Work from home, a year later: Unveiling Flaneer

2020 has been a weird year for everyone. The world has experienced a whole new set of challenges and the professional fields have not been spared…

As fresh-out of school engineers, we believe that our current ways of working are fundamentally flawed but evolving.

Flawed because they focus on hard constraints: an office, a piece of hardware, security limitations... But evolving because the cloud opened a thousand doors and people are now starting to work remotely.

We want a product that could bridge all of these gaps:

No matter the place, the hardware, the software, or your objectives, you should always be able to work in the same productive environment.

It starts with four basic considerations, and it keeps building up through hundreds of interviews we had during the past year:

• After a year of Zoom meetings, slow screen-sharing technologies, and pair-working on slides, documents, or videos, online collaboration needs a considerable boost.
• No matter their tools or mission, everyone should be able to work from wherever they want (be it a matter of fairness or simply freedom). While we don’t want anyone to get stuck because of the hardware they use, we also want to empower everyone and make the access to cloud computing power more straightforward than ever.
• Enterprise tools lag years behind consumer-facing ones. Whether you’re buying books, subscribing to Spotify or using an enterprise-grade software, it should be with the same ease-of-use, customer service & transparent pricing.
• Companies renew hardware every 3 years in general. That means remanufacturing CPUs, graphic cards, screens, and throwing away the old ones that could still be used. This is a disaster in terms of CO2 emissions and power consumption. Hardware should be used through their full life-cycle and powering them should be done efficiently.

The one common denominator between every device we use is the internet browser: it is a key element shared in work, research and free-time !

We asked ourselves “How does one access the computing power they need in a single webpage?”. From there, we followed a few simple principles:

• Simplicity. Everyone should be able to use it.
• Collaboration. No matter the distance or the software, it should feel as if your teammate was over your shoulder helping you.
• Power. No more laggy apps or software, and hardware usage with perfect energy management.

We are building Flaneer to solve these issues all at once:

Bring power, simplicity, security, efficiency and collaboration in the same place: A single web app.

The process is straightforward:

• a web page streams a virtual machine to your browser.
• You do your magic.

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If you’d rather work with teammates, you can join their session and collaborate seamlessly. Talk with each other, annotate each other’s work live, send snapshots…

And all of this while using low powered devices that you almost never have to renew because the actual machines doing the computations are in data centers with top of the line power management and hardware usage efficiency throughout the whole life-cycle of the components.

Flâner, in French, means to get out and stroll, to go see friends and have a nice time, to be relaxed and enjoy every step of the way. That’s what we want to do: we want to make work an enjoyable process again.

It’s time to change the way you work for the better.

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Flaneer is currently in beta. Join us here.

You can also come work with us.

Paul & Arthur

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