Agave Weekly Update #5
Wing Venture Capital released a survey today on remote work and it has interesting insights. Survey is here.
Notably, casual interactions are the #1 pain point remote teams experience today. This was why Dave and I built Agave—despite a sea of competitors, none of them worked well or stuck for us.
The mission of Agave is to make it easy for remote teams to have informal conversations. We’re more excited than ever to be solving this problem today. As part of that mission, we’ve got some exciting easter eggs that we won’t share broadly or publicly. You’ll have to know someone who already has a virtual office to find out more on that. Get an early spot on the waitlist by joining here.
Changelog
v 1.1.7
🚀 New
Relics have been renamed to Props (thanks Christian!) and now have rich text descriptions that are favored over the old image, description, and URL attributes.
During conversations you can now mute and unmute yourself. Great for if you have loud dogs barking in the background or other noise.
During conversations you can now see your network quality level. For bad network quality, try a voice-only app, or try a phone call. We also automatically adjust the quality of the feed based on your network quality.
Visitors are only allowed entry to the office when one or more tenants are around. We now have “office hours” from 12pm-8pm for Agave’s office. If a tenant is not around, a “sorry, we’re closed” message will appear to prevent the “walking into an empty building” experience.
Notice that mobile support is disabled for visitors. We display a message encouraging them to use a laptop or desktop.
✨ Improved
Pre-visit instructions tell visitors how the app works, including proximity audio/video, keyboard controls.
Adjusted Dave and Jared’s desks to reduce accidental video interactions.
Video bubbles now show names.
Improved pathfinding algorithm to prevent accidental teleportations.
Added more app icons (Apple TV, Photos, System Preferences).
"Start your Visit" is now the default homepage, rather than asking a user to sign in.
🔧 Fixed
Fixed an issue where "Now playing" wouldn't correctly update for your Spotify or Apple Music playlist.
Fixed an issue that prevented stale visitors from disappearing.
Fixed an issue where video calls would stick around after avatars move away from each other.
🧹 Cleanup
Misc development and back-end improvements.
It was fun catching up with my old cofounders Nikhil and Siong from the GraffitiGeo days (below). Thanks to them for helping clarify some thoughts I was having for an essay I posted last week Re: PG and Jessica.