Webware

Review Basics is a collaborative workspace for small teams and businesses. It runs right in your browser, and offers a fairly simple and straightforward way for others to share and leave feedback on photos, video files, and office documents. The interface runs entirely in Flash, so there are no special extensions to download, or programs that need to be installed on your computer. Just start up a workspace and go.

Review Basics works with a variety of common office document standards like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF. It also can handle uploading an entire zipped folder, so if you get a zipped attachment in an e-mail, you can upload it straight to the service without having to unpack it and send files one at a time. Review Basics also handles videos, although they have to be in the .FLV Flash format, which despite its popularity on the Internet, isn't a consumer-friendly standard compared to .MOV and .AVI. Files are capped off at 25MB apiece, so if you're working with any video clip over a minute or two, it's likely to be too large.

To call attention to certain items on a document you can place emoticons and highlight text.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Annotating media is fairly simple. Users get five different tools to mark what's on the screen: boxes, arrows, a highlighter, call-outs, and emoticons. There is no drawing tool, which is one thing I enjoy and make use of on other collaborative workspace services like ConceptShare [hands-on] and Octopz [hands-on]. I think at a basic level it makes things feel familiar, like using a pen. There are still boxes which can be resized and color coded, but for irregularly shaped elements, you're out of luck.

To separate which feedback is being displayed, you can toggle each person's edits on and off. It's a lot like PhotoShop when you show or hide layers, and useful when you have more than two or three people working on a piece of media at a time, as things tend to get crowded.

Review Basics is very versatile for a free app, but it's missing a few things I think would make it far more competitive in this space. I'd like a way to leave audio or video notes. Some people (like me) find it easier to hit a record button, say something and move on, instead of writing it out. I'd also like to see live chat or live video conferencing, something that can take telephones out of the equation for both businesses and customers. The service is planning on moving to a paid model in the future, adding these things would certainly put it in the realm of some of the other services charging monthly fees.

The team has put together a series of hands-on demos you can play with to get a feel for the service. [More screens after the break.]

To make notes on a picture, you can draw arrows, create call-outs, and add highlight boxes. This entire interface runs right in your browser. There's also a personalized area at the bottom for the content creator to leave a note for potential reviewers.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Thirty-two start-ups and 11 established companies pitched their Web-based business products at the Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters event last Friday. That's a lot of productivity right there. Webware bloggers Josh Lowensohn and Erica Ogg covered all the start-up pitches--click the "UTR" tag beneath this blog to read about them.

From the 31 start-ups, we picked five favorites (see video). They are:

• Calgoo has a neat solution for working with schedules from your work and home lives. It's a problem we all have. See previous Webware coverage.

• Sandy is the new e-mail assistant from the team that makes Stikkit. You cc: "Sandy," the e-mail bot, on your correspondence, and the agent will decipher what you're saying, like "let's have lunch tomorrow," and put the right information in your calendar. It will be very cool, if it works. (See also: Wrike.)

• Xcellery adds real-time collaboration to Excel spreadsheets. We like the idea of making the spreadsheet tool, which we all know how to use, into a Web 2.0 application. See previous Webware coverage.

• ConceptShare is a beautiful application for sharing creative work, like photos and layouts. It's targeted at a niche of users (designers and their clients), but it could bring Web-enabled collaboration to a large number of people. See previous Webware coverage.

• WuFoo is my favorite Web application. It's a simple, cheap, and reliable database service masquerading as a forms designer. We use it (and pay for it) at Webware.com. See previous Webware coverage.

Fax machines, couriers, and e-mail are old news. Today's reviewing and meeting apps use the Web to share desktops, photos, and live video.

ConceptShare is a neat reviewing tool. We have reviewed ConceptShare before. VH1 used the professional version of this tool to redesign its Web site. ConceptShare's demo was really slick, showing the crowd a step-by-step brainstorming session on a design for a business card. ConceptShare focuses on asynchronous communication, meaning users note suggestions and changes without the need to have people in the room. It's almost like passing around a story among copy editors. It's less of a net meeting, and more of a sharable whiteboard for documents and media.

SlideAware is a PowerPoint add-in that lets you publish and share PowerPoint presentations via an Office add-in. Once you've clicked the Publish button in PowerPoint, you have the option to control how people can use your presentation, either by limiting how long it will be hosted, or how many times the presentation can be viewed. Think of it like DRM for your presentation. There's also a drag-and-drop interface to customize the order of your slides, depending on who is viewing it. To follow suit with the group theme of these presentations, SlideAware also has online collaboration to create and manage shared presentations with others. We'll have a hands-on look at this soon.

Spresent is a Flash-based presentation creator that comes in both browser and desktop flavors. We got our hands on Spresent in December, and today it's releasing its third version. It uses vector graphics for text and clip art, meaning you can zoom and scale presentations as needed without a reduction in quality. It's marketed as "High Definition" and as a presentation tool for mobile devices.

Vyew is a synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and conferencing product. Presenter Christopher Peri took a bold move and invited Under the Radar attendees to join his live Vyew presentation to show off the product. It was also a brilliant move as nearly everyone who joined had a hands-on demo right in front of them. Peri also showed that Vyew presentations can be embedded in various places like Netvibes and MySpace, something that in all honesty seems like more of a gimmick and less of a needed feature for a presentation tool. Check out our previous coverage of Vyew..

Earlier this week we checked out Buddy Shopping, a collaborative Web browsing tool for shoppers. And today we got word of Yugma, a more general-purpose screen-sharing product. Best of all, it's free and cross-platform. Yugma runs in Java and acts almost like an app outside of the browser.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In Yugma, drivers and passengers can trade place at will--you can swap which desktop is in view. There also are some basic drawing tools, so you can doodle on the screen. (But for serious design review work, you might want a specialized tool like ConceptShare)

Like other screen-sharing and presentation products, Yugma sets up a meeting room of sorts, with a chat box. The messaging isn't quite instant, as there's a second or so delay. Considering how much information is being exchanged, this is acceptable, but the delay could increase with additional users.

Yugma has four different tiers of service, with the free version still being pretty generous at 10 attendees. The paid versions add access for more users at once and business-centric options like networked storage, scheduling, and keyboard and mouse sharing for attendees. Yugma may work as a voice conference tool in the future, although in the current version this function is disabled. The developers apparently are "revamping" voice conferencing, but Skype and Google Talk (or the phone) can still be used in the background.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The one thing we like about this service is the Widget creation tool. You can create about a dozen various buttons to insert into e-mails, Web pages or e-mail signatures. Clicking it will take you to the user-specific conference joining page. This is much easier than sending people to a URL or having to give them log-in instructions.

There are many similar Web conferencing options out there (see Vyew and Unyte), but Yugma offers several levels of service for business users, and Widgets to simplify the joining process. The user interface and the desktop "swap" tool both are implemented very well. You know it's a good app when you don't need to think about how to use it, and Yugma does just that.