This weekend I went to Tata Communications Future of Collaboration hackathon at nestGSV in Redwood City. With such a broad category of making collaboration easier, it was hard to narrow down what our team wanted to build in less than 18 hours.

While enjoying a delicious dinner from SF Whisk, our team started brainstorming.

What if you had access to a remote team of experts that you could ask questions or form longer term relationships for services like legal and regulatory tasks.

Sure, there are plenty of hire me sites like eLance and oDesk. But their bidding process and the time to get up and running (as in getting connected to the person) is sometimes longer than one is willing to be patient and wait.

What if you could connect to that A-team of experts and get an opinion on the best way to implement a feature in your product? That’s where One Dynamic comes in.

We came up with six categories for One Dynamic. FDA, Startups, Patents, Automotive, Finance, and Retail.

Of course there are many more categories than we added. And we could probably further divide these categories into subcategories. But for the demo, we wanted to keep things simple and quick. Remember the other hire me sites? They take time to get through. We want to save the user time.

When you select a category, you are shown a list of available teams with expertise in that category. You can choose a team that’s available to chat that is most appropriate for your situation. Looks like Team Awesome is a good fit for my question.

There’s a team profile with more details so you can confirm it is the team you want to chat with. You can either provide an email address or login to connect.

The members of the team get a text message via Twilio if they aren’t online. As everyone comes online, you see a video of each. The client can then ask their question and the experts give their opinion or answer. Each expert can immediately provide feedback on another expert’s solution.

In our example, Ash gave an answer that was good, but wasn’t the best. Matt suggested another solution and Ash immediately agreed the second option was better. If I had only talked with one expert, I would haven’t known about another option to solve my problem. Two heads really are better than one.

Because I like how this remote team handled my question, maybe they have provide another service that I could utilize. I can click on the Hire team link after the conversation and be able to secure a relationship for the long term.

Benefits

What are the benefits of One Dynamic? Quick answers, validated answers, and the ability to then form a long term relationship.

There was no cost to try One Dynamic. The team gave me a quick and free consultation. If the team ended up not knowing anything, which would be rare with a vetting process, I would have only wasted a minute or two of my time. The remote team of experts has provided a quick consultation and has the opportunity to make a long term relationship where they can charge for their services. They didn’t have to pay for marketing costs to get in front of the client.

I got a validated answer very quickly. Having multiple points of view quickly validated the answers I got. And if something wasn’t clear, I could have asked for a clarification or examples.

Lastly, because of the great experience of getting the answers in a timely fashion, I will be more likely to come back and pay for their time the next time I need something. First impressions are really important and this quick meeting can make or break a relationship.

Why is One Dynamic unique?

One Dynamic is all remote video conferencing. That means each person can be a different place, a different timezone, and work a different schedule. For example, the two experts could work together as a team, but are a far distance from each other. As a client, I can connect from anywhere. If I needed legal help without One Dynamic, I may have to wait for the whole team to get together and then talk with me. With today’s technology, that doesn’t have to happen.

One other idea we had was that you could create a team of experts that don’t know each other but have a common pool of talent. Just using their knowledge and expertise, they could collaborate on the client’s problem, making it a dynamic team. You could add and remove team members over time and maintain a team that can answer a variety of questions.

Here are some pictures I took during the hackathon.