But ideas are not enough. At some point, we have to deliver on our ideas before we can change the world.

As we know, software delivery is a very complicated field, with many contradictory theories and practices. Waterfall, or agile? Scrum, XP, RUP, or a custom-rolled methodology? And then there’s a whole raft of technology decisions that need to be made along the way. Comet, RTMP, custom sockets? Flex? Ajax? jQuery or Prototype? Then, once we’ve nailed down all these high-level decisions, there still comes the fun but very challenging task of actually pulling these dozens of pieces in the same direction and making them do something that will make the users go “Wow!”.

John Gall once stated that: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

It’s a good formula, applied successfully by Apple and many others, and has always been a key principle of the way we develop things at Woobius. Since the last VMC presentation, our focus has been to build the simplest working version of Woobius Eye. The key for us is to identify the lowest common denominator, in terms of functionality, which allows our users to collaborate live between mobiles and desktops. After many days of hard work and lively debate amongst the team, we gave birth to the Woobius Eye prototype.

Those who have seen it have invariably been drawn to one of its unintended “fun features”: taking a picture of your colleague and scribbling all over their face. Within the Woobius team, which is geographically distributed, we’ve already been using it to help with remote meetings, and even this early prototype has proven extremely useful.

Another essential step when building a successful product is to get users. Steve Blank calls it Customer Development. Eric Ries repeats the theme by encouraging what he calls validated learning about your customers. The long and short of it is, to build a successful product, it’s not enough to develop something cool. We need users, and we need them as early on as possible, so they can be part of our feedback loop and help evolve the product in the right direction. Which is why we’re equally pleased that our beta program, building on the success of Woobius, has been gathering momentum and interest from all parts of the construction industry, as well as from other industries, such as design, advertising, and environmental control.

Without further ado, here’s a demo video showing our prototype in action. We hope you like it.