Stypi founders have a plan to reinvent Google Wave (video)

Google Wave was a colossal flop. So why are the founders of Stypi trying to revive the idea of Wave-style collaborative software?

We caught up with the Stypi team at VentureBeat’s San Francisco office and asked them exactly that. This Y Combinator-backed startup is revisiting the concept of cloud-based, collaborative work. It enables multiple people to work on the same document together in real time by sharing a link amongst themselves.

This is familiar ground for those of us keeping a close eye on the tech space. Google Wave launched in mid-2009 as a “communication tool of the future.” While press and users alike were initially ecstatic about the potential of the product, few people could actually figure out how to use it, and Google shuttered Wave just one year later. Late in 2010, Wave was made an open-source Apache project.

The Stypi team is starting out a bit differently. Rather than debuting a feature-filled, bells-and-whistles product to a worldwide audience of everybody, the current version of Stypi begins with a simple, pared-down, developer-oriented feature set. In the near future, the team hopes to bring collaborative, web-based features to all kinds of Internet users — normal folks who simply need to work on documents together.