Board by Klaxoon: Next-gen Virtual Workspace For Effective Visual Collaboration

 

French company Klaxoon, a pioneer of visual collaboration that won four CES Innovation Awards since 2016 (2016, 2017, 2020), is back for the 6^th time at the show with Board. Board is an impressive new virtual collaboration application that integrates a user-friendly online visual workspace with built-in video conferencing.

Packed with Klaxoon’s award-winning know-how, Board delivers a complete visual workspace in one place: an intuitive user interface that is compatible with all types of content and formats, with hundreds of ready-to-use meeting templates, and access to unique, built-in videoconferencing functions.

The company showed me a demo during a briefing held inside Board, and I can vouch for the impressive set of user-friendly collaboration features that any business in any industry would dream of for efficient and creative remote work! The app is user-friendly, simple, inclusive, and promotes participation, knowledge-transfer, and collective creativity.

Klaxoon developed the Board web app remotely during the lockdown and used it in beta to collect feedback and experience from thousands of organizations. According to Matthieu Beucher, CEO and Founder, Klaxoon, 1000 people registered in 30 minutes in the Board beta version, following an email sent by the company last summer. User adoption is still going strong as “5000 teams per week are currently onboarding in Board, from SMBs to large corporations across all industries, including the public sector,” said Matthieu Beucher.

On December 1, 2020, Gary Shapiro, CEO of the CTA, took part in a series of live interviews with industry leaders organized by Klaxoon to discuss the digitalization of the trade show this year and shared his enthusiastic feedback about Board:

“One thing I’m hearing during the pandemic, getting meetings and creative juices flowing to in a way be productive is so important, and that is what is missing in a lot of experiences, and Klaxoon comes along solving a lot of the bigger problems there. Thanks for being Klaxoon. You are making the world better. You are making people collaborate better.” said Gary Shapiro.

Board is compatible with many third-party collaboration tools such as Microsoft Team or Zoom.
Microsoft is both a partner and a customer of Klaxoon. The tech giant uses Board internally and awarded the French company a 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award and a “Best User Experience” in the 2019 Microsoft 365 app awards.

How Does Board Work?

Two days ago, I virtually met Matthieu Beucher, CEO and Founder, Klaxoon, and Benjamin Sasu, Head of Public Relations, Klaxoon, inside the Board application for a demo of the best features. The user experience is excellent, and the tool is powerful at improving team productivity and collective creativity. Watch the video above with the 6-minute demo to see how it works.

Board includes a visual workspace accessible from mobile devices or computers, “Live by Klaxoon” the built-in videoconferencing function, and a library of several hundred ready-to-use meeting templates.

An augmented video conferencing experience for short team synchronizations

Audio and video feeds are directly embedded on the Board for more visual, shorter, and simpler synchronization meetings (see photo above).

The user interface for sharing all types of content, including videos and photos, is incredibly responsive and easy to use. Users can zoom in and zoom out very rapidly in the Board’s canvas to add content endlessly (see the zoom out below). Only 10% of the space is devoted to video conferencing to make more room for the content teams are working on. You see each participant’s video stream in small thumbnails at the edges of the virtual board, and you interact with the content at the center while talking. Board allows for up to 15 participants and recommends renewable 5, 15, or 30-minutes sessions since, after that, attention levels drop.

Improve productivity by using hundreds of ready-to-use templates

One of the most brilliant features Board has to offer is the vast meeting template library. Based on industry-standard agile methods and the Klaxoon community’s best feedback, each template is customizable, saves hours of work, and provides endless possibilities.
Users can choose from a vast array of meeting types such as daily, weekly, project management, workshop, ideation, design thinking, brainstorming, etc. For beginners, there are detailed turnkey work methods that include tutorials on how to use them. Advanced Klaxoon users can select from ready-to-use graphical models.

Communicate visually under a single channel, using Questions

During the demo, we tried the Questions feature that allows any participant to ask any question by clicking on an imported piece of content; in my example, it was a cat photo. Participants can anonymously vote on the question or directly write a reply on the shared content (see screenshot). Offering anonymous voting removes the fear of judgment and allows managers to collect honest feedback from team members. The Questions feature is a brilliant tool to truthfully help companies assess any type of idea, product, project, or proposal.

 

Import, display, share ideas and organize all types of content visually with Views and the Graphical toolbox

Import and Ideas features
Import and share ideas using text, links, sketches, images, videos. Users can also import a massive amount of raw data from Excel that appear in the form of Ideas on the Board. To structure ideas, users can access as many backgrounds as they need.

Graphical Toolbox
On the Board workspace, users can highlight certain pieces of information with a broad palette of colors, highlight ideas with special fonts and formatting tools, create spaces with the available forms, draw with various brushes, and group ideas together with connectors.

View feature
View content from three different angles: Board view, Column view, or  List view.

Price and availability

Board is affordable for small businesses since the monthly subscription starts at €9.99 and allows for meetings with up to 50 people with integrated video conferencing of up to 15 people (you see the videos inside the Board workspace). Users can also use third-party video conferencing tools such as Zoom in a separate browser window. Available from €14.90 per month with the Klaxoon suite.

A member of the French Tech #Next40 list and founded in 2015, Klaxoon has developed a full suite of collaborative tools to enable visual teamwork, in person or digitally. Klaxoon is now used by millions of teams in more than 120 countries, in more than 4,000 organizations, from the SMEs and intermediate-sized enterprises to NGOs and public authorities. 100% of CAC40 companies and 15% of the Fortune 500 subscribe to the Klaxoon suite of tools.

If you are registered at CES 2021, you can visit the Klaxoon virtual booth on the CES website (still available at the time of publishing).

Klaxoon is part of the French Tech delegation at CES 2021, you can check our coverage here and connect with the other French Tech startups here on the CES 2021 website (requires registration).

Eliane Fiolet
Categories: General
Tags: CES, CES 2021, collaboration, covid-19, Editor's Choice, FrenchTech, Microsoft, web app