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CapturetoCloud emerged from stealth mode July 11, offering what it calls a Social Workspace collaboration platform for teams to share and work on a variety of content. The company has chosen to integrate with Google Apps over the collaboration offerings from Microsoft.
We generally saw the market as being largely a Microsoft-focused space where a lot of the social software companies that were coming out in the last couple of years [operated], and we saw the Google Apps ecosystem not really having much of anything in this area, said Ramon Nunez, CEO of CapturetoCloud.
CapturetoClouds approach to social-based collaboration is to offer a platform to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that allows users to capture and share any type of digital content and to collaborate on a project with anyone on any device via the cloud, he said. The idea is that content could be uploaded to the platform without first having to be converted into a specific format or segregated by format in different places. Therefore, content in the CapturetoCloud Social Workspace could include video, photos, Web pages, PDFs or various other documents.
Like other social collaboration tools on the market, CaptureToCloud offers both a free and premium service and has been available during a beta period in the Google Apps Marketplace, Google Chrome Web Store, Google Play and at the companys own Website. While Nunez thinks the Google Apps market is underserved in this area, compared to the Microsoft platform, there are four million companies using Google Apps, which makes for an attractive target market.
While Microsoft cloud offerings such as SharePoint and Office 365 have done a great job of creating demand for cloud-based collaboration, Google Apps really has grown tremendously and has a lot of momentum. We think that there’s an opportunity to bring these kinds of social software capabilities to the Google Apps user, said Nunez.
Users log onto the CapturetoCloud platform from any Web-connected device and can bring together files from Google Drive, the online storage service, as well as Dropbox, another online file storage service. Dropbox allows a team to incorporate large file sizes from there in their original size, which wouldnt be possible if documents were retrieved from e-mail, noted Fritz Mueller, vice president of product management for CapturetoCloud.
CapturetoCloud also announced July 11 it has raised $4.7 million in Series A venture capital funding from Acero Capital to bring the Social Workspace product to market. Beta customers include ePopDev, an online marketing services firm for SMBs, and the Chamber of Commerce of Mountain View, Calif., near San Jose, where CapturetoCloud is based.