Mural.ly, an innovative visual collaboration application, today announced performance enhancements and improvements, as well as more robust collaboration features. The company will also reveal plans to debut paid premium and business accounts alongside its free personal offering.

What is Mural.ly

Mural.ly provides digital Murals for creative teams to collaborate anytime, from anywhere in a flexible way.

Murals are webpages that feel like physical pinboards or walls that enable users to pull and post photos, websites, files and documents from multiple sources including YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest, Google Maps and Drop Box and author them freely. Its zoomable interface allows users to zoom out to see the big picture, and zoom in for the details and story.

Its new, easier-to-add content capabilities allow the direct importation of media and files from Google Images and Google Drive. It also delivers improved authoring capabilities with the ability to design shapes in multiple colors as well as customizable text.

“We talked with over 2,000 beta users in the creative industries: web product teams, game designers, visual designers, advertising agencies, visual thinking specialists, writers, videographers and more,” said Mariano Suarez Battan, CEO of Mural.ly. “Our users need something easy and flexible to use to help them stay in the flow and let their ideas grow as they did in their designer war rooms.”

Most collaboration software out there is too structured: text, tables, and image uploads in a structured format that is ill suited for the imagination to run free. HTML5, Node.js and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform are leveraged to improve response, and reduced load times.

“We are pushing the limits of what can be done inside a browser,” said Pato Jutard, Mural.ly CTO. “We are happy with our current stack and will continue to evolve as browsers get faster. Our goal is for tech to get out of the way and help creative teams work better together.”

Improved Visual Collaboration

The updated Mural.ly platform features more robust visual collaboration capabilities with SSL encryption. In addition to easily letting contributors add and edit content, a new layer of comments has been included to discuss changes or observations regarding different sections of a mural.

Contributions to indoor murals are private and confidential, and are accessible only to users granted permission from each mural owner. Collaborators invited to edit murals gain access to all element previews and are able to contribute to and edit content, such actions recorded in a timeline or activity feed.

Enhanced live, on-screen collaboration within the mural facilitates collaboration and understanding among team members; for example, a game design team collecting visual references for a new product or a writer collaborating with a designer to design a book’s cover style.

Users can also contribute to public or “outdoor” murals to show their ideas, publish and embed Murals in their blogs and websites.

After laying out project goals, users can upload ideas, sketches, photos and other media and map it to provide more meaning. Fellow team members can contribute content and comment on different areas. What’s more, users can ‘@mention’ somebody to grab their attention about a certain conversation or a section of a mural.

With the addition of an improved email notification system, the goal is to more quickly achieve visual understanding without excessive emails on a given topic. Live collaboration on the mural immerses entire teams into a common space where every team member can feel like a peer, encouraging them to be playful and enhance their ideas.

Future premium and business accounts

Users can benefit from the free Mural.ly for open innovation, open education and publishing use cases, but mural access will be limited for private projects. Premium and business account features are being optimized to help power users better achieve their goals when collaborating in private projects, such as organizing murals in rooms, integrated invitations, connection to premium storage and more.

Pricing will be announced in the coming weeks; schools can freely use Mural.ly for open education projects, and will get a special educational pricing if private rooms shall be needed.

Currently accessible on desktop computers via the web, the application is also being optimized for the iPhone and iPad. A native iPhone app, initially focused on collecting pictures, links and notes to be sent to a selected mural, will also become available in the App Store™.

For more information about Mural.ly, visit www.mural.ly or follow the company on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mural_ly.

About Mural.ly:

Mural.ly is a startup based in San Francisco and with development operations in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It offers a visual collaboration application on which users can group together multimedia content from various sources into flexible Murals used for group ideation, design and visual sharing. The company received funding in 2012 from Intel Capital, Alta Ventures, 500 Startups, and various angel investors from the Americas. Mural.ly was founded by Mariano Suarez Battan, Pato Jutard, and Agustin Soler. Mr. Suarez Battan and Mr. Jutard both previously founded Three Melons, a maker of social games which was acquired by Playdom/Disney in 2010. For more information about Mural.ly, visit www.mural.ly.