It’s little surprise that the idea for Bounce, the new app from IdeaPaint, the Boston-based maker of dry erase paint, came out of a brainstorming session. The company, which has been shellacking walls with their product since launching in 2008, had been getting requests from its users to add more capabilities to its product than a simple coat of wall covering could provide.

“How do you get your big ideas off the wall so that the momentum of that discussion continues in the hours, days, and weeks that follow?” said IdeaPaint chief executive John Stephans. “How do you keep that energy of that discussion alive?”

Stephans said that even in the IdeaPaint offices, team members would snap a photo of a brainstorming sessions, then maybe make a PowerPoint or add it to Evernote. But inevitably, he’d never see most of the images again. “I like to say that whenever someone takes a picture of something on the wall it dies,” he said.

Bounce, which IdeaPaint launched in partnership with the Project Beacon team at Hill Holliday, allows users to capture the creative genius that’s been written on a wall, then store, share, and annotate those drawings or notes. IdeaPaint has been testing the product internally, but opened up their beta to the public on Wednesday.

“In every brainstorming meeting, there’s an epiphany or magic moment where the group reaches a shared understanding,” said John Running, who leads the Project Beacon team. “But sometimes after those meetings it evaporates.”

Running’s goal was to capture that spirit, and make it simple for users to get a quick link to an image for which they can also add commentary and feedback. The saved images will be available to users through a mobile app and online. He and Stephans anticipate that Bounce will launch in the late spring or early summer; later iterations will also integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox.

Stephans said Bounce is designed as a easy-to-use tool that he hopes will make sharing ideas easier. “It adds a little more,” he said. “It makes that picture active versus captive in a very simple way.”

From: betaboston.com