After WebEx founder Subrah Iyar sold his company to Cisco five years ago, he spent some time helping with the transition then became an investor in companies such as Huddle. About a year ago his daughter suggested the idea of shared virtual binders for college students — and around the same time, Iyar got back together with some of his former WebEx colleagues, who were keen on the idea of helping people access all their personal information from mobile devices.
The result, which launched in January, was Moxtra, a service for students and small businesses that combines collaboration capabilities with the ability to access data not only from cloud services such as DropBox, but also from the user’s desktop computer.
And now the company has made a big global push, releasing versions of the iOS app in 18 new languages, namely Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. This should help a lot more people join in the service’s collaboration aspect.
Moxtra has some pretty clever features on that front, starting with the range of things that can be rolled into these “binders” and the sources from which they can be derived: they could be photos from the tablet’s camera, or documents from the user’s remote desktop, or audio from a cloud storage account. In true Evernote style, web clippings can also be added. Updates from any member of the collaborating team will show up in a Facebook-like activity stream.
There’s also an ad-hoc meeting facility in there (again: WebEx guy) and the ability to share binders publicly or within a private group. However, the cleverest feature in my view is Moxtra Note, which lets you annotate files and binders with your voice (video is apparently also on the horizon, Iyar told me). You can then send out the annotated result to people who aren’t even themselves Moxtra users, who can then view it like a video clip.
With Evernote continually adding new features, and with rivals such as Wunderlist in hot pursuit, this personal information management space is getting quite frisky. Moxtra’s collaborative take gives it an interesting new avenue to go down.
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