Update: Voting was very close so after team debate today, we’re inviting a 9th company to join us in this round.

Thanks to all for voting for the Sweet 16 companies who submitted their pitch videos.

Cumulatively we had over 3,300 community votes!

Now (drumroll please) … here are the top 8 companies who will move on to Round 3, where they will submit an updated 2-minute video that deepens the explanation of their company -

1. CumulusIQ – The on-demand knowledge marketplace

2. Bantam Networks – Networked collaboration meets social CRM

3. SocialWok – Facebook + Twitter for business

4. Brainpark – Where information comes alive

5. YouCalc - Custom analytics on demand

6. BillFlo - Machine readable, electronic invoices for (every) business

7. Producteev - A web-based task management application

8. OpenText - Enterprise Content Management

9. ManyMoon – Internet’s first social productivity application

CONGRATULATIONS!

What now?

These Elite Eight companies must submit their videos to the Launch Pad site by Friday, June 5th. 9am EST.

Videos will be published on this page and the contest begins again.

Voting will run through Thursday, June 11th and then we’ll announce the Final Four winners. These companies are all vying to win a presentation slot at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, where the audience will select a winner. The winning Launch Pad participant receives a free turnkey Pod (valued at over $7,500) in the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Sponsor Pavilion.

Google is..ahem…making waves… with it’s “Wave” announcement this week. At this point Wave seems to have created as much confusion as excitement. Is it an e-mail killer? A SharePoint killer? Or something entirely new??

Continue Reading »

Tandberg’s new compliance appliance could be a precursor of a potentially growing market around compliance enforcement for emerging collaborative technologies. Tandberg’s offering is designed to help companies archive and manage video conferences to support compliance and auditing needs. We’ve already seen similar developments as companies like Akonix, IMLogic and FaceTime emerged to support compliance needs in light of use of instant messaging. I expect to see similar appliances or applications popping up to support enterprise usage of services such as Twitter, Google Apps, and Facebook to name a few. We’ll discuss this topic at Enterprise 2.0 on Wednesday at 3:30 in a session entitled “Privacy, Data Ownership and Identity in an Increasingly Virtual World” – hope to see you there!

What is the Open Enterprise Innovation Award?

This is an industry salute to the work a case study company has done to embrace collaborative and transformative enterprise 2.0 tools. The winning company will also be given a 10-15 minute presentation on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference keynote stage on June 23, 2009.

This award is tied to the Open Enterprise 2009 research project being hosted on this blog.

Please submit via the form hyperlinked below. Thank you!

Round two voting is live. Vote for your best enterprise 2.0 company idea.

Dear Sweet Sixteen finalists of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Launch Pad program, first – another congratulations for beating out all the Round 1 competition!

I’ve gotten some inquiries about how to submit your video for round 2 so am sharing your next step details on this blog for clarification. It’s actually pretty simple:

Please visit the Launch Pad site, create a (new) account and upload your videos.

There is a ‘Video Submissions‘ tab that outlines the rest of the process so please take a careful read through.

Please note that the video formats supported by the site are: MPEG, MPEG-4, M4v, MPG, FLV, Real Audio/Video, WMV, ASF, AVI, BFI[7], IFF[8], RL2[9] and .mov (for the Mac lovers out there).

Reminder: All submissions should be posted by Sunday, May 24th (midnight PST) – and community voting will commence through Thursday, 28th.

On Monday morning we will announce the URL where all the videos are being hosted and YOU CAN VOTE (with no log-in needed).

Thanks for playing! We look forward to seeing what you come up with and wish you the best of luck.

~ Janetti, Stowe & the Enteprise 2.0 Conference team.

PS – since it’s a holiday weekend, if you have a technical emergency, please call 415.947 and send a text message to the mobile # mentioned.

Box serve up over a quarter of a billion files a year for two and a half million users from their ‘software as a service’ file access and sharing platform.

From a base offering which makes it easy to move large files around securely and freely, Box connects to dozens of integrated third party applications including Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, Zoho, WordPress, and Picnik to provide an increasing range of collaborative options.

During this conversation we cover:

• The fundamentally important role granular permissions play in allowing users to control precisely who sees stored content and how they are able to interact with it
• For large enterprise deals, Box pass various IT compliance tests in order to fit security standards
• The myriad small and medium sized businesses using Box include many financial and legal companies who generate a lot of content to store each year
• Box is primarily geared to serve groups from a few to a few hundred, and is seeing their signature ease of use encourage uptake and adoption in a wide a variety of businesses
• IT organizations are becoming more progressive and in some cases specified Box as an effective way to manage content using the freemium model. This allows IT to store content cost effectively while focusing on core company targets
• Ad hoc line of business uptake is very common due to focus on solving the problems of people trying to share files: users can use as much or as little of the services offered as they like. control and flexibility are key attributes
• The economic situation is a ‘perfect storm’ which plays  to Box’s strengths and has resulted in markedly increased adoption patterns as a low cost solution to urgent problems

The founders of Twitter couldn’t possibly have imagined the popularity of their little short messaging service. In the last year Twitter has gone mainstream, with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to members of Congress getting onto the Twitter bandwagon. But as Twitter usage grows, it appears that company is struggling to scale to meet demand.

Continue Reading »

I am happy to announced the Sweet Sixteen contestants for the Launchpad, based on the community voting on their Twitpitches.

The companies are these:

1. CoCloud
2. BillFlo
3. InfoVark
4. Bantam
5. Producteev
6. NewsGator Social Sites
7. Brainpark
8. RumbaFish
9. Interacorp Intrix
10. Manymoon
11. CumulusIQ
12. OpenText
13. YouCalc
14. Cloudize
15. SocialWok
16. Swift Mobile

This round will pitch the 16 contestants against each other based on video — a video demo, preso, talking head, or whatever — with the community voting to decide who proceeds to the Elite Eight:

Video Upload Instructions

1. Create a free account on the Launch Pad page.
2. Make a video of your application (preferably with voiceover describing it), or a video of yourself describing the application.
3. Upload the video and promote promote promote.

Then we all watch the votes come in… wishing you all the best of luck!

SCHEDULE:

Sweet Sixteen (Video Round)
Pitch your product or idea in a one-minute video.

May 19: Begin accepting submissions

May 24: Video submissions close

May 25 – 28: Community Voting

May 29: Elite Eight Finalists announced