The Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program is a program that allows companies to showcase their products and compete for the opportunity to present their ideas to the community at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This competition, organized by Stowe Boyd, began in April when companies were invited to post their video pitches to the E2 web site. After the community voted, the list of contenders was narrowed down to five finalists who will now compete for the final spot. For that grand prize winner, the prize is free exhibit space at the upcoming conference.
This year, there are five great finalists who will compete again on Wednesday, June 11th, when they present their ideas to an audience of Enterprise 2.0 creators, adopters, and evangelists who will then give feedback in real-time. Afterwards, the grand prize winner will be declared.
Here’s a brief look at the current contenders:
Aegeon
Aegeon entered their social collaboration suite, Spaceo.us, in the competition. The software, which would be deployed in a company’s own data center, delivers Web 2.0 content via areas called “spaces.” These spaces can be people spaces, product spaces, organization spaces, topic spaces, or a company can create space types of their own which suit their organization’s needs. Within these spaces content can be mashed up – anything from Excel spreadsheets to Google Maps to SAP iDocs. These spaces can then be tagged, rated, or commented on, just as any Web 2.0 user-generated content could be.
GroupSwim
GroupSwim is a SaaS Collaboration solution that uses proprietary semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. The technology also identifies experts by topic and searches for relationships among the data. Although that description might sound a little dry to the average user, it’s no matter because GroupSwim is actually fun for them to use. By combining more subtle implicit attributes with more explicit meta-data generated via Thumbs-Up voting buttons on content and Watch Lists for monitoring favorite topics, GroupSwim is just plain useful – even if you don’t understand how the backend works.
NewsGator
From Newsgator, the maker of popular desktop and online RSS readers, comes Social Sites 2.0. Via an AJAX interface, Social Sites uses a series of scripts and SharePoint Web Parts to make SharePoint a new social hub for business. The software leverages a company’s previous investment in Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies, turning SharePoint’s My Site and Team Sites pages into more of a Facebook-esque enterprise solution. The original version of Social Sites was introduced last year, but version 2.0 lets people connect over common projects, areas of expertise, activities and interests, as well as offering a visual social graph.
Project SocialSite is a tool that will deliver social networking functionality to any community web site. The functionality will be based on the OpenSocial standands to bring their platform to applications written in Java, PHP, or Ruby. SocialSite is designed for web oriented applications with a set of REST APIs and widgets, OAuth and OpenID for authentication, and single sign-on.
Veodia
Veodia offers business users a broadcasting service which makes it easy and affordable for businesses and other institutions to create and distribute high-quality video while also keeping control and ownership of their content. The solution can be easily deployed, with no need for any I.T. involvement to do so.
