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Upon graduating from Bates College in Maine, Ben Schippers and Sam Huleatt became business partners in a start-up media-consulting firm based in Brooklyn, N.Y. With very little capital, the classmates relied on outsourcing work for clients as large as Geico to people located throughout the country. From their experience with using different technologies such as instant messanging and e-mail to stay in touch, they developed the idea for a program that would integrate these communication tools into one system and provide a way to more easily stay up-to-date on co-workers’ activities.

About a year after building a prototype of their idea and gaining financial backing through Austin Ventures, Schippers, 27, and Huleatt, 28, are preparing for a public launch of Workstreamer in mid-June. They also are seeking a second round of capital investment – $3 million to $6 million – to ramp up commercialization of their product, which they hope will compete with programs created by Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. In just a couple of weeks of pitching their idea, they have received interest from three investors and two acquisition offers, which they are now weighing for the best deal.

Their personal experience of creating the complicated software with a work force spread out in Texas, Washington, D.C., New York City, and now Ames, due to Schippers’ move last year to be with his wife while she attends Iowa State University’s veterinary school, has helped sell their concept.

“We saw clearly this is where the world is going – distributed work teams,” Schippers said. “We’re kind of living through the problem now.”

The growing popularity of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter has helped generate more interest as well, with Workstreamer’s similar goal of enhancing collaboration and generating greater awareness of co-workers’ activities.

The program features a feed that displays a message when anyone in the network updates his or her status, creates an event, assigns a task or sets up a document. The feed can be filtered to show just one thing, such as events or direct messages. People also can set up projects, where messages, events or other activities related to each project are organized under and displayed only to the team members involved.

“There’s a huge level of organization that’s automatically associated with Workstreamer,” Schippers said.

The application scheduled to be released last week – and where Workstreamer may separate itself from the competition – allows users to integrate RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook updates, e-mail and other programs into the site so people have a central place where all of their work-related communications go.

“It becomes a place that you go to instead of going to your e-mail first,” Schippers said. “You come onto Workstreamer because you see all of your information.”

People can sign up for a public account or companies can get a private domain for their employees. Accessing the program has been by invitation only so far, but will be opened to the public in the next couple of weeks. It will be offered for free at first, with charges for some features and new applications in the future.

About 10 large companies and six to eight smaller ones are currently using the program, Schippers said. Workstreamer LLC is focused on selling its product to large professional technology services companies, making sure the software especially meets their needs before expanding to other markets.

Development of the program has cost $500,000 to $750,000 so far, Schippers said. Austin Ventures’ backing has allowed Workstreamer to develop faster and go after bigger competitors, as well as provide access to major companies that are potential customers and help the founders develop their business model.

“They invested in us and sort of nurtured us,” Schippers said, “but they let us be who we wanted to be and really helped guide us but not micromanage us.”

However, the relationship also means that the Workstreamer founders will have to give up a big stake in their company to pay back the financing during this next round of raising capital, Schippers said. Austin Ventures is one of the firms proposing to invest more money in the start-up.

The venture capital firm came to the rescue at a time when Schippers and Huleatt needed the money. An acquisition deal fell through when the recession hit last fall, and Schippers and Huleatt were forced to pitch their idea to investors for funds to continue to develop their program. “We were fortunate because there were a lot of companies all over the country that really fell apart during those times,” Schippers said.

Schippers, who graduated with a degree in history and education and taught fourth grade for a year before returning to his passion for technology, is focused on the operations and development of the Workstreamer program. Huleatt, based in Brooklyn, is focused on business development and marketing. The company also has a product director and five programmers, one of whom Schippers has never met in person; he found the person’s information online and interviewed him through Skype.

The team has stayed in touch through Workstreamer, often checking in early in the morning as people grab their coffee and breakfast and updating their activities throughout the day.

“We’re building an incredibly complex piece of software and nobody is going into a central office and the technologies are enabling,” said Schippers, who works out of a home office in an apartment near Main Street in Ames when he’s not traveling to New York or Texas. “The stronger the technology gets, the easier that becomes.”

The next round of financing not only will allow Workstreamer to hire more people, but also allow the team to continue work on new features, such as a “managerial dashboard,” where a manager can track things such as employees’ activities and how they relate to the company’s goals for the month.

But the competition to make it against big companies such as Microsoft is steep.

“We’re going to be going against some big players that have more money than we will, that have the infrastructure in place, so making sure we have the support in place when we launch the company and really hit the market (is important),” Schippers said. “We have the foundation in place to support it and grow.”