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Sten Tamkivi

Teleport Sundial — How distributed teams work well across timezones.

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Sten Tamkivi
Maker
Hello, good people on ProductHunt. We have been building tools for location independent life for about a year now at @TeleportInc. We have learned from our early users that often the #1 input for deciding where you need to be is the location of other people. And, as we are a team of 10 spread around 7 countries we are living this first hand. Hence, we have spent more time thinking how to make this coordination better and: enter Teleport Sundial, a tool that let's you stay on top of your team's locations and timezones. We hope you never have to ask the "where are you" question when scheduling a call in your @slackhq or @fleepio or other team chat. Instead paste the Sundial invite URL, and once your team is there -- bookmark the timezone view. Sundial also integrates with other stuff we've built: your team members who have the Teleport for Startup Cities mobile app (http://www.producthunt.com/tech/...) just need to open it once when in a new city and their team will get their new location on the Sundial map. And when you know another video call won't cut it, you can hit the "get the team together" and run an automatic Teleport Flock (http://www.producthunt.com/posts...) query to see where in the world would the optimal meeting place be. And for the extra transparent teams: would you include a live Teleport Sundial map on your /about page? Would love to hear what you all think.
Thomas K. Running
@seikatsu Great to see that you're keeping up the rapid execution over at @TeleportInc! I think Sundial makes a lot of sense both as a user, but also for you guys. Most of your other products aren't really something I think most people would use on a near daily basis. Sundial might be different, especially for teams where people tend to move around a lot (the best kinds of teams IMO 🚀), which might hopefully lead to more people building habits around the Teleport suite of products 👍 Keep it up!
Gillian Morris
Another awesome product from the @teleportInc team. I wish it were simpler to just add my teammates without waiting for them to accept my invites. I did and they initially showed up on the map, but then disappeared when I refreshed (this may just be a bug). I can see this being especially useful if we were working with people in India, the half hour difference always throws me off.
Sten Tamkivi
Maker
@gillianim thanks, G! we'll try to debug your specific case. the balance of "prepopulating" your peer's location VS getting a valid update from them is a bit tricky to strike.
Paul Gosnell
Nice. This will come in handy. Quick question before signing up... how do users update their location? Does each user have to login to Sundial and update their location as and when it changes? A team I work with is always on the go so we would need to update our location regularly. Thanks.
Sten Tamkivi
Maker
@paulgosnell thanks for the good question, Paul! This is what we've implemented in short: 1) when inviting individual members by email you can provide your "guesstimate" on their location - which they can update when they join 2) when sharing an invite URL (e.g not a named invitation to email), joiners can provide their location 3) every time any group member opens the web app, and the location hasn't been updated in a certain threshold they will be prompted to re-confirm their location 4) every user can trigger a manual update of their location from their avatar or the top-right menu at any time 5) all web based location update dialogues allow manual typeahead entry of city names, or you can opt in to browser geolocation 6) pro tip that should fit your team the best: any users who also use the Teleport for Startup Cities mobile app will have their location automatically synced to Sundial groups when they open the app on mobile So: if your team members bookmark the timezone view and re-visit regularly and/or they adopt them mobile app, you should be all fine. And do let us know if you would like to get additional update triggers in!
Sten Tamkivi
Maker
http://teleport.org/2015/07/tele... - a few more words and screenshots in this blog post