 Gmail, Hangouts, Google Drive, these products are pretty much ubiquitous in modern offices. This voiceover right now, I wrote this script with a colleague in Google Docs. That's all been online, and now Google is trying to take its workplace tools from the cloud to the physical world. We stopped by Google's New York offices to check out its first attempt. Big, expensive, surprisingly playful device called the Jamboard. So the Jamboard is essentially a digital whiteboard. It's a 55 inch 4K TV that's meant to solve the miserable experience that is collaborating with people remotely. Everything you do can be synchronized across multiple Jamboards, tablets, and the web so that different coworkers can join in. So even though this is something that's meant to be in an office, this is weirdly fun and playful. The whole design is. It is bright red. It has these soft, curved sides. The material is actually kind of a soft plastic. It just really looks like a blown up kid's tablet or something like that. The devices you use are also the same way. This is sort of like a giant crayon, and there's no real technology here. You just start writing and it works. The eraser is the same way. It's like a big puck, and it even has microfiber on the eraser side, which is pretty neat, because that way you end up cleaning off the display as you're erasing. The tool that I really love is a handwriting tool. My handwriting is absolutely horrible. I can barely read it sometimes, but the Jamboard, from my experience, has actually been really good at figuring it out. Look at that. That happened pretty quickly. I'm really amazed because my handwriting is really, really terrible. This is pretty cool and actually makes this experience a lot more usable for somebody like me. You can just grab these. You can manipulate them if you want, and you can just throw them away if you don't need them anymore. The other thing is there is a shape tool that's really similar to that, where again, if you don't make a perfect shape, it's not going to always perfectly correct you. In that case, it did. This is an internet connection whiteboard. You can actually go a little bit further, and you can bring in things from the web, which is pretty cool. We have this verge page pulled up, and I can just crop it and bring this in. Now I can mark it up how I want. I can circle the author. I can go back. I can circle the author here, point out what it's about. These things are also on layers, which I didn't point out. I can move and scale these things around too and do whatever I want with them. That's kind of neat because again, this is another thing that normally you'd be sending files back and forth rather than being able to just draw on them, which is a much more natural experience for people. There are a few other options as well, like sticky notes you can write text on and all kinds of emoji to play with. There's even a selfie function, which maybe you shouldn't use too much at work. But the big deal here is being able to collaborate with people who aren't in the room. So we called Lauren Good out in our San Francisco office. Hey, Jake. Hey, what's going on, Lauren? You can see me right now, right? I can see you in what appears to be a conference room. Yes, it's a beautiful conference room. I think what I have to do is there's a specific button. You can't do video and the board at the same time. If I flip the switch, I go away and I think now you can see everything that I've been writing, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. Now I see it looks like you posted an article page. Yeah, I was able to... It looks like you pasted an article page from Caitlin. Yeah, I know. I saw it. So you can see, can you even see my web searches and stuff? Or is it? No, so that's just, that's not showing up to you. I can't see your web searches. Okay. No, I just see a bunch of shapes and the words horrible. So obviously you're plotting something. I see. Right now, this is all a little bit confusing. Lauren can't interact with the Jamboard because she's on the web. She also can't see me and the Jamboard at the same time, which is kind of strange. When the Jamboard is actually out, Lauren would be able to get more involved. Google is launching a Jamboard app for iOS and Android, and it basically turns your tablet into a miniature version of the Jamboard. It's a little less fun, but it works, including the handwriting recognition. So even without the app, we were able to do a little planning for my next trip out to San Francisco. If you put in AT&T Park, you can, I don't know, maybe grab some lunch and then go to a game after work with people in the office. AT&T Park. Now I have info on this and I can bring that in. Okay, cool. Yeah. I don't know exactly when they're playing though, so we'll have to look up some dates. That's okay. I need to look up how baseball works before we go. I don't know how many offices will actually end up with a Jamboard. The product costs $5,000 before annual service fees, but if you're in a workplace willing to spend that kind of money, the Jamboard seems like a surprisingly practical and fun way to collaborate, even at this early imperfect stage. And Google is already planning for the future. Third party integrations for Jamboard are on the table. I know I want to see Trello on there. And Google tells us it's interested in using hardware to solve other problems in the workplace too. Jamboard is only just the beginning.