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.

This month we caught up with Annie Normandin, a producer with Frame Studio located Montreal, Quebec. FRAME starting using Cozimo less than three months ago and it has quickly become an integral part of their production workflow.

Hi Annie. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Frame Studio.

FRAME is a motion design and VFX studio that produces animated content for all types of applications. We do animated work for commercials.  We do visual animations and broadcast packaging for TV shows or documentaries. We’ve also done a few big projects for live events that used animated projections.

What type of clients do you work with?

We work mainly for ad agencies or production houses. Some ad agencies come directly to us for certain small projects and if it requires a shoot we’ll work with production houses. That’s the nature of the industry – we’re often collaborating with many different companies and freelancers on any given project.

How have you been using Cozimo?

We have two facilities – one located here in Montreal and the other one in Quebec City. So we started off using Cozimo primarily to help us manage our internal production workflow and exchange feedback. It’s a great communication tool for dealing with digital media and pretty much everyone in our company is using it now on a daily basis.

Have you been using Cozimo for client reviews?

More and more. We recently completed a production where we were working with a freelance director who was on assignment in Toronto. We used Cozimo extensively to manage the feedback loop and to hold online production meetings with him and other consultants.

What was the response?

Since we were previously working with FTP and email, it took a bit of an adjustment at first but once we got started people got very excited about it. Being able to watch and work together on a video through a web browser is very cool. In fact, I understand that you’ll be picking up two or three new customers from this experience.

So has Cozimo proven to be a cost effective solution for you?

No question. We’re using Cozimo more and more and the gains in efficiency are immense. It has absolutely made our feedback process faster and it’s also helped  us avoid mistakes because we can communicate and discuss the content visually and interactively. In this economic climate we have to be careful to keep our costs under control and Cozimo has definitely been a big help in that regard.

Today we introduced a number of improvements to our branding functionality for customers at our Plus level plans (and higher). With our previous version, you were able to replace the Cozimo logo in the upper left corner of the workspace with a custom logo for each workgroup. You had the option of putting your company logo there or a logo to represent the client or project itself. We have now introduced an option for you to upload a default logo that will always be displayed in the top left corner unless you specifically provide one for an individual workgroup to override it. For instructions on how to set up all the branding options that are now available visit our Help page here.

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.