It may not have a garage in which to create a software success story, but Avatar Works (www.avatarworks.com), a small Dublin software development firm, is a classic technology startup in just about every other way.
It's lean, consisting of two core people; it's hungry, actively networking to help build a promotional support system for its sole product; and it's based for the time being in a sitting-room where most flat surfaces have been invaded by computer hardware and software development tools.
Certainly, it's a convenient work environment there's easy access to the kitchen for the caffeine that fuels endless hours of development work, testing out new "builds" of their program.
Nonetheless, you get the feeling that Avatar Works personnel, in the form of chief executive officer, Mr Gerry Hurley, and chief technology officer, Mr Mark Miller, wouldn't mind a stretch of offices, a corporate car-park, and the luxury of planning their public offering.
The moment of truth is fast approaching for the firm, which tends to focus the mind on possibilities as well as concerns. Although it has already received some interested media coverage from the technology press in the US (in Macintosh magazine MacWeek, for example), it has not yet put its work on the line. But its project management tool, Avatar, gets its official pre-release (the not-quite-commercial release which goes to guinea pig companies willing to try it out and offer feedback) in under two months.
Avatar is "groupware", a software program that enables a range of people to work together on a project. As computer networks have become ubiquitous, groupware has come into its own, because it manages the complex environments which evolve as projects develop. However, groupware applications can be complex. Avatar is designed to allow people to work together in an intuitive way, without the layers of controls and procedures that make some project management software confusing.
The name Avatar reflects the central feature of the product project members as well as project items like documents or sound and image files are represented by icons on the screen. A visual metaphor for handling information or gathering part of a project team together to work on one aspect of a project is more natural for people, say Mr Miller and Mr Hurley.
Avatar users can drag and drop files and, through their avatars, project members into a virtual desktop workspace in which the flow of information is then managed by the program. Email can be sent to team members, documents can be worked on jointly, with the most current version available automatically, and security elements are structured in, which limit the kind of access each group participant is allowed.
Mr Miller, the primary programmer, intends to add in a chat function, which would allow group members to communicate all together, in real time, and a "whiteboard" space, which would let all group members see and work in a shared, real-time workplace. "Our real focus is the interaction between project members," says Mr Hurley.
Avatar is all Internet-based, so that users can communicate internally over a local network or globally. Underlying the program is a database which is housed in one server and keeps project data centrally, while sending it out locally to group participants.
Mr Miller says the whole process is so easy to use that it should be self-explanatory. "We're trying to find a way of demo-ing [Avatar] where we don't actually say anything," he says.
The primary market will be the publishing industry, although the film industry has also shown interest. "Several people have already approached us," says Mr Hurley, noting that film-making involves numerous project managers who need to manage lots of visual and textual information.
The firm's Website is hosted by a Hollywood Internet service provider interested in the product and in pursuing possible business arrangements as soon as Avatar is formally released. "It's something I'm really excited about," says Mr Miller. "I think that's a market that's really been ignored."
Avatar Works, launched in early 1997, has received funding from US investors as well as the Government here. In classic Silicon Valley fashion, Mr Hurley stumbled onto initial contacts after chatting to fellow passengers on a flight to San Jose one was a venture capitalist.
Avatar Works has also benefited from some initial market exposure from Apple Computer, which gave the company space on its stand at the Seybold publishing exposition last January in San Francisco, again in New York in March, and at the Milia multimedia conference and exhibition in Cannes, France in February.
That is all part of Avatar Works' start-up confidence and enthusiasm. Mr Hurley, a former Apple distributor, and Mr Miller decided to create the product with the Apple market in mind, using Apple's new development platform, code-named Rhapsody (which will now be released as Macintosh's server operating system, called OS X Server).
Despite Apple's current corporate rebound, Rhapsody/OS X Server remains an unknown entity in the marketplace; developing for it involves an element of risk.
However, Mr Miller feels the platform offers flexibility. He notes that Avatar will be released on Windows 95, 98 and NT, as well as Macintosh OS X Server, because Rhapsody allows software developers to take their Rhapsody-created product and "compile" it, or have Rhapsody automatically re-engineer it, for Windows.
"It ends up running and looking like a Windows environment," says Mr Miller, adding that the one difference is that Rhapsody lets them represent files with icons even in Windows, a capability Windows does not have.
Avatar Works will launch its pre-release at the September Seybold exposition. After that, only time will tell whether the computers move out of the sitting-room and into new corporate offices.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
