Workspace is an Ottawa-based startup co-founded by Obaid Ahmed and Marc Windle.
Workspace provides an online collaboration environment for web development projects, allowing for management of many remote servers through a single interface, a built-in editor (no local machine IDE required) and support for six programming languages. A potential boon to freelancers and consultants, Workspace has 2,000 beta testers from around the world providing feedback on bugs and feature requests since beta testing began at the end of March. Pricing has not yet been determined, but will likely follow the freemium model familiar in Web 2.0 applications.
Beta users were identified early on (prior to development) by starting with a blog and using Digg to get some attention to the idea from likely customer/users and signing people up with a simple online form. Workspace is currently working closely with their beta users and will be looking for seed funding this summer to expand the team to add more features and to support scale at launch.