My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.
Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.
Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as a template for your next "blist." In addition to monetizing for the enterprise crowd, Blist will start placing ads on the free version.
Cozimo is a video and image collaborative annotation tool (see coverage). It shares a few similarities with FeedbackFX with much more attention on real-time collaboration of rich media documents. Each member in a work group is assigned a layer where they draw and scribble comments, all of which are saved in the session even as it's synchronously presented to the group. Cozimo can also be used asynchronously through a collaboration widget that can be pasted onto any image on any Web site. Like other collaboration tools, there's internal IM, though VoIP services aren't yet part of the equation.
LiquidPlanner's collaborative project management software doesn't gauge your project's progress by how on-target you are; it measures its deficiencies (coverage). LiquidPlanner can calculate schedules and predict using mathematical probability when a project is likely to get done. It also cooks up a range of best and worst case scenarios to project the soonest you'll conclude assuming everything goes right, and how long you'll struggle if everything goes wrong.
LiquidPlanner calculates project management estimates.
SlideShare (coverage) is a site for uploading and sharing PowerPoint, PDFs, and OpenOffice presentations and also folds in some social networking elements like blogging and podcast hosting. CEO Rashmi Sinha said she sees her company traveling more along the LinkedIn model for generating contacts than a YouTube for all sorts of PowerPoint presentations. E-learning and business presentations make up the bulk of the content, but there's also a fair number of photo slide shows and even some more adult content. There's also a Facebook application for easy uploading.
Going forward, SlideShare will introduce a program for lead generation a la LinkedIn. They're also talking about ad deals to monetize the free service and will work on integrating Google Presently documents.
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 boss said that if he don't find a way to get it done, they'd all be fired. Rosen's solution? Cozimo.
It works like this: An image is sent to your e-mail by one of your colleagues. When you open the image, it launches Cozimo's collaboration tool. Anyone invited to the project can mark up and leave comments on the image or video in question. Chat windows appear to talk in real time about the changes.
It also works with video clips. Everyone online sees the video play in real time and any can leave notes on particular frames. It has a clean, simple interface and appears very intuitive, but Rosen is not the only one to come up with this idea. See also: ConceptShare, Octopz, and ReviewBasics.
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