Technology

A new document creation service has hit the web, and it’s inspiring individuals and businesses to change the way they collaborate on documentation. LUNARR, founded in 2006 by entrepreneurs Toru Takasuka and Hideshi Hamaguchi, creates a virtual “back page” which includes all of the email communications, informal notes, and discussions that go in to perfecting any given document. This not only provides a real-time look at all the ideas surrounding a document, but also solves the versioning problems that so often plague offline documents. Takasuka and Hamaguchi are hoping to change the way teams collaborate with their unique interface and web-based service. LUNARR is well-positioned to join the ranks of SAAS companies making an impact not only on businesses, but on individual users as well.

Toru Takasuka is a well-known entrepreneur in Japan, having started a company called Cybozu which develops collaborative groupware for enterprise use. Cybozu was a resounding success, and it is still the top groupware company in Japan, surpassing IBM and Microsoft. Takasuka, however, was looking for a new challenge in a more dynamic and daring atmosphere, so he left his position at Cybozu in the spring of 2005.

Hideshi Hamaguchi is also a respected expert in his field, and his work concentrates on creative concept and strategy development. When Takasuka, his former colleague from Panasonic, told him he was venturing out from Cybozu on April Fool’s Day, Hamaguchi assumed it was a prank. “I asked Toru if he had a concept for his new company, and he said no. He just knew that the market was ready for something big and new, so we sat down and developed the concept together.” Their brainstorm produced the front page/back page strategy that became LUNARR, which was named for the two faces of the moon.

LUNARR’s founders drew inspiration from Japanese business philosophy and aesthetics. As Hamaguchi explains, “Japanese people rely on intuition for many business decisions, but Americans use logic for making decisions. The mixture of intuition and logic is totally different in the two cultures.” The back page concept reflects this mixed mode of decision-making, allowing teams to explore not only intuitive changes and whims, but also collect and analyze all the information about a project. The user interface is the essence of simplicity, which Hamaguchi compares to a traditional Japanese stone garden. “The general idea in web applications is ‘more is better’, but in Japanese culture, less is better…we kept subtracting features and design elements to reflect this minimalism.” Hamaguchi compares LUNARR’s clean interface, which is essentially a document with a dog-eared corner that flips to your back page, to Google’s miniamlist landing page. It’s the essence function without any distractions.

Takasuka and Hamaguchi hope to influence the very idea of document creation, though their goal is not to replace current technologies. “We want the dynamic and agile work styles seen with whiteboard note-taking, emails, and web conferences to continue, but we want people to slow down and change their work styles. You take your time and organize the front page, but then you’re able to flip and see the chaos, the additions, and your initial impressions,” says Hamaguchi. “LUNARR provides that relaxed mode of collaboration.” Because of their ambition to change the way people use documents, they are not using the beta launch to gather specific feedback about features for future releases. Takasuka and Hamaguchi see iterative methods as a means by which to improve an existing product, not a tool for innovation. “People do not know what they need from innovative companies. It’s our job to tell them.”

This confident, devil-may-care philosophy is also reflected in Takasuka’s marketing strategy for LUNARR. With Cybozu, he was on the cutting edge of web advertising, but he’s exploring what Hamaguchi describes as a “crazy approach” for this new venture. Since the internet market in the U.S. is saturated with conventional ads, LUNARR has rented an old-school billboard for a year off San Francisco’s Highway 101 near Oracle headquarters. The messages, handwritten and striking, will change every month. The area’s high concentration of tech workers has created a human network that Takasuka is confident will spread the word about his product.

LUNARR is one of the most promising SAAS applications which enables collaboration and vibrancy for any creative team. The service is in a free beta at the moment, though plans are in the works to develop a enterprise version and corresponding pricing structure. As Hamaguchi puts it, “We hope people will see their documents differently, not just a depository, but a work-in-progress, a living thing.”

By Haley January Eckels