collaboration

The writers' strike is over, now go celebrate with Plotbot

Writing a screenplay is tricky business. To help structure the process, a handful of software developers have stepped up to create programs that help writers build up their works; but what if you want to pull a Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and co-write something? Check out Plotbot, a collaborative, Web based screenplay writing tool that lets you write alone or with others.

The best part about the service may be that the editing tool is not just a blank canvas, but it also lets you build up a project from the ground up. You can set the rights usage restrictions, the MPAA rating you're shooting for (which is basically a quick way to show others the content of your script), and a pitch about the project to get the interest of others who can join your project as fans, or full-fledged contributors.

When it actually comes time to write the script, the process goes through a small, simple editor that lets you swap between sluglines, action cues, and dialogue. Each line is automatically formatted on the fly, and can be edited simply by clicking on them, making building up a scene fast and intuitive.

The entire production is very webby. There are tags and favoriting tools for everything, and each project gets its own page that serves as a home base to track recent activity, shared documents, and a history of all the changes made to the project since its inception. Also, to help keep track up of updates, members can subscribe to the project's RSS feed.

When all is done, users can print out their work, or save it as a XML document, or RTF file, which can be imported into Final Draft, one of the more popular pieces of screenwriting software.

If this whets your appetite, be sure to check out the 140novel, a novel written by CNET's own Tom Merrit and Molly Wood alongside tech personality Leo Laporte. The entire thing is being written in Twitter.… Read more

Zimbra's new Desktop: Look ma, no browser!

I fell in love with Zimbra's Ajax-style interface the first time I saw it.

Slick, powerful, and much more extensible than Microsoft Outlook ever dreamed of being. There was just one thing I hated about the Zimbra experience: the browser artifacts around the application that made me feel like I was stuck in a Web site, rather than living in an application that just happened to leverage the power of the Web.

No more. For the past few weeks I've been using Zimbra's new Prism-based Desktop. Verdict? It rocks. Take a look at the UI below:… Read more

Web 2.0 won't pay the bills, but collaboration will

Sometimes it's all in how you ask the question. As Dan Farber at ZDNet reports, Forrester asked a wide range of enterprises how much they plan to spend on Web 2.0 technologies (plumbing), and then asked essentially the same question but focused on what that plumbing can create - social collaboration - and found that purchasing interest was much higher:

Collaboration is increasingly a big business. Just ask Microsoft which minted $1 billion on Sharepoint in 2007, making Sharepoint Microsoft's fastest-growing product (measured in terms of revenue) ever.… Read more

Box.net adds group collaboration to personal Web storage

Box.net added a really cool, and useful collaboration feature to its online storage service yesterday. Any user can right click a folder and choose a new collaboration option that lets them invite anyone to gain access to those files, either as an editor or viewer. Box.net has always had the option of linking to the file, or sharing a grouping of files with everyone, or a just a small group of people via its premium service and snazzy widgets; however, this new addition is more advanced.

Once a user becomes a collaborator, the shared folder will show up … Read more

Now Yahoo's, Zimbra takes mail and documents offline

At Zimbra, the game plan remains largely the same, even after consumer Web giant Yahoo acquired the company last year for $350 million. But what happens if Microsoft succeeds in its acquisition of Yahoo?

Zimbra on Tuesday will release a new version of its e-mail and collaboration software, with features for reading mail and creating documents offline from a Web browser.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 also adds support for BlackBerry clients and Java 2 mobile-equipped phones and now has integrated instant messaging.

The features were part of Zimbra's product plans before Yahoo acquired it and its business plan … Read more

Make iPhone the company workhorse

Get to work, iPhone. As far as HyperOffice president Farzin Arsanjani is concerned, you've spent too much time avoiding real work.

If he has his way, your days loafing around in back pockets while the other mobile devices pull their weight are over. That's why HyperOffice (review) recently announced a plan to make its suite of online collaboration tools even better on the iPhone (trial beta).

While the productivity application for rapid-growth companies has already been accessible from mobile browsers, certain functions are limited within a constrained user interface. The iPhone, with its large screen and Safari browser, … Read more

Collaborate in real time with Cozimo

Cozimo is a tool for real-time collaboration around photos and videos.

It promises tight synchronization--at the exact frame level in videos--when multiple viewers are online, and a timeline-based annotation system that sounds a bit like Viddler's video-commenting feature.

Founder Joshua Rosen, who presented his product at Demo 08 Wednesday morning, said the genesis for Cozimo was a bit of desperation. Working on the artwork for the movie Peter Pan several years ago, Rosen and his team were split up all over the world and finding it hard to find time to edit images and video for the film. His … Read more

Google's Schmidt urges NASA to "create more luck" through open development

In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.

While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it

...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.… Read more

What Ronaldinho and soccer can teach you about innovation

It's been a lackluster soccer season so far, especially in my favorite league, the Spanish Primera Division. The performances of the two top teams, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona (Barca), have been inconsistent, and while both have displayed some exceptional skills in their best matches, the passion, the surprise, and the big drama, all of which crucial elements of soccer's unique appeal, have been largely missing.

There is hope that this will change on Sunday when the two archrivals battle each other for the first time this season, in the derby of derbies, "El Cl?sico," … Read more

Changing the rules of enterprise software

I spent some time on the phone Wednesday with Mike Herrick of the Collaborative Software Initiative. I knew Mike back when he was at Liberty Mutual, building out its open-source team. When Mike left to join CSI, I wondered what would cause someone with a great job in a Fortune 100 enterprise to join a start-up.

Today, things became a bit clearer.

Remember Avalanche? It was an open-source co-op formed by several major enterprises (Best Buy, Wells Fargo, etc.) to share code in areas of common need (call centers, for example) but little to no competitive overlap. The idea was to share code and thereby improve innovation while lowering costs.

CSI is similar in its aims, but I think it's a better approach to the problem because it should do a better job of coordinating collaboration. CSI's mission is to:

build communities of like-minded IT leaders to reduce software development costs, accelerate compliance and consolidate project timelines.

CSI does this by helping to bring different companies to collaborate on IT projects that each individually needs, but that can be done more cost effectively as a collective. So, for example, perhaps CSI found that Credit Suisse needed to develop a trading platform. As it turns out, this is a common need for Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and other financial services companies. So, CSI would then approach these other companies to gauge interest and then to coordinate the development.… Read more