Dear Cozimo Team,

This year Advanced Graphics Applications provided again Design Management services for MuchMusic Video Awards 2010′ stages.

On behalf of 25 members from 17 companies, working together for last 6 months, I would like to thank you for the excellent on-line collaboration experience!

Sunday (June 20, 2010) broadcast of the 2010 MuchMusic Video Awards goes down in history as the most-watched broadcast of any program ever on MuchMusic. Ten thousand fans descended on MuchMusic HQ to get up-close-and-personal with homegrown A-list stars Justin Bieber and Drake, as well as co-host Miley Cyrus and scores of other artists and celebs.

Andre Wojaczek

Last week, the winners of the annual CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards were announced at the Mundos Digitales Conference in La Coruna Spain. In recent years, the field of digital architecture has grown into a significant specialty of the digital media world – a fact recognized by the inclusion in this year’s conference of a dedicated digital architecture track alongside the more traditional fields of Animation, Vfx and Games. A review of the winning entries and nominations shows just how far this field has advanced with the quality of productions often surpassing both the technical and creative standards of many Hollywood films. Our congratulations to all of this years winners and nominees.

Now in its sixth year, the CGarchitect 3D awards have become widely recognized as the “Academy Awards” of the field. Organized by Jeff Mottle, founder of CGarchitect.com, the event now attracts over 1200 entries from dozens of countries around the globe to compete in ten categories. A panel of twelve industry leaders reviewed all the entries to first nominate the finalists in each category and then to select the winners. With the judges themselves spread over three continents, Cozimo helped out by providing a platform to facilitate the distribution of the entries and the sharing of feedback during the judging process. “What’s become apparent”, Jeff observed “is just how international this field has become over the years. With tools like Cozimo, talented artists and producers from countries all over the globe can collaborate effectively with partners or clients anywhere in the world. It’s really changing the dynamics of the industry.”

Last week over 6000 lucky fans were treated to Toronto’s biggest annual block party – the Much Music Video Awards. The show, produced and broadcast live from downtown Toronto by CTVglobe media featured an all-star musical lineup including the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas. And while naturally most of the focus is on the musical talent, we would like to focus the spotlight for a moment on the other stars of the night – the production teams that worked tirelessly to pull off such a brilliant spectacle. This was no minor effort. Designed by Michael “Spike” Parks, the set used for this one night extravaganza required over 6 months of design, planning and development involving dozens of people from at least five different organizations (read the full story here).

The design development was coordinated by Andre “Vinci” Wojaczek (Advanced Graphics Applications) who used Cozimo as the primary tool for managing the review of design drawings and documents amongst all the various collaborators involved. This isn’t the first time that Andre and Spike have used Cozimo together for this event but this year, they said, the big difference was in how central a role it played with the entire extended project team and how readily people adopted using it. “The key,” related Andre, “was that regardless of the software programs the different consultants were using to create their design data, Cozimo allowed everyone to share and provide feedback on all of it from their web browsers. That made the whole process much easier for everyone involved and played an important role in keeping the project on track.”

We’re pleased to announce our partnership with Flypaper Studio. We met Flypaper last year when we both launched at Demo 08 and immediately saw the synergies that existed with our offerings. Flypaper produces an intuitive and robust desktop application for producing Flash content. Essentially it removes the complexity of the Flash platform and makes it accessible to non-technical content developers in an application that is as familiar as PowerPoint. This means that organizations can now affordably produce compelling interactive Flash presentations for marketing and training programs in-house. Their latest release of Flypaper introduces the “Flypaper Platform” enterprise solution that provides an integrated content management system for storing, distributing and tracking the progress of a project throughout its development.

Cozimo’s collaboration tools have been integrated into this system so that anyone involved with the project development (both within and external to the organization) can also review and annotate the content either independently or together in real-time. In recognizing the importance and value of a collaborative workflow, Flypaper has really set themselves apart and come up with a unique solution for flash content developers. It’s been great working with the Flypaper team on this project and we’re already looking ahead to future collaborations. To read the complete press release announcing the partnership, click here.

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.