VirtualDesign.net came into being as a result of a conversation between founders Robert Ebert, CEO, and Craig Della Penna, COO. They had worked extensively in the advertising industry, where Robert was a designer and Craig was a production person. A few years ago, they were talking to each other about the dawning of broadband and what they would like to do with the new technology.

From those conversations, they began the process of putting together a company (now known as VirtualDesign.net), which offers a set of tools that allow design professionals to collaborate over the Internet. Other tools include calendaring, scheduling, task lists and a file viewer for viewing CAD/CAM formats. The viewer supports many other files formats and incorporates real-time, multipoint video conferencing.

According to Mr. Della Penna, “The application is designed to get people from all over the world to be able to sit down with the product and work on design problems, go through changes/alterations, view presentations (whether they are streaming or PowerPoint, etc.) and make decisions while they are talking to each other. This way, they can save on shipping, air travel costs and reduced time to market.”

Nathan: Looking at your website, you appear to have two products, VirtualDesign Network and Virtual-WorkSpaces.

Craig: “Actually, the company is VirtualDesign.net and Virtual-WorkSpaces is the product. For videoconferencing, you have to be invited into a conference and you need to have a USB camera. To be able to use the system, you need to be on a 256 K DSL line or better and have a 6-700 MHz Pentium 3. Once you have that, you need to download our software client, which runs over a VPN and is secure. This runs all over the public internet, so there are no dedicated lines or dedicated hardware that needs to be set up.”