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

Canadian Business Online has published a Q&A interview with Octopz CEO Ron McKenzie (pictured above) on Web 2.0 and real-time collaboration. Ron responds to questions about market challenges and opportunities for Octopz, the benefit of our online collaboration service for companies and his thought on who else is doing innovative work in Canada. The whole interview is here.

On a related note, Ron will be speaking about Octopz and collaboration at an upcoming Web 2.0 Canadian Leadership Series Lunch & Learn in Toronto, on October 6, 2008. An information sheet with details and registration information is available here (pdf).

Octopz now features an extensively revised and updated video help system that is available both within our collaboration application and as a standalone support service on its own web page.

Video help is available from the drop-down help menu at the top right hand corner of the Octopz application. You can choose to view help videos on using Octopz (How To Use), on how to administer users and rooms (How to Admin) or you can get a quick overview on the latest features (What’s New).

Selecting any of the video help options on the drop down menu will bring up a custom video player window (shown above) with a list of help topics on the left and a video playback window on the right side. You can click on any topic and sub-topic you want to learn about from the menu and that specific video will load and play almost instantly.

There are built-in player controls for rewinding or skipping ahead to any point in that video, as well as a volume adjustment for sound. You can view the help videos sequentially or in whatever random order suits you best.

All the video help files can also be accessed directly without going into the Octopz application at http://www.octopz.net/help/. There is an additional video on this page, called Quick Start Video, which will help you quickly get started using Octopz if you are a new user or have signed up for a free trial.

The is also a link on this page to the Octopz Text Help section which provides more detailed step-by-step instructions on how to use our collaboration software.

TorontoTechWeek 2008 kicked off its week-long run earlier today with the PICK 20 awards ceremony and our co-founder Barry Fogarty was on hand to pick up the award for Octopz. PICK 20 is a roundup of Canada’s up and coming Web 2.0 pioneers and is produced by Backbone magazine and KPMG. PICK 20 judge Michael Connor Clarke noted that Octopz:

Has a superb UI and great customer support and is a fantastic and enthusiastic participant in the Web 2.0 community.

Toronto Tech Week celebrates Toronto as the third largest Information & Communication Technology (ICT) cluster in North America, after Silicon Valley and New York. Both our CEO Ron McKenzie and our Director of Sales Asif Khan will be speaking at the conference later this week (details here and here). Asif is also the program chair for the Future Forward: Internet 2010 track.