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!

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.

During his keynote address for Enterprise 2.0 last June, Andrew McAffee, a professor at Harvard made the interesting observation that “Email is virtually everyone’s current endowment of collaboration software.” Email, of course, was originally designed for sending and receiving messages and for that common task it’s an unprecedented success. Today, over 90% of Internet users use email. And with email so ubiquitous – especially in business - it’s easy to understand why we try wrangle it into doing tasks that it was not really designed to support – including review and collaboration. But as the Google Docs video above so nicely illustrates, when it comes to working on content together with a team, email alone can have a lot of drawbacks:

• Sending attachments makes it difficult to track versions over time and ensure that everyone is always working with the latest content.
• Email does not let you hold a conversation with more than one person at a time.
• Email does not provide a convenient record. Any markups made on visual content like images and video cannot be searched for from an email.
• Email is not generally integrated with project content.

Today project managers have a wide variety of communication tools to take advantage of in running a project (email, IM, VoIP) and all have their role to play in a collaborative workflow. The challenge arises in trying to coordinate and track communication as it relates to the content being developed. Google Docs represents a new apprach to the problem by integrating documents with various modes of communication from one easily-accessible web-based service. Cozimo takes the approach further for creative and design professionals by supporting rich media content like images, video and PDF files and letting you collaborate together with your team directly on the content itself when the needs arises. Old habits die hard, but as one of our customers so aptly put it “until you start using it (Cozimo) on a project it’s hard to appreciate just how much smarter the approach really is.”