Best of the North: Day 1

It is the first day of my 4 city Lessons from the Den tour of Northern Ontario.  First up was North Bay followed by Sudbury. I was taken aback by the quality of some of the companies I meet in 1on1 sessions following the lecture.  Funny enough, the best of the bunch was actually a company I meet last Friday in Silicon Valley.

Yes you read that right, I saw them last friday in the valley and then only days later in Sudbury.  In the valley they were presenting at Under the Radar Office 2.0, in Sudbury they were simply at home representing and showing that not all Web 2.0 compaines have to be Caolifornia.  The company is ConceptShare and not only are they part of a growing list of Enterprise 2.0 companies popping out on the net lately, they are definitely joining Cambrian House, NowPublic, FreshBoooks, b5 Media and Celtx on my list of BEST CANADIAN STARTUPS.

So what does conceptshare do?

According to me, ConceptShare is a Plaform for Online Asynchronous Visual Collaboration (POAVC, ok I need to work on that acronym some more) or in English, they help graphic designers, visual artists, webdesigners, storyboarders, toy makers and the like create a workspace where members of a team can provide feedback on their own time.

According to their website they:

ConceptShare makes capturing feedback easier and more accurate.

ConceptShare allows you to easily share designs inside Workspaces that contain designs related to a certain topic or project.

It’s easy to invite people into a workspace. Invite team members, managers, clients, and consultants to add and reply to comments, chat and markup designs.

People do not have to be in the workspace at the same time to contribute. Workspace members can log-in anytime to any workspace they are member. If members do happen to be in the workspace at the same time they can collaborate with real-time chat and real-time comment updates and concept updates

But take if from me, there is way more to this than meets the eye. So this site is a must try for anyone working on logos, websites, ad campaigns or any other visual representation. 

I demoed their product as a means of working through an infographic on a project I'm on.  Up until now the 5 people working on the project had to physically get together to discuss the illustration, which is hard since one is in Ottawa, two are in Calgary, and one is in London.  But with ConceptShare it was not only easy to solicit feedback, it was efficient.

So if you are working on a team that has visual outputs as part of its mandate, zip on over to ConceptShare and give it a try. You won't regret it, I sure don't.

Comments

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Aside: Just in case it wasn't intentional (i.e. so this site doesn't show up in their referrer logs or associated Google searches), your URLs seem to be missing the "http://" prefixes that they need to resolve properly.