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

Using Cozimo in conjunction with a project management application is a straightforward process:

1. Create a Cozimo workgroup that includes the people who have access to the project.
2. When you have a set of files that you want reviewed, create a collaboration folder and upload the files (reorder them if desired).
3. Click on the “Collaborate” tab of the folder to access the first file and then click on “Link” to display the URL



4. Copy it and then paste it into the message, task or milestone of your project management application.

When the specified team members receive notification of the new message, they click on the Cozimo link and the Cozimo workspace will open in a new window. They can use the thumbnails to navigate through the files that have been uploaded and leave their comments and markups.

Reviews can also be conducted in real-time by clicking on “Start presentation”. Team members can return at any time to review all the annotations that have been made by themselves and others.

On this Earth Day, with Mt. Eyjafjallajökull still actively billowing its disruptive ash, we’re given yet another opportunity to contemplate man’s relative impotence in the face of nature’s power. By volcanic standards, this one is really considered something of a minor event. I like to think of it as something of a karmic reminder from Mother Earth that we cannot take our position on this planet for granted or become too overconfident that our technological solutions alone can save us. So while the atmosphere got a short reprieve from the 344,000 tons of CO2 released every day through the European aviation, stranded travelers were also given the opportunity to think twice about the necessity of all these millions of flights we make every year. I was encouraged to see one frustrate traveler get the message in a recent New York Times post:

“Myself and 12 others from our company have been stuck in London since last Friday, we only came here for a two day workshop. Why do people fly across the Atlantic for one-day meetings or two-day workshops anyway? What an insane waste of jet fuel, time and effort, especially in an age of Internet and teleconferencing. Lots and lots of gratuitous long-distance air travel going on, which will likely be harshly re-examined when the (pardon the pun) dust has settled.”

We’re pleased to announce a new partnership with Clarizen – a robust, easy-to-use online project management platform that provides a complete suite of integrated tools for ensuring that your projects run efficiently and are aligned to meet your business objectives. Unlike most project management systems that tend to focus on the management aspects of a project, Clarizen offers a more “user-centric” workflow that benefits the individual team member and facilitates team collaboration – an approach that makes it particularly appealing for creative media projects involving many internal and external stakeholders.

Cozimo offers a natural extension to Clarizen’s centralized approach to content management by allowing users to review and provide feedback and collaborate directly on any rich media content that may be posted. This combination provides a complete and cost-effective solution for organizations looking for a more advanced and integrated approach to project management and digital content collaboration. Try the solution out for yourself by signing up for a free 30-day trial of Clarizen.

Hi Boaz. Why don’t you start out by telling me about Studio216?

We’re a visual communications company that specializes in “storytelling” -  creating 3D animations, video and renderings to help design and market capital construction projects. The kinds of clients we typically work with are architects, developers, municipalities that are in the process of starting capital or construction projects.

How did you get started using Cozimo?

Our work requires a lot of coordination with our clients.  In past years, we got by using email and using some web conferencing products but it was all very inefficient. We really needed a way to combine the asynchronous and synchronous feedback and organize the whole process. We also wanted our clients to have a convenient tool that could support drawing and note annotations. Sometime the notes can be more important that the scribbles and in the past it was sometimes difficult to make sense of a lot of the feedback we were getting. Having everyone use the drawing and note tools in Cozimo keeps it consistent and clear.

You mention asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. How do you find yourselves using Cozimo most often?

Well my goal would really be to work as asynchronously as possible. It’s a lot more time efficient to let the client review the content internally and add notes on their own time. But there are also times when we have to talk through something together and it’s important to be able to get online and point things out. I used to spend a lot of time marking things up and making notes after having conversations with clients. Cozimo is much more efficient because now we can just make and share the notes as we talk. And whether the clients leave notes on their own or we work together it’s all recorded in one central location that I can share with the staff.

Are you using Cozimo often?

Absolutely – every day. It’s an indispensable tool for us now.

How do your clients like it?

They’re very pleased. There’s a bit of a learning curve but not a steep one. Once they get going they love it.

From a business perspective, has Cozimo proven to be cost-effective for you?

I would say that Cozimo is saving me 2 to 3 hours a day that I use to spend just collecting, interpreting and organizing client feedback for the production staff. It’s a huge time savings for us.

You’ve been using Cozimo now for over a year now. How have you found the reliability and support?

It’s great. What’s nice is that when I have a question or a problem I can pick up the phone or Skype and speak directly with someone on the product team. That was especially helpful when we were getting started. But, it’s been a while now since I’ve had to have any support.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to read the latest book by David Coleman – 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration. As the founder and director of Collaborative Strategies, David has been involved in the collaboration world since 1989. He’s a leading analyst, author and public speaker who has consulted with many of the top vendors in the collaboration industry. His blog is a great source for insightful information on current trends. I first met David myself at an Enterprise 2.0 conference back in 2007 and since then he’s provided us with much valuable advice on our own business development.

This is David’s fourth book dealing with collaboration, though his other books have tended to have more of an academic flavor. What I found so effective about this book was the simplicity of the format with which the ideas were presented. Each rule was concisely presented in a page or two. You can read through the book in about an hour or two and take away many valuable insights to help your business. I also liked the way that the book itself was developed as a collaborative undertaking, with over 3/4 of the rules being contributed by people from various fields who relate the collaboration issues they’ve addressed first hand in their organizations. This gives the book a diverse and very practical perspective.

As examples, here are the top 10 rules that I thought were most relevant to our mission with Cozimo:

• Rule 2 – Know Why You Are Collaborating
• Rule 4 – Include All of Your Stakeholders
• Rule 7 – Structured Communications Support Successful Collaboration
• Rule 22 – Accountability Is the Next Step in Collaboration
• Rule 25 – Collaboration Can Make Projects More Successful
• Rule 31 – Collaboration Tools Should Be Easy
• Rule 34 – Communication Improves with Collaboration Technologies
• Rule 38 – Persistence Is Critical
• Rule 39 – Use Visual Technologies for Collaboration
• Rule 40 – It Is Easier to Move Bits than Butts

To get the full story in a fast and easy read,  I would highly recommend picking up a copy of this very insightful and practical book. You can order it online here.

This month we take a more detailed look at one of the more powerful features of Cozimo – the ability to review and annotate video. Cozimo’s system allows any number of remote team members to play and annotate a video from any standard web browser. Members can review videos on their own or you can have online meetings where the playback and annotation are fully synchronized between all participants. To optimize the real-time performance of the system, we recommend that video files posted for review and feedback not be larger than necessary for the type of feedback required (there is a 60 MB per file limit).

Formats and Encoding – Cozimo supports most popular video formats, including QuickTime (.mov), MPEG (.mpg, .mp4), AVI, Windows media (.wmv) and Flash video (.flv). When formats other than .flv are uploaded an .flv proxy is created for the purposes of playback and review. Because the encoding occurs on the fly at upload, there may be a delay between the time that the file uploads and the thumbnail of the file appears in the file tab indicating that it is available for review. This delay is usually a few minutes but it can sometimes take quite a bit longer if the file is large (or the encoding server very busy).

The encoding parameters have been set to preserve the resolution and quality of the original file as much as possible though with any encoding process there can be variations so it’s a good idea to check the result prior to distribution if this can be an issue. You can maintain complete control of the quality by uploading your own .flv files. This way you avoid the encoding delay as well.

Playback  and Annotation – During playback, video files are progressively downloaded to the browser (not streamed). You can start playing the video clip after 20% of the file has downloaded. File download progress is indicated as an orange line in the scrub bar:

Use the buttons or hotkeys to control the playback as shown below:

Click on the label above the controls to toggle between a timecode display or frame count:

Stop on any keyframe to make annotations on it as you would on any image. Frames that have annotations on them are indicated with a blue marker in the timeline. By default, Cozimo inserts a keyframe at every six frames during the encoding process. If you upload your own .flv files you can insert keyframes at any frequency you wish.

To synchronize the playback of the video between multiple collaborators, click on “Presenter Mode”. While in presenter mode you can play the video or scrub to any keyframe and all participants will be synchronized to the same frame. When you stop to annotate all participants can “whiteboard” on the same frame together. If a participant moves off the synchronized playback to view the video independently, the presenter can re-synchronize the participant by pausing and restarting the playback. Any collaborator can click on Presenter Mode at any time to take control of the playback.

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 a new partnership with Chalex Corp. of Grasonville, MD. We first met the CEO of Chalex, Murray Oles back during our launch at DEMO 08 where he and his partner, Gary Bollinger, were also unveiling their latest product – a web-based marketing resource management system call BizFlo.  The latest release of BizFlo now offers a new annotation module that was built using Cozimo’s real-time Image Collaboration Environment (ICE).

BizFlo is really quite a unique product. It’s one of the few web-based solutions on the market to combine a fully featured asset management system with multi-level workflow management tools based on the XPDL standard (developed by the Workflow Management Coalition). A major client, IDL Worldwide (a division of Mathews International) uses it to manage the routing and scheduling of hundreds of concurrent point-of-sale projects for companies such as GNC, BP and Chevron.  Now with Cozimo’s ICE integrated with the platform, the company can also solicit and track more accurate feedback directly on the content and conduct live synchronized review sessions.

I asked Murray to comment on the response they’ve been receiving so far from their customers:

The integration of Cozimo with BizFlo was a natural fit.  Customer’s training was handled in 3 seconds.  “Hold the shift key and click on the thumbnail to launch and interact with Cozimo”.  With Cozimo and the BizFlo activity log with version control a complete history of the graphic lifecycle of every job is at the customer’s finger tips.This has certainly improved productivity for the review and approval process so naturally, they’ve been very pleased with this additional functionality.