Google's enterprise-focused smart whiteboard, called the Jamboard, is now available for those in the U.S. who are ready to increase collaboration and move beyond smelly dry erase markers. The Jamboard at its core is a 55-inch 4K touchscreen panel powered by an NVIDIA Jetson TX1 board, focused on super-fast touch response with low-latency stylus input as well.
The Jamboard hooks into G Suite accounts to pull in files and documents from Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, letting everyone work and draw together at the same time. Everything is saved constantly to the cloud, so you can pull in members to collaborate remotely, or move between Jamboards and computers seamlessly.
The Jamboard is a smooth $4999 to buy, but that's really just the starting price. If you want to use it on a rolling stand rather than mounting it on a wall, that'll set you back another $1199 (or $1349 after September 30). There's also a yearly service fee, which comes in at $300 if you sign up early (again, before September 30) or $600 per year thereafter. That's of course above and beyond the fees you're paying for your G Suite enterprise app platform.
$5000 is a small price to pay if it dramatically improves collaboration at work.
That's a whole lot of money when looking at it from the point of view of an individual, but for even a small business that could be just a drop in the bucket of your yearly technology budget. It only takes a couple minutes of video from Google to show just how much something like the Jamboard could improve collaboration by removing the friction of moving data between platforms and having it visualized in a room.
You'll have to be in the U.S. to buy a Jamboard today, but it'll be coming to the UK and Canada this summer with an expansion further in the coming months.
