Lookback, a startup from two former Spotify engineers with technology for recording what people see and do on their mobile devices, is announcing today that it has acquired Reissued, the company behind QuickCast, a similar tool for Mac OS X.
In addition to just recording the screens, the Lookback and QuickCast services also use the front-facing cameras and microphones on devices to document how people respond to what they see onscreen. And starting today, they'll all carry the Lookback name.
Put simply, the Lookback team wants to become the go-to provider for software that can improve -- and lower the cost of -- user experience research across devices, Lookback cofounder and chief executive Jonatan Littke told VentureBeat in an interview.
The tools can be useful for bug reporting as well, but the primary use case is user experience research, where companies historically have relied on cameras to record people and the things they see on devices.
"'There's a Lookback for everything, so we'll just use Lookback, and we can just trash our cameras, basically,'" Littke said, representing what he hopes many executives will be saying in the coming months and years.
Sure enough, today Lookback is introducing its first Android screen-recording tool, alongside the new Lookback for Mac it's picked up through the QuickCast acquisition.
"I think really capturing digital experiences and directions across any platform is interesting," Littke said.
Indeed, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all been encouraging developers to think about cross-device application development. A tool that can help developers get a handle on real usage could come in handy for such work.
Established in Sweden in 2013, Lookback now has 12 employees. Lookback has accumulated 12,000 users, and it's being used at companies like Lyft, Spotify, Squarespace, and Venmo.
United Kingdom-based Reissued, meanwhile, has racked up more than 15,000 users for QuickCast since starting in 2013, Littke said. The tool can show how people use Mac apps and websites in several browsers.