Collaboration tool to enable communication between remote team members.
Remote working has a lot of potential advantages for businesses and employees. It can reduce comuting (cost, time, environmental impact), and can lead to generally better well being. It also increases the potential pool of people for an organisation or a project. Plenty of folks are already doing this, but the trade off, as we all know, is that communication doesn't flow as easily. We lose a certain amount of initimacy with our co-workers, and the currently available technologies often present constraints (e,g, need to have an equiped meeting room available, or sacrifice someones laptop to run the Hangout) or headaches (getting a Hangout initiated is rarely as easy as it should be).
Inspired by recent innovations such as the Segway mounted iPad type robots and this more steam punk alternative, the idea is to introduce some more elements utilising open hardware (e.g. Raspberry Pi) to make communication even better and more fluid.
The benefit for DiUS is that we can increase flexibility for our people - in the office and potentially on client sites. If we can strike an affordable, winning formula, it is something which other organisations might use. And if it works really well, there is VC funding floating around for these types of solutions.