Colwiz

By Colwiz

Free

iOS and Anroid OS.

Colwiz (Video), shows that Colwiz is a desktop and mobile application designed and developed by Oxford academics to enable academics and students completing research projects to manage, organise and control information and work flow.   The desktop app provides the functionality to:

·       Free 2Gbytes cloud space

·       Invite the research team (local and international) to join colwiz;

·       Private cloud communication space for the research team; enabling team to chat, share data, equations publications, documents, and survey results on-line chat communication;

·       Private organisation space to define task lists, and calendar events that can be shared with the team;

·       Import, add and manage your research project reference sources, and share with the research team;

·       Highlight and annotate reference sources, share your thoughts with the team;

·        Import research data for team to visualize and analysis the results;

The on-line and desktop enables you organise and manage your research project, enable you to share and store securely (backed-up) your research data, reference, communications, and connections in one location.  The mobile app provides you read access to all the files uploaded and stored on colwiz, that is  your publications, reference sources, research data, survey results, etc.

Personally an app both on-line, desktop and mobile app that has potential for student group research projects for example MEng, MComp original research projects, Phd projects and Final year projects.   However it would require asking corporate IT services to install on desktops.

Like Diigo, Colwiz has a bookmark tool functionality, however unlike Diigo does not appear you can install this functionality on the iPad Safari browser.   This limits the user to importing references to Colwiz from a Desktop, not practical when tablets now out strip desktop sales [1].    In addition the mobile app only provides read only functionality of your upload publications, and does not appear to access documents in the Colwiz drive.

In practical terms mobile app the Mendeley app offers more as you can add references and upload to Mendeley cloud.   Combine Mendeley with using Google Drive a project team would have all the functionality of Colwiz and more operating over desktop, online and mobile applications.  With a coporate license agreement with Google, resolves the copyright ownership personal Google [2].

References

[1] Ahmed, M. (2013) Tablet computers swallow desktop, The Times, 28^th March 2013, last accessed 2^nd April 2013 at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technology/gadgets/article3724628.ece

[2] Whittaker, Z. (2012) How far do Google Drive’s terms go in ‘owning’ your files?”, ZDNet, last accessed 22^nd April 2013 at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/how-far-do-google-drives-terms-go-in-owning-your-files/75228