Sudbury - ON Canada
The big idea: In 25 words or less, please tell us how this Fast 50 Nominee is helping to address the planet's problems.
Conceptshare changed the way the teams collaborate on the visuals of their projects. Centralizing the conversation and leveraging the wisdom of your group.
Please describe how this nominee is using business as a force of positive change. What technology, idea, or strategy is the nominee using -- and what problem, such as global warming, poverty, or pollution, does it address? (suggested length: 100 words)
ConceptShare has innovated and disrupted the traditional means of sharing and discussing the visuals components of any project. Pre-conceptshare the back and forth over visuals was a tedious process that generally slowed the design process down using emails, faxes and meetings in a mashup of ineffectiveness.
Conceptshare centralizes the group discussion for the duration the of the project, acting like a visual wiki. It becomes the central point for teams to review and discusss the visuals giving them the tools they need to directly markup and annotate, wether they are graphic design, architectural, engineering, retail, scientific or any of the other uses that people have found for the tool.
Our users have found that this tool has allowed them to take on more projects, eliminated distance for clients, faster projects due to reduced "approval lag", less meetings and generally more time to focus on the things that really matter to a project not on administrative monotony.
We are in the midst of rolling out this similar approach to our "community design collaboration" to provide people who don't have access or budget for expert feedback on their design projects to access the community. This will focus on not for profit, educational and smaller market designers.
What are the results, both financial and social? How has the nominee's business performed, and what impact has it had on the problem it addresses? (suggested length: 100 words)
We are a 6 person company located in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Yet we are managing to compete on the world wide market with clients in 35 countries and offering localization in 8 languages. We are currently being used in the engineering, architectural, educational, scientific, pharmaceutical, graphic design, publication, sports and healthcare markets.
We have recently done a non-exclusive deal with Corel for the recent release of Corel Draw x4, a product targeted mainly at Europe and niche North American markets. "share with conceptshare" is now an item in the file menu allowing Corel users to share directly from the design software.
We have really changed the way people are approaching their projects. By centralizing the conversations for these people we are eliminating a real pain from the project life cycle. We have also simplified the correlation of this data for reports, capturing all data, approvals and markups for recording and documenting projects.
-Just released our full API
-Intergrated into Box.net service
-Releasing Adobe Air partner APP
-working with the IIC @ Harvard to create a tool for the discussions of visuals in science
We got mentioned in FastCompany Magazine as a "wow tool for designers" in a recent article by Robert Scoble.
Hope this paints a Fast picture for you .... we really try to do cool stuff here. We never really tell our story ....
cheers
Scott
