Dropbox is a great way to sync your files across devices. What about adding some collaboration features to that? So far, no news that Dropbox is doing that soon enough; but that never stopped us from wanting, has it? Well as long as new developers are around, ideas have better chances to come to reality. In this case, CanvasDropr uses rich media in form of visual collaboration with files on cloud. Drag and drop files on to a digital canvas and work on them with others. Dead simple but with visible brilliance.

Sign up for a free account with CanvasDropr. Get in and create a canvas. Add files to the canvas by simple drag and drop method and you can perform basic operations on them like resizing, commenting, rotating, scratching notes or captions etc. You can then share the canvas with others with editing or viewing permission. Your team can then work on the canvas or offer a presentation to others having viewing permissions. All the changes and operations are reflected in real time across all the screens(devices) on which the canvas is opened. iPad, tablets and smartphones can also access the web portal which is optimized for mobile platforms.

The service is in beta and hence there are certain flaws which includes a slow interface and a server that kept throwing 503 HTTP ERRORs many a time. Notwithstanding, the service offers a brilliant collaborating platform for any team. Remember the working sessions before a college art exhibition or a protest march? All the photographs, data sheets, newspaper, cuttings, markers and whatnot scattered over the surface while every other person in the room is busy sorting, commenting or brainstorming ideas on them? The experience is similar with CanvasDropr. However fine, the idea of visual collaboration has already been tried and near perfected by DropMark which is an exact similar app with one or two minor differences. In fact, organizing content is much easier on the latter. DropMark offers free(250MB) plans and paid($48/yr for 25GB) plans whereas no such plans were found on CanvasDropr, which is free to sign up and use for now. So, if you haven’t tried out visual collaboration yet(RIP Google Wave), it’s time to get your hands dirty.