Cacoo Gives You a Virtual Whiteboard for Google+ Hangouts

We’ve written about Japanese startups Cacoo a few times before. You may recall that they operate a collaborative web service that can be used to create diagrams, charts, and mind maps with others. Just now I received a mail from them saying that Cacoo now can work in Google Hangouts.

Note that I’m in Tokyo, and my colleagues Steven and Charlie are both in China. First I had to proceed to Cacoo’s website, specifically launch-hangouts.cacoo.com. From there I could launch the Hangouts session, and invite Steven and Charlie to join. First I had to authorize the Cacoo app with my Google account (as did Steven and Charlie), but from there it was pretty smooth sailing.

We quickly made a little chart of our TechInAsia contributor structure (see below). This is not really complete or anything, so apologies to our great contributors in Thailand, India, and elsewhere. But you get the idea. We could all add items at the same time, and in a few moments we had a very simple chart.

Of course, if you’re well-versed in the tools that Cacoo provides, then you can likely do something far more complex than this. There’s always screen-sharing over Skype of course, but the collaborative element with Cacoo in Google Hangouts is pretty neat.

Personally, I’m not sure if I really have any need for such a solution, but when we heard from the startup last, they had a strong user base of 200,000. And as of today, a representative tells is that the service is being used by 420,000 users in 120 different countries.