Spotlight: CanvasDropr's virtual canvas

The team behind CanvasDropr have told us about their virtual canvas and how people use it for collaborating with images, photos and videos.

What is CanvasDropr?

CanvasDropr is a tool for collaborating real-time with rich media – you could describe it as GoogleDocs for images and videos. Users upload stuff to a canvas, a virtual blank sheet. This canvas can be shared by an unlimited amount of people. Everyone connected to this canvas can upload, edit and see changes happening in real-time. We started out with testing the product in the consumer market for image sharing and got more and more companies who were interested in using it so now we’ll be launching for businesses very soon.

What problem have you solved for users?

The problem that we solve for users is being able to collaborate around images and videos simultaneously. The idea moves away from conventional collaboration/sharing solutions and centers around a canvas. The platform is aimed especially at media agencies, designers and creative businesses but also highly useful for e.g. educational use and most other businesses working with visuals in some way.

One of the largest media agencies in Denmark is using it to collaborate with their clients, partners and offices around the world. When planning a campaign, CanvasDropr makes the process a whole lot easier; choosing images and videos to be used in the campaign, comparing visual elements and working on visual projects real-time in groups across the organisation.

What are the main user benefits of real-time collaboration?

The main benefits of this kind of real-time collaboration is of course that users will be able to collaborate just as easily around visuals as they can with text nowadays.

How do you use Pusher?

Pusher is the backend protocol used for the synchronous collaboration in CanvasDropr. It makes it possible for us to offer this service to our customers, making them able to work on images and content real-time in the browser simultaneously. With users from 80+ countries and a bunch of companies ready to start using CanvasDropr when we launch for businesses, we’re looking forward to scaling big time with Pusher :)

Thanks to Christian Rasmussen, Cathrine Andersen and Agnete Purup for their inspiring collaboration tool. They’re launching for businesses within the next couple of months, presenting a new way of collaborating real-time. If you’ve built something useful and/or weird and wonderful we’d love to hear from you.