ConceptShare

Conceptshare.com is an online collaboration tool for gathering feedback from clients and team members on visual design projects. Users can upload concepts, comment on them, and perform markups on them, all within a browser-based software application. Each concept has a dedicated workspace that is accessible by all the team members and/or clients involved in the project. The workspace consists of the concept, a comments section, a list of the team members and a chat box where team members can chat with one another in real time. Concepts can be in the form of an image file, a PDF file or a DWG file. The browser-based workspace application provides basic drawing tools for highlighting and commenting on portions of the design. Changes are immediately visible to all of the team members. The Conceptshare site allows team members located anywhere to contribute to a project either synchronously or asynchronously. The software behind the site is Flash-based and quite sophisticated. The workspace application is almost as responsive as a desktop application and performs quite well. The Conceptshare.com site was launched in July 2006. The company is based in Sudbury, CA. The site has undergone steady growth since launch, and currently serves thousands of unique monthly visitors. The site has an Alexa pagerank near the 100,000 mark. Conceptshare recently announced a partnership with Corel which allows Corel Draw users to collaborate on projects using Conceptshare. As a result of this partnership, a new website, CorelDrawConceptShare.com was launched. Competition to Conceptshare comes from sites such as Thinkature.com and GE’s Imagination Cubed. Thinkature offers most of the same capability as Conceptshare, but is built entirely in HTML and javascript, whereas Conceptshare is Flash-based. Thinkature is a free service, while Conceptshare is subscription-based. GE’s Imagination Cubed is really more of a web-enabled white board which multiple users can draw on. The Conceptshare site has a very clean and uncluttered look and feel. Navigation is intuitive and the site is very responsive. The workspace application performs similar to a desktop application despite being browser-based. File uploads were quite responsive as well. There is a convenient top menu bar for navigation, with tabs for My Workspaces, My Profile, People, and Account Settings. There is no advertising displayed on the Conceptshare site. Registration is required to use the Conceptshare site. A 30-day free trial is offered by the site. The registration process asks for company or group name, an Internet address (this address is where the workspaces are accessed and is a subdomain of the Conceptshare domain), first and last name, email address and password. Validation of the email address is required. The free 30-day trial allows users to have 15 active workspaces and provides 1GB of storage. There are three paid membership options – Solo, Team and Business. A Solo membership costs $24.00 per month and allows for 5 active workspaces and up to 5MB of storage. A Team membership costs $49.00 per month and allows for 15 active workspaces with up to 2GB of storage. A Business membership costs $99.00 per month and allows for 35 active workspaces and up to 5GB of storage. The site accepts Visa, MasterCard and American Express as payment for premium memberships. The Conceptshare site is recommended to anyone who needs to collaborate on a visual design project. It is ideal for allowing clients to view progress on a project and provide feedback as well. The site has developed some sophisticated software that performs very well.