Jun 24th, 2009 |
At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week in Boston, I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of interesting new companies and products. Video camera in tow, I captured elevator pitches with half a dozen of them: Newsgator, Tomoye, Yakabod, Joyent, nGenera, Box.net and qTask. Here is the E2 elevator pitch extravaganza.
nGenera. On the nGenera booth, I met Brian Magierski, the EVP of Corporate Development, who talked about the company’s suite of collaboration applications. Some of nGenera’s apps focus on soliciting and capturing ideas, such as nJAM. Here’s Magierski’s elevator pitch:
Box.net. I’ve checked out Box.net’s app before, and was pretty impressed with the ease of use (I’m a huge 37Signals fan, and Box.net exhibits the same focus on UI and workflow as Basecamp and Backpack). Originally focused on helping people share large files without having to FTP them, Box.net is building more and more collaborative features into the service a la Basecamp. And at E2 this week, Box.net’s VP of Business Development, Karen Appleton, described the current state of the app and talked about some new partnerships — including one with with Fedex — that make the app more friendly to small businesses:
Newsgator. Over on the Newsgator booth, JB Holston, the CEO of Newsgator, gave me the lowdown on Social Sites. Social Sites 2.7, released last month, is the latest version of the company’s SharePoint-based enterprise social computing app which helps bring together colleagues who share similar interests and lets you know what’s going on with them. It’s like having a company-centric Facebook within Sharepoint. Here’s JB’s pitch:
Yakabod. On the Yakabod booth I met Scott Ryser, the CEO of the company. He told me about the Yakabox, which, unlike the most of the products I saw at E2, is a collaboration appliance. The Yakabox is a hardware-based “knowledge engine” that enables collaboration, social networking, content management and yes, search, within an organization. As an appliance, it has some tough security built in: encryption that passes Federal Information System data security standards, two-factor authentication, and a user permissioning system. Here’s Scott describing it:
Tomoye. Eric Sauve, the CEO of Tomoye, told me about Tomoye Communities for Sharepoint, which extends Sharepoint with user communities and new cross-enterprise collaboration features. Sauve says that the company has 500,000 users at the moment under contract - not bad! Here he is, describing Tomoye:
Joyent. On the Joyent booth, I met James Duncan and Jason Hoffman, who told me a bit about their company’s on-demand cloud-based hosting which specializes in Rails apps. Joyent is apparently the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world. Here are James and Jason talking about Joyent:
If you want to check out more of the companies that were at E2 2009 in Boston, you can find it on the E2 conference site.
