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.

When it was first introduced, the iPhone immediately intrigued us as a potential platform for collaborating on rich media. With its larger screen size, support for Safari (the “real web” as Apple puts it) and touch screen interface, it seemed like it would be the ideal convenience for creative people on the move. Now with faster Internet access of the new version, the device is even more compelling.

Unfortunately, our initial enthusiasm for the iPhone was somewhat dampened by the lack of Flash support which forms an important component of our collaborative interface (not quite the “real web”). Depending on who you listen to, this omission is simply a temporary limitation of the platform/software (the party line) or else it’s a strategic move on the part of Steve Jobs to thwart the wide adoption of the Flash format as mobile standard in favor of their own solutions.

In any event, we’ve always made the effort with Cozimo to be technology agnostic and so we continue undeterred with our efforts to develop a unique collaborative mobile solution. We only use Flash to collaborate and for multi-file upload so most of Cozimo worked out of the box. As a second step, it is now possible to review images together with their annotations and notes (which are displayed in a format better suited to the smaller screen size). This means that you can now review the feedback you receive while on the go and also respond using the built in messaging system. Moving forward we will next introduce functionality for uploading images from the iPhone (perfect for dealing with on-site problems) as well as provide basic annotation tools so you can collaborate in real-time with your team members.

Last week was our chance to get out from behind our computers for a while and get in front of customers by attending not one – but two back-to-back conferences in Boston.

The big event of the week was the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). This major conference and tradeshow attracted over 15,000 architects from around the US who came to participate in continuing education and learn about the latest products and services. The theme this year was “We the People” with the focus on the responsibilities of architects to engage the public in designing for a more sustainable world. This is a theme close to our hearts and over the course of the three-day event we had the opportunity to speak with many participants about the benefits – both in productivity and sustainability – of using Cozimo for online review and collaboration. Most of the architects were extremely receptive with many expressing how they’ve been looking for exactly the type of service that Cozimo offers. For a profession as traditionally entrenched in paper as architecture, it’s an encouraging sign of progress.

In conjunction with AIA convention was VisMasters Design Modeling and Visualization Conference. This event was a far more intimate affair, attracting 350 specialists involved in design visualization for the architecture and building community. This group is ahead of the curve when it comes to using fully digital workflows and Cozimo is, in fact, already used by many of the leading firms who were present. In the more informal setting of this conference, we had a good opportunity to engage current and prospective customers in discussions regarding their needs and our priorities for future development. Kudos to Jeff Mottle and the crew at VisMasters for organizing a great event.

This year’s VisMasters Design Modeling and Visualization Conference is being held in Boston, May 12-13, and we’re very pleased to be one of the sponsors this year. In fact, it was at DMVC two years ago that Randal Stevens and Jeff Mottle of VisMasters and CGarchitect.com generously gave us the opportunity to preview our alpha version of Cozimo to the attendees and many of our current customers go back to that event. So it will be great to get back and show everyone how far we’ve come since those early days.

DMVC is really the only conference of its kind in North America to specifically address the needs of architects, designers, artists and CG producers who are involved in 3D design visualization. It brings together some of the best speakers and instructors from around the world for two intensive days of sessions dealing with the latest technologies and techniques. Speaking from experience, it’s also a great informal event to meet and learn from a very passionate group of interesting people doing some incredible CG work. If you’re in the field, it’s well worth attending. And as sponsors we can save you $50 on the registration if you use the promo code – dmvc08cozimo – when registering. See you there!

Last week we were back in California, presenting Cozimo at Under The Radar. This is one of the better run conferences in the valley where new companies get to make their pitch in front of a panel industry experts – what Kara Swisher (a tech journalist for the Wall Street Journal) calls a “geek version of American Idol”. The theme for this event was “The Business of Web Apps”. There were 40 companies invited and we were part of the track called “Working Together”.

With only 6 minutes to present we decide to try something different this time – running the whole presentation as a live collaborative session. So in addition to image and video examples we also presented our slides within Cozimo and collaborated on them in real-time as the presentation proceeded. It did add some fun improvisation and in the end did a great job of illustrating what we’re all about. In the discussion that followed we garnered high points from the panel for the quality of our technology.

After the high pressure of DEMO, one of the nicer aspects of UTR was the more relaxed atmosphere with plenty of opportunity to mingle and speak with the VCs, journalists and other companies who attended. While it does help generate some buzz for our efforts, probably the most valuable aspect is learning about what other companies are up to, meeting the principals, and (in keeping with the theme) finding some promising opportunities to work together.

Today we are happy to announce the public beta release of our latest collaborative experiment: a Cozimo WordPress plugin! That’s right – now rather than just displaying an image or a video as a static participant in your blog posts, you can use the plugin to enable a dynamic media experience where readers can chat, draw and comment directly on your images and videos. You can even use the plugin to collaborate in real-time with others and to synchronize the playback of a video so that everyone is watching the same frame at the same time.

We hope this functionality will open new opportunities for how blogs can be used in professional, educational, creative or just plain fun applications. Try it out for yourself! The beta plugin is available free of charge for installed versions of WordPress.org. You can get all the information you need to download and install it here.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!