as our primary communication platform, our friends began begging us for access and we realized that sharing this tool could bring us, our friends, and many others in many industries, vastly more joy.” 

After a year and a half of working remotely, staring at faces on screens, many people are ready for a meeting and collaboration tool that can bring some of the old spontaneity back to the workday. At Springwise, we have seen a platform that allows users to reduce the amount of background chatter they are exposed to and a virtual whiteboarding tool that aids brainstorming. 

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