Here’s a great new video just posted on Intruders TV of Cozimo’s chief engineer, Juan Pablo Di Lelle, showing Cozimo at our recent launch at DEMO 08. Clearly, Juan’s a natural in front of the camera (thought, as he points out, the wine helped : )

Just back from California and our big DEMO launch. The week started off with a nice send off article in the Montreal Gazette about our Montreal-based team and the 2 other Montreal-based companies who were attending (xtra-normal and Standout Jobs). We joined up in Palm Springs with our Berkeley based CEO, Joshua Rosen, who had the honor (and pressure) of presenting Cozimo to the world in a live 6 minute demo.

The challenge for us was getting across the idea of real-time media collaboration with only one demo screen (a limitation because the event was broadcast live). To accomplish this we enlisted the help of one of our customers – Millions of Us – who are using Cozimo to collaborate on the creation of the new web episodic What is Scion City. During the presentation we dropped in and joined the team in a real-time session to review the latest home page changes and video episode with people based in the US, Italy and France – a risky venture but in the end, it went off without a hitch.

While most of the public attention was focused on the live presentation, just as important to us was the chance to follow up with people in the more informal setting of the demo pavilion. Here we were able to show the product and talk in more detail about our product and plans with investors and journalists. It was also a good opportunity to meet some of the other companies who were there – a number of which we think could be good partners as we move forward.

All in all, we were very impressed with the professionalism and high production standards of the event. And judging from the amount of positive press we are receiving (and new customers signing up) it was a great way to launch.

We’re excited to announce that we will be officially launching Cozimo at DEMO 08 on January 28 in Palm Spring, CA. DEMO was started over 16 years ago by Chris Shipley, a leading technology author and journalist, as a way of showcasing promising new technology companies. It’s now regarded as one of the leading launch pads for new companies and attracts all the players, investment firms, and press. Chris personally interviews all the applicants and is extremely selective – only 70 companies of hundreds of applicants get accepted. So it’s very gratifying for us to be given the opportunity.

The format is pretty unique – presenters have all of six minutes to give a live demonstration of their product. No PowerPoints, canned demos or company presentations are allowed. It’s very professionally produced and makes for quite an impressive show. If you’ve never seen it, you can catch many presentations from prior years on their website (actually makes for an entertaining tutorial on the do’s and don’ts of live presenting). Aside from the presentations there’s another 3 days to show and talk about Cozimo at the DEMO pavilion, network, and basically build as much buzz as possible.

If you’re interested in attending, you can use the link in the banner above to get a discount on the registration fee. Otherwise, we’ll be sure to keep you posted daily here on the Cozimo blog. We have a lot of big plans for Cozimo in 2008 and this will be an exciting way to kick it off.

This week we’re very excited to unveil a new collaboration project that we’ve been developing with Jeff Mottle of CGarchitect.com, a leading online magazine that caters to CG artists and production companies who do architectural design visualizations and rendering. One of the more popular features of the site is the gallery section, where CG artists can show off the latest examples of their work. In the past, these galleries have always been something of a one-way show but now we have added a whole new dimension to the experience by integrating Cozimo’s real-time collaboration tool directly into the gallery itself. Now visitors can actively engage and collaborate on any image, leaving markups and comments or even interactively discussing the work in real-time with other online participants. As far as we know, providing this level of collaboration is a first for any online magazine. We’re hoping this will be the first of many such efforts on our part to help promote and support more collaboration in creative online communities. We also make functionality like this available for integration into private websites and client extranets. If you’re interested to learn more about this feature please contact us.

Last weekend we saw the largest musical collaboration to date in an effort to trigger a global movement to solve global warming. Live Earth, brought together 100 artists in concerts on every continent. The event was covered by an impressive media architecture reaching 2 billion people through TV, radio, Internet and Satellite channels. One of the goals of concert organizers was to try to minimize the environment impact of the concerts themselves by following a set of “Green Event Guidelines”. It was nice to hear about Cozimo playing a role in the design and development of the sets used for the Canadian concerts staged in Toronto, Ontario. Andrzej Wojaczek, whose company, Advanced Graphics Applications worked on the design with the CTV television network, reported,“Cozimo fit right in with the spirit of this event because first, it’s a completely paperless way to distribute and get feedback on the design, and second, it saves us from doing a lot of unnecessary driving to meet with the clients. In fact, given the incredibly tight deadlines we were under, we would not have been able to pull this off without using Cozimo. It’s a great example of how being more efficient and cost-effective can also have a positive environmental impact.”