Today we’re launching a new service in our ongoing support of creative collaboration: an online app we’ve dubbed “Collaborate Now”. While our primary Cozimo application is designed specifically to support creative professionals with ongoing projects in private workgroups, the idea behind Collaborate Now is to make image collaboration as easy and convenient as possible. No account is required – just upload an image, share, and collaborate. As with our main application, you can give feedback either individually or work together in real-time. For example, if you use Skype (or another IM/VOIP application) you can upload the image you want to talk about to Collaborate Now, cut and paste the URL into the Skype Chat and immediately start to “whiteboard” on the image to help communicate your discussion points. In addition to images, our new Firefox extension also lets you screengrab and collaborate on any web page – great for web designers.

Our goal with Collaborate Now is to introduce people to the benefits of online collaboration on visual media and the simplicity of using Cozimo by providing a simple, practical (and free!) application. By allowing Collaborate Now to be embeddable, we’re also looking to use it as a way to explore and support new approaches to creative collaboration and education through integration with existing web services and social/professional networks. So check it out at http://collaboratenow.cozimo.com  and let us know what you think. We’re eager to hear your feedback on the functionality as well as the ways in which you use it. As we hear about new ideas we’ll share them here with the community.