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

With Octopz, up to five people can gather online at the same time (synchronously) in a secure virtual room and use text, voice and video chat as well as annotation and markup tools to collaborate on documents and digital media files.

Octopz also gives the room participants the flexibility to log in and work separately (asynchronously) at their convenience, whether they are down the hall or thousands of miles and many time zones apart. These options mean that Octopz is particularly suited to the iterative way that creative professionals work.

As well, in today’s globalized and networked economy, it means that you can work on a project during local business hours, upload revisions to Octopz at the end of the day, and get feedback on the work from a client or supplier that’s half way around the world, while you’re sleep.

To see Octopz in action synchronously or asynchronously, take the quick tour and then sign up for your own free trial account.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, coworking, internet, Octopz, online collaboration, RIA, SaaS

. . . let’s collaborate (via remarkk.com).

Technorati Tags: ad, collaboration, comedy, humor, Octopz

Douglas Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse but his pioneering work and influence extend far beyond that device. A towering figure in computer science, Engelbart’s fundamental tenet is that computers should help us become smarter and work together better.

In December 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart gave the first public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system which brought together the mouse, cathode-ray tube displays, windowing systems, text editing, hyperlinks, videoconferencing and networked collaboration.

This 90-minute presentation, dubbed the “mother of all demos”, presented a compelling vision of how computers and online networks could be used to augment human capability. It’s a vision that we are still trying to realize today.

For more on Doug Engelbart check out the Invisible Revolution documentary and MouseSite.