As Increo is currently in a period of nose-to-the-grindstone development (preparing a new release of Backboard), I thought I’d step back and take a look at one of the articles written about Backboard just after our initial launch.

Marc Hustvedt, angel investor blogger behind seedWatcher, a blog that tracks early-stage startups reviewed Backboard back in May.

The pro’s of Backboard, are clearly its painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. [...] Anyone can comment on a document if they’re given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

As we add functionality to Backboard, we’re careful to leave the basic lightweight use case Marc mentions intact. Our hope is that you will continue to find creating a Backboard as easy as when Backboard was first introduced.

Marc continues:
The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I’d like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It’s also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it’s going to get wide-scale business use. [...]

This is where Backboard has made tremendous strides over the past few months. I’m excited to launch markup support (easy enough for your most time-pressed client) in the coming weeks. We have also launched security for confidential documents.

Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way.

Plans are certainly in the works to continue producing tools to help companies innovate.