San Francisco-based venture studio The Giant Pixel is officially launching the first of three projects that it’s been cooking in its SoMA offices with the unveiling of the new startup Nama.
Named for the Japanese word for “fresh” Nama is a project management application that the startup lab is hoping can take on companies like Podio and Atlassian.
Nama began as an organizational tool that Giant Pixel developed to use in-house, and the company quickly saw the benefits in bringing the software to the wider world, according to John Cwikla, Giant Pixel’s co-founder.
“Nobody likes their project management software,” Cwikla says.
Coming from Yammer, another Giant Pixel co-founder, Elliot Loh, said the technology fills a lot of gaps in current messaging and organizational platforms. “From the Yammer side, we saw how powerful it was to open up a channel of communications across an organization, but the communication that came through was sort of unfocused.”
Nama purports to solve that problem by tying every message to a corresponding task that needs to be completed, so messaging is automatically linked to the corresponding steps of a project, according to Loh.
There are currently roughly 100 businesses using the service which is going into a broad release today. In keeping with Giant Pixel’s vision, Nama has yet to take on any outside funding, but Cwikla says it could soon seek to raise a round of outside capital.
“If Nama is successful that product would get spun out of our studio and that company will pursue the business,” he says.
The company is at least trying to compete in a fairly large market. In all, companies spend roughly $4.2 billion on collaboration and organizational software and services, according to Cwikla.
Beyond the Nama launch, Giant Pixel has two other projects in the pipeline: Antenna Radio, an on-demand radio service for smartphones and Sobo, a “social sound board” that allows users to listen, share and record audio clips with friends and followers.