Apeer Delivers Easy Media Collaboration

I met yesterday with a young start-up called Apeer Instant Media. Currently in beta, the company's product is essentially a collaboration tool designed specifically for use with digital media, including sound clips, video files and photos. The software also supports PDFs. It doesn't support .doc files, but that's intentional--the point isn't to be yet another web conferencing application; instead, the company is targeting people who work with digital media and need to share those files with others for collaboration and (perhaps more importantly in some businesses and use cases) approval.Think ad agencies, photographers, directors, casting agents, marketing teams and even product developers who need to easily share videos, audio clips, photos and diagrams but not much else. The Apeer service launches in a heartbeat, and it's so lightweight it should work over any connection, anywhere. It offers built-in chat and push-to-talk capabilities, as well as basic mark-up tools and a slide-show mode. All participants can share and control media files at any time (no baton passing needed), and the software plays well with other digital asset management systems.Apeer is about to go live with several customers; pricing is $14.95 per named user per month, or $142 per year.