One of the trends we noticed quite early on in our Beta program was how many people found their way to Cozimo from all over the world. That’s a trend we want to encourage because it’s really at the core of what Cozimo is about – helping people to work and create together regardless of where they live. We designed the Cozimo interface to support multiple languages and as we move forward we will be continually adding support for new ones. To get started, we recently added support for both French and Spanish. Our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. In fact, one of our first reviews came out in French at Les infonews d’ARCH’image.

With the exploding popularity of video, driven by websites like You Tube, there’s a growing demand for tools that give people fast and easy ways to put their shows together. One of the most exciting recent features of Cozimo is its support for video collaboration that lets any team of people review and markup a video clip together online. This feature has been raising some eyebrows and was recently discussed on David Strom’s Web Informant blog.

The way the video collaboration works is very straightforward. First, you upload any Quicktime, avi, Flash or windows media file to a collaboration folder. After upload you can invite people in your workgroup to review it just as you would any other item. A reviewer can play the video, stop at any frame and leave annotations and notes. As you play the video any drawings or notes will fade in and out as the frame passes. Annotated frames are also “bookmarked” in the scrub bar and can be easily jumped to using the “next” or “previous” annotation arrows in the control panel.

If you want to hold a group review, simply get everyone together on the same page (just post a message to the people you want). Then activate “Presenter Mode” and start playing the video. The video will start playing for all the participants and will be synchronized to the same frame. If you jump ahead or pause on a frame, every participant will end up on the same frame. Then you can start your discussion or chat while drawing on the frame together to clarify the points that are being made. All the notes will be maintained on the video and can later be referenced or printed out for making revisions to the original.

Distributing, reviewing and obtaining feedback has always been one of the toughest challenges for video producers (much tougher than for static images). Cozimo makes it easy with this powerful new feature. Try it out and let us know what you think.

We recently made significant improvements to the way in which online meetings can be synchronized using Cozimo. If you are online together with a number of people reviewing the content in a collaboration folder, any person can click on the Presentation Mode link next to the navigation arrows to take control of the navigation. The name of the person presenting will then be displayed to all participants. If desired, another person can take control by clicking on the name of the current presenter.

When the person in control clicks on a navigation arrow to advance to the next or previous item, all people who are looking at that same item will advance at the same time. If a meeting participant happens to have independently moved away from the currently presented item (or comes to the meeting late) the presenter mode changes to “join session”. Clicking on this link will then advance the person to the item currently being presented.

If a multi-page PDF or Video clip is being presented, then all meeting participants will be synchronized to be viewing the same page or video frame as the presenter. Note that zoom and pan functions are not synchronized between participants so as to not interfere with any drawing that a person may be doing. A presenter (or any participant for that matter) can draw people’s attention to a particular region of the screen by using the “Region of Interest” tool.