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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on the launch. I'm a remote worker, so I was keenly interested in this.

I've been using a Facebook Portal for about 1.5 years as an always-on video device. It works great, so I love the idea. There's open water in this space, so it's great to see others entering it.

For now, I don't see why I would ever use this over the Portal. The Portal HW has a high-quality build with a great speaker, and the auto-tracking video is creepy good. I purchased the large desktop Portal for $200 one time—a better deal than 25$ a month IMHO.

I wrote up my remote work experience with the Portal, too (https://medium.com/@dbal/facebook-portal-makes-for-a-better-...). Facebook has been researching business uses cases also. A research firm hired by Facebook came to our remote sites and observed how we used the Portal.

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That's really cool! Have you expanded beyond your cofounders? And are you guys still using it for always-on?

Also, how do you guys handle knowing when you can talk to the other person? How do you know if the other person is in a meeting?

"Have you expanded beyond your cofounders?"

We haven't, although we do have other team members with Portals, I don't think it would be effective for our use case. Most of the conversations are semi-private, so we use the device like we were sharing an office more than having a meeting.

As a team, we use Slack for Chat, Zoom for Meetings and screen sharing, and Slack for one on one video chat. We use slack for quick conversations because its fast to deploy, and you can keep your hands on your keyboard (or mouse).

Oddly, we hop on Zoom all the time for screen sharing but continue to just use the Portal for AV.

"Also, how do you guys handle knowing when you can talk to the other person?"

That's have been easy. If I want to talk to Tom, I just look at him. If he's in a meeting, I can almost always tell. We keep each other muted unless we're going to talk. You can tell from the eyes, or headset, etc. pretty quickly.

For the shared office use case, in particular, it's excellent.

Any way you slice it, I'm glad to see more people in this space, as it can only lead to better things for remote workers. Good luck!

What kind of company do you work at?

I work at all remote internet company; I use my Portal to connect to specific people though in an always-on environment. I find it helpful for all the reasons described in the OP and more. When I went from a shared office with a co-worker to a remote office with the same co-worker, I thought we would lose something. The always-on video fills a void. I can't recommend it enough for remote workers that work closely with another person. Sometimes a look or a glance can even accomplish a goal.

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