8 ms·

Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13)

284 points by pallian 12y ago

slantyyz 12y ago
My business partner and I have been using Slack as our primary messaging tool and been somewhat stuck with Skype as a secondary tool for voice and screen sharing. I am definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and it's definitely a feature we'd pay for.
- jnettome 12y ago
  I'm totally agree with you. Same here.
- socialist_coder 12y ago
  You could have paid for Screenhero before. Maybe if more people did, they wouldn't have sold to Slack. We used Screenhero when it was free. It is better than Skype. But, it's not really worth the price when Skype is free.
  - slantyyz 12y ago
    To be more clear, I'm actually hoping that it becomes a tightly integrated feature within Slack vs. using it as a separate service.
    - socialist_coder 12y ago
      Me too. Seems like it is and that will be awesome =)
imrank1 12y ago
I used Screenhero a lot when I worked remotely. It's a great tool. Shared screens from the East coastto West coast (US) with hardly ever experiencing problems. Great service.
- jsherwani 12y ago
  (Screenhero co-founder here) I'm very glad to hear this! Your screen sharing (and voice and video communication) experience is going to get even better in the coming months. Stay tuned :)
kendallpark 12y ago
I am extremely excited about this. Pair Programming++
orthecreedence 12y ago
It's a Slacquisition ha ha. Been using Slack a lot the past few months and really love it. Pairing it with Trello has given us a powerhouse of open communication and task management. I'm interested to see how it scales for our team as we grow, although the way Slack sets up channels I think it won't be a problem. It will be interesting to see the screen sharing stuff too. Maybe it could replace Skype, which I cringe whenever I have to open (slow desktop app + tons of ads + incessantly begs me to update almost every time I open it).
hammerdr 12y ago
This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company). Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :( [1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need
- wallflower 12y ago
  Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards? https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Setting-up-a-custom-message-retention-policy https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...
  - fidotron 12y ago
    Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it. I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.
    - bmh100 12y ago
      Do you know of a great resource for actually doing that self hosted email, based on your experience?
      - fidotron 12y ago
        I wish I did. Personally I'm very much in the Google ecosystem, and this has been a repeat point of friction. Thus far the approach has been to go on site with a trusted intermediary that has the required infrastructure, but it's not sustainable. Not much scares me technically like the idea of ineptly deploying a mailserver.
Killswitch 12y ago
Been a long time user of Slack and absolutely love it... I've seriously got a bromance with this company. It's adored throughout the company I work at, and one of our pains is that we do all our communication through Slack, even if we're next to each other, we still have headphones on and we talk in Slack. But we still have to go to Skype to do stand up meetings with our remote users... Would be so much better if we could do video over Slack.
- jsherwani 12y ago
  Give us a few months...
  - Killswitch 12y ago
    I'm patiently waiting. Keep up the awesome work.
adieth 12y ago
We tested Slack some months ago, but rejected it due to lack of solution for VoIP and video conference. I am not seeing this acquisition is changing this. In order to have a meeting with multiple participants, we will still need Skype/Hangouts/Lync/WebEx.
- sciurus 12y ago
  What are you using instead?
- joelandren 12y ago
  Our team has been using the Google Hangouts integration for months and it's worked flawlessly.
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    Hangouts has a maximum number of participants. For large phone conferences it's not usable.
bradenb 12y ago
Our entire company uses Slack for most communication since everyone works 100% remotely. It has been fantastic. Finding a good tool for screen sharing has been difficult, though. I pair almost every day, so I need a tool that is stable and has a good quality-to-speed ratio. For people with good connections, Screenhero works well; only downsides are that we get a lot of crashes in the beta app and sometimes the mouse sharing changes window focus or mouse position for the other user, but in general it is the best tool we've found. For those without good connections, we have to use GoTo since it sacrifices refresh rates for quality. Overall, I'm excited to see how this works out. Right now it's a small subset of people in our company that use Screenhero, but I expect to see that number jump with this announcement.
nikhilpandit 12y ago
I used screenhero for some remote work. It's great for pair programming and helping debug a problem remotely. Since our team used Slack, I really wished Slack would add similar functionality to their product. Glad to see that it's going to happen now, and will be built by the people who built the awesome screehero product. Congrats guys! hope to see more awesome work from you!
- jsherwani 12y ago
  Thanks! We are looking forward to doing more awesome for you :)
agentultra 12y ago
Screenhero has been amazing for pairing remotely; something I do often. A co-worker was amazed when his custom keyboard layout worked seamlessly with my terminal session. Once people experience it I find it's not hard to convert them. It will be interesting to see how the Slack integration will improve the experience. One thing I've always wanted though was integration between Screenhero and Sqwiggle. Any chance we'll see something like that, Slack?
dnfriedman 12y ago
We're big users of both Slack + Screenhero at Thinkful for our students communicating with each other in real time (Slack) and pair programming with mentors (Screenhero). We were even spec'ing a feature to make Screenhero the only tool for mentor sessions. Congrats to the Screenhero team – you built a great product and deserve this, but it's sad we'll have to switch to another product. We can't wait months to have something available, and it's not clear the new features will do what we need :/
- Grae 12y ago
  Yeah, congrats to both teams. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's comment; I love each of your products separately and look forward to playing with the integration down the road, but I'm disappointed to lose the existing Screenhero now.
- cvburgess 12y ago
  according to @tptacek, you might be fine: > There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.
robertwalsh0 12y ago
As a screenhero and Slack user I'm excited to be able to experience one experience across both products. They're both best in class in my opinion.
lbotos 12y ago
Screenhero reps, do you have a gameplan for being able to "invite" users for one time sessions? This is what I often need Screenhero for.
- Anjin 12y ago
  This would be amazing. I use Screenhero all the time for work, but every so often I need to help my mother with something on her computer and there is no free solution available that is better than Screenhero. I'm just not going to pay for another subscription just to help my mother out with tech support once a quarter...
- digitalbase 12y ago
  i am sure they will think about this. Plus slack is working on public channels which would be a workaround for one time users.
cobychapple 12y ago
Blog post from Screenhero: http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-joins-slack http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-join... Thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845
wamatt 12y ago
As a user of both Slack and Screenhero this makes me happy. I've always felt they would make a cute couple. That said, integration seemed kind of sparse (limited to /username in Slack). We also struggled to have it work reliably in daily use. Thus we mostly reverted back to the Skype/Slack combo. However this has proved to be suboptimal, partly because links and chatlogs shared in Skype are not archived in Slack for easy retrieval. Hopefully this marriage will bring about a bunch of deeper and more polished integrations for users.
- jsherwani 12y ago
  (Co-founder of Screenhero here) Thanks! We do think we look good together ;) A great integration is exactly what we want to make happen. Stay tuned for awesomeness in the coming months! We are super excited to make something that you will love.
e0m 12y ago
What does this mean for Sqwiggle? Are you guys the next Slack acquisition?
porter 12y ago
is there anything else out there that I can pay for now that's like screenhero? This actually looks like something I need, but now I can't sign up.
ringmaster 12y ago
I have to agree with the frustration of the apparent minority. We've been using HipChat corporate-wide, and the subset of users that have been using Screenhero aren't going to be able to change to Slack now (even if we wanted to). And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+ over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well, congrats on that. Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.
StevenKW 12y ago
So if I am an unpaid slack user how do I screenshare with a user that is not a slack user? If I am an unpaid member of several unpaid slack teams how do I continue to use screenhero? Can I opt in to a paid single user and use screenhero across my multiple slack teams?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
q3k 12y ago
> Cross platform: Screenhero supports both Windows and Mac. It's like there isn't any other operating system... We do both, country AND western!
shenoyroopesh 12y ago
As a slack user, I think this is awesome. This is one thing that we do miss currently, a video calling facility. I mean we can log into skype or google hangouts something else, but having it in slack would be totally cool! I've never used Screenhero before, but going by the comments here, I wish I had!

284 points by pallian 12y ago

My business partner and I have been using Slack as our primary messaging tool and been somewhat stuck with Skype as a secondary tool for voice and screen sharing. I am definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and it's definitely a feature we'd pay for.

jnettome 12y ago
I'm totally agree with you. Same here.
socialist_coder 12y ago
You could have paid for Screenhero before. Maybe if more people did, they wouldn't have sold to Slack. We used Screenhero when it was free. It is better than Skype. But, it's not really worth the price when Skype is free.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  To be more clear, I'm actually hoping that it becomes a tightly integrated feature within Slack vs. using it as a separate service.
  - socialist_coder 12y ago
    Me too. Seems like it is and that will be awesome =)

imrank1 12y ago

I used Screenhero a lot when I worked remotely. It's a great tool. Shared screens from the East coastto West coast (US) with hardly ever experiencing problems. Great service.

jsherwani 12y ago
(Screenhero co-founder here) I'm very glad to hear this! Your screen sharing (and voice and video communication) experience is going to get even better in the coming months. Stay tuned :)

kendallpark 12y ago

I am extremely excited about this. Pair Programming++

orthecreedence 12y ago

It's a Slacquisition ha ha. Been using Slack a lot the past few months and really love it. Pairing it with Trello has given us a powerhouse of open communication and task management. I'm interested to see how it scales for our team as we grow, although the way Slack sets up channels I think it won't be a problem. It will be interesting to see the screen sharing stuff too. Maybe it could replace Skype, which I cringe whenever I have to open (slow desktop app + tons of ads + incessantly begs me to update almost every time I open it).

hammerdr 12y ago

This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company). Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :( [1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need

wallflower 12y ago
Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards? https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Setting-up-a-custom-message-retention-policy https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...
- fidotron 12y ago
  Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it. I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.
  - bmh100 12y ago
    Do you know of a great resource for actually doing that self hosted email, based on your experience?
    - fidotron 12y ago
      I wish I did. Personally I'm very much in the Google ecosystem, and this has been a repeat point of friction. Thus far the approach has been to go on site with a trusted intermediary that has the required infrastructure, but it's not sustainable. Not much scares me technically like the idea of ineptly deploying a mailserver.

Killswitch 12y ago

Been a long time user of Slack and absolutely love it... I've seriously got a bromance with this company. It's adored throughout the company I work at, and one of our pains is that we do all our communication through Slack, even if we're next to each other, we still have headphones on and we talk in Slack. But we still have to go to Skype to do stand up meetings with our remote users... Would be so much better if we could do video over Slack.

jsherwani 12y ago
Give us a few months...
- Killswitch 12y ago
  I'm patiently waiting. Keep up the awesome work.

adieth 12y ago

We tested Slack some months ago, but rejected it due to lack of solution for VoIP and video conference. I am not seeing this acquisition is changing this. In order to have a meeting with multiple participants, we will still need Skype/Hangouts/Lync/WebEx.

sciurus 12y ago
What are you using instead?
joelandren 12y ago
Our team has been using the Google Hangouts integration for months and it's worked flawlessly.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  Hangouts has a maximum number of participants. For large phone conferences it's not usable.

bradenb 12y ago

Our entire company uses Slack for most communication since everyone works 100% remotely. It has been fantastic. Finding a good tool for screen sharing has been difficult, though. I pair almost every day, so I need a tool that is stable and has a good quality-to-speed ratio. For people with good connections, Screenhero works well; only downsides are that we get a lot of crashes in the beta app and sometimes the mouse sharing changes window focus or mouse position for the other user, but in general it is the best tool we've found. For those without good connections, we have to use GoTo since it sacrifices refresh rates for quality. Overall, I'm excited to see how this works out. Right now it's a small subset of people in our company that use Screenhero, but I expect to see that number jump with this announcement.

nikhilpandit 12y ago

I used screenhero for some remote work. It's great for pair programming and helping debug a problem remotely. Since our team used Slack, I really wished Slack would add similar functionality to their product. Glad to see that it's going to happen now, and will be built by the people who built the awesome screehero product. Congrats guys! hope to see more awesome work from you!

jsherwani 12y ago
Thanks! We are looking forward to doing more awesome for you :)

agentultra 12y ago

Screenhero has been amazing for pairing remotely; something I do often. A co-worker was amazed when his custom keyboard layout worked seamlessly with my terminal session. Once people experience it I find it's not hard to convert them. It will be interesting to see how the Slack integration will improve the experience. One thing I've always wanted though was integration between Screenhero and Sqwiggle. Any chance we'll see something like that, Slack?

dnfriedman 12y ago

We're big users of both Slack + Screenhero at Thinkful for our students communicating with each other in real time (Slack) and pair programming with mentors (Screenhero). We were even spec'ing a feature to make Screenhero the only tool for mentor sessions. Congrats to the Screenhero team – you built a great product and deserve this, but it's sad we'll have to switch to another product. We can't wait months to have something available, and it's not clear the new features will do what we need :/

Grae 12y ago
Yeah, congrats to both teams. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's comment; I love each of your products separately and look forward to playing with the integration down the road, but I'm disappointed to lose the existing Screenhero now.
cvburgess 12y ago
according to @tptacek, you might be fine: > There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.

robertwalsh0 12y ago

As a screenhero and Slack user I'm excited to be able to experience one experience across both products. They're both best in class in my opinion.

lbotos 12y ago

Screenhero reps, do you have a gameplan for being able to "invite" users for one time sessions? This is what I often need Screenhero for.

Anjin 12y ago
This would be amazing. I use Screenhero all the time for work, but every so often I need to help my mother with something on her computer and there is no free solution available that is better than Screenhero. I'm just not going to pay for another subscription just to help my mother out with tech support once a quarter...
digitalbase 12y ago
i am sure they will think about this. Plus slack is working on public channels which would be a workaround for one time users.

cobychapple 12y ago

Blog post from Screenhero: http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-joins-slack http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-join... Thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845

wamatt 12y ago

As a user of both Slack and Screenhero this makes me happy. I've always felt they would make a cute couple. That said, integration seemed kind of sparse (limited to /username in Slack). We also struggled to have it work reliably in daily use. Thus we mostly reverted back to the Skype/Slack combo. However this has proved to be suboptimal, partly because links and chatlogs shared in Skype are not archived in Slack for easy retrieval. Hopefully this marriage will bring about a bunch of deeper and more polished integrations for users.

jsherwani 12y ago
(Co-founder of Screenhero here) Thanks! We do think we look good together ;) A great integration is exactly what we want to make happen. Stay tuned for awesomeness in the coming months! We are super excited to make something that you will love.

e0m 12y ago

What does this mean for Sqwiggle? Are you guys the next Slack acquisition?

porter 12y ago

is there anything else out there that I can pay for now that's like screenhero? This actually looks like something I need, but now I can't sign up.

ringmaster 12y ago

I have to agree with the frustration of the apparent minority. We've been using HipChat corporate-wide, and the subset of users that have been using Screenhero aren't going to be able to change to Slack now (even if we wanted to). And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+ over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well, congrats on that. Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.

StevenKW 12y ago

So if I am an unpaid slack user how do I screenshare with a user that is not a slack user? If I am an unpaid member of several unpaid slack teams how do I continue to use screenhero? Can I opt in to a paid single user and use screenhero across my multiple slack teams?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

q3k 12y ago

> Cross platform: Screenhero supports both Windows and Mac. It's like there isn't any other operating system... We do both, country AND western!

shenoyroopesh 12y ago

As a slack user, I think this is awesome. This is one thing that we do miss currently, a video calling facility. I mean we can log into skype or google hangouts something else, but having it in slack would be totally cool! I've never used Screenhero before, but going by the comments here, I wish I had!