Usually collaboration using a whiteboard either has to happen in person or is fragmented because of the lack of a truly collaborative connection. You could stream a video of the board as it is being marked up but that’s a broadcast model. You could take a photo of the board and email it or upload into Evernote and share it, but that’s asynchronous.

With eBeam, you can write on a whiteboard and the system picks up what you’re writing and drawing and transmits it digitally in real time to your collaborators. The system creates less friction within the meeting (no one gets stuck re-copying the notes for the team, and remote participants immediately see the whiteboard content) and allows you to write and illustrate with a more natural flow while sharing the data in a smoother way. The low-bandwidth data transfer can be easily received even on home networks, and there are no big files to download. Even if you do choose to email the file to other participants after the meeting, the file size typically is just a few hundred KB.

Those away from the whiteboard can view for free, using the downloadable desktop viewer, and also annotate the board data during a session.

If you opt for the Projection pack upgrade, you can use the setup with a projector and turn a larger projected display area into a giant tablet, using an electronic stylus like a mouse with drawing functions. Then you can pull in other digital content such as image files and other files to mark up and share with team members and other collaborators.

You also can record your whiteboarding session and play it back with or without voice so you can see what you produced, in context, and in the order the activity occurred. eBeam can be used independently or as a complement to a web conferencing system. The system is integrated into the WebEx conferencing application.

The eBeam system comes with an eraser, a package of regular whiteboard markers as well as special sleeves in red, green, blue and black that slide over the markers so anything you write can be read by the system. There is also a receiver that you can place on any side of a standard whiteboard to read marker movements via USB or Bluetooth.

Base product lists at $899.95 USD for the USB version and $1049.95 for both USB and Bluetooth capabilities.

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After signing up, you can create your first board. Across the top of the board is a menu bar allowing you to upload files, take screenshots to add to the board, scribble on the board with a selection of drawing tools, add comments and selection and zoom controls. Uploaded files are converted and placed on the board; then you can then annotate and comment on them.

You can share the board with your team by clicking the “Invite participant” link at the top-right of the screen to send them an email, or by sending them the URL of the board. Only the person creating the board has to create an account; collaborators don’t have to log in, although if they don’t, any comments they make will then be left anonymously. Boards can be public (which allows anyone with the URL to access them) or private and password-protected. Collaboration is in real-time: If you scribble or comment on the board, your collaborators will also see it on their screens. Comments can be added anywhere, and can be responded to by your collaborators, leaving a conversation thread. Helpfully, comments can also be marked as tasks (either open, critical or closed), with a task list displayed on the right of the screen

Conceptboard can also be used in “presentation mode,” where  the presenter leads the other participants through the board, with their mouse pointer and viewport being transferred to the participants’ screens.

It’s a nicely designed app that works really well, but one criticism I have is that some of the copy is poorly translated (the app was written by a German team). That needs to be cleaned up, as it may make the app more difficult to use for some folks. It’s still a new application, so hopefully that’s something the developers will address.

A basic Conceptboard account, which allows for 25 boards, is free. A Professional account, which offers unlimited boards and more features, such as password protection of boards and SSL encryption, costs $8 per user per month, while an Enterprise account, which allows for company messaging, costs $25 per user per month.

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That’s why I took a look recently at Scriblink, another free collaboration tool.

For a fee, businesses can take their Scriblink board, customize its appearance, then embed code into their company site to launch their branded whiteboard. The board is still hosted on Scriblink so the URL for the custom Scriblink whiteboard is http://www.scriblink.com/yourcompany. Scriblink puts a tiny “powered by Scriblink” at the bottom of the board.

Scriblink is much less buggy than Bookgoo. The company says they accomplish this by working to master one thing. They want to avoid feature creep. You can upload an image or photo to mark up or you can type, draw lines and shapes, erase and change colors easily. You have to make sure your browser allows pop-up windows for some of the site’s features.

One thing Scriblink doesn’t allow you to do is to save your whiteboard directly to your hard drive. You can either email a link to it to yourself, to others or take a screenshot if you really need an image file of your whiteboard.

One group who is embracing Scriblink are online tutors. Scriblink incorporates an equation editor by Sitmo.com that embeds equations into the whiteboard and online math tutors are providing feedback on additional features they’d like to see.

Scriblink also gives easy access to in-screen chat, VOIP conferencing provided through a third-party provider and phone conferencing provided by FreeConference.com.

Prices for Scriblink’s Business Solutions range from a Silver level at $9 per month to Platinum at $29 per month.

And after all of this, I’m still trying to find ways to use a whiteboard for my own business.

Do you use Scriblink or another collaborative whiteboard like it? How do you use it?

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Through Bookgoo, you can upload a document (pdf, html, doc, xls, jpg, gif) or URL and opt to make it either private or public. At first, I was envisioning another Scribd. Then I thought it sounded a bit like Backboard, a feedback site I recently reviewed here. But that is where the functionality diverges from both of those sites into a nifty annotating tool for marking up documents in a way that makes Google Docs look a little plain vanilla and some of the online whiteboard apps available seem a bit old school.

Bookgoo actually makes marking up a document fun. Upload your document, invite others to view it and provide their input, and then watch the annotating begin.

On Bookgoo, you get your dashboard view of your document activity on you “Goo Gate” where you can: 1) Add notes to the document by highlighting particular text and typing in related notes; 2) Draw on the document; or 3) Change the pen color when you draw.

The annotations you make lay over the document, but do not change it. Even when you highlight text by clicking and holding your cursor then dragging it over text, the text is not actually modified but the highlighted words contain the related comments.

Because Bookgoo doesn’t change the document, the tool works well for commenting on and pointing to changes that should be made. Then someone can download the original document from the site – without the annotations – and implement the modifications from viewing the modifications online.

Other things you can do with your Bookgoo include:

1. Subscribing to a document RSS feed. Get notified each time someone modifies your document.

2. Emailing documents to a friend. You can allow others to access the modified document directly from the document page. This feature, however, brought up the question of privacy for me. Currently, Bookgoo does not offer different levels of privacy features and even their “private” mode is not very private and definitely not secure. Of course, if you have very sensitive documents, uploading them to the Internet at all is a risk.

3. Adding a document to your MyGoo page. If you upload a document, it is automatically archived on and accessible from your MyGoo page. However, if you are invited to annotate someone else’s document, you can also add that to MyGoo for easy access.

4. Sharing a document with a group. You can create groups and must do this first before adding a document to the group.

5. Adding the document to your social networks and other sites. The presence of an AddThis button brought me back to my questions about privacy. At this time, even if you opt to make your document private, once you share that URL with others, they have the ability to share your document broadly. The company calls their privacy option “pseudo privacy” for this very reason. Therefore you need to trust those to whom you give access or keep really private documents in much more secure environments.

Some of the downsides or limitations of Bookgoo:

1. Lack of more robust privacy features. Bookgoo plans to release role-based permissions soon.

2. Inability to use word documents newer than Microsoft Word 2003. Support for newer docs is pending.

3. Difficulty sifting through larger documents for annotations. Another upcoming feature will be “page inspection” for large, multi-page documents so you can inspect 10 pages at a time to locate annotations deep within a document.

4. Still somewhat buggy. While doing the first demo with the company, I uncovered several bugs that rendered some of the key features inoperable. The Bookgoo tech team rectified those problems so that everything seemed to work well during the second demo. But you may end up finding a few more bugs here and there.

The folks at Bookgoo don’t anticipate ever charging for any level of their application and see their business model as more a software licensing venture as well as experimenting with Ad Sense. They simply want to offer Bookgoo free to the general online community.

Gotta love their spirit!

How do you annotate documents collaboratively online?

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