The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

In this video, recorded at the most recent TED conference, Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love, muses on the nature of creativity. She suggests that it’s not a rare person that is a genius but rather that there is genius in all of us, waiting to be discovered. At 18 minutes, the video runs on the long side of what we tend to feature on the Octopz blog, but it’s worth every second of attention. If you’re in a real hurry, have a look at this 94 second excerpt from the talk.

Watch Byte Club - Ep17 - Octopz in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

The latest episode of Byte Club TV, a show profiling tech companies, features Octopz. It includes interviews with our founders, CEO, marketing VP, developers as well as you humble blog editor, who reveals his social media planning secrets (hint: it involves toy soldiers).

Show notes below.

The creators of Octopz are award-winning content developers who have helped some of the world’s most recognizable brands compete successfully in the global business environment with innovative web-based product visualizations including interactive photographic and 3D imaging services.

Taking interactivity to a new level of performance, they created Octopz - a technology specifically designed for the iterative way creative professionals work. With support for an unprecedented range of document types, intuitive markup tools, and built-in text messaging, VoIP and webcam capabilities, Octopz enables team members to work securely, either together in real time or asynchronously, with Octopz automatically saving their work. Each session can be easily retrieved and reviewed by anyone they choose, at anytime, and from anywhere.

Of course, one of the reasons Octopz works so well for creative professionals is because, in addition to being software developers, the inventors of Octopz are also creative professionals with successful careers in photography and digital media. Their first-hand insight into the creative process informed every decision made during the software’s development.

This approach, coupled with input from users, now drives a continuous enhancement process. They listen to what user have to say about Octopz and make improvements based on their comments. As a result, Octopz will continue to become more functional, more powerful, and even easier to work with, thanks to feedback from you, the people who actually use it every day.

Playing For Change is a both remarkable film and a global multimedia movement to connect the world through music.

The film, Playing for Change - Peace Through Music, is a documentary about music and its inherent ability to unite people. It began with a single recording of street performer Roger Ridley in Santa Monica, California singing “Stand By Me”. From there it snowballed into a year-long journey around the world by one of the directors, Mark Johnson, to record over 100 musicians at street corners, small clubs and homes in places like New Orleans, Moscow, South Africa, and Tibet, using small and portable sound and video equipment.

The critical acclaim and positive momentum of this and the directors’ first film (Playing for Change, released in 2003) led to the creation of Playing For Change Foundation. The Foundation provides support and resources to musicians and communities around the world by building music schools in places like South Africa, helping students to create and share their music and enabling collaboration between students of their schools and students from established schools around the world.

Playing For Change will release a CD and DVD of their music and videos in the spring of 2009. Some of the audio and video content is also available at their website playingforchange.com

Related Pond post: Jimmy Wales on internet collaboration and video