Jun 12th, 2009 |
Let me start by saying it was a VERY difficult process to get here - to be able to happily announce the Final Four Launch Padders who’ll present live on our main stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on Wednesday, June 24th.
Starting with 80 (or so) companies we went through 4 intense voting rounds and whittled down to our Elite Eight (actually nine) companies.
“This year’s response for the Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program was the best we’ve seen yet,” said Steve Wylie, General Manager and Conference Director for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. “The sheer amount of companies participating signify the incredible innovation happening in the space. These four finalists will present their unique technologies to our audiences, demonstrating new and applicable solutions that can improve the way we work and communicate.”
- Here are your finalists, congratulations!
- Bantam - a provider of online workspaces for business teams with real-time, streaming “social CRM” to keep track of people and business
- youcalc - where business people create and share custom reports and analytics on data from SaaS systems with zero coding required
- Brainpark - a smart and simple software product that helps employees learn from one another and become more productive at work
- Manymoon - a social productivity application that makes it simple to share and organize tasks, events, documents, status, links and projects
And congratulations to all our runners up, and everyone company who participated. And thanks to everyone who voted. Hope to see you at our event.
NOTE: Now in our second year we recognize that the voting system we use may not be the most accurate method of tallying true votes. Finalists were selected after taking the ratings data and filtering it through a system that de-duped IP addresses based on time stamps and range - because we requested only 1 vote per person. We applied the filter to ALL the companies and selected the top 4 with the highest scores, as stated in our voting guidelines.
Sorry guys, that is a very poor excuse for the total lack of transparency and faith in your entire voting process.
If you guys where just going to select 4 finalists on your own then why waste everyone’s time with this farce of a voting process.
The final publicly listed votes should define the winners and not some list you guys came up with in the back room. This really hurts the credibility of the conference on the whole. We really need something more here. This is really bad.
Think about this you mention that you knew that the voting system was broken for two years now. Still you made no attempt at fixing it. To any rational person it looks like the broken voting system works in your favor by serving as good excuse to pick the final winners based on something other that just votes.
I understand that legally you reserve all rights in regards to picking the winners, but unfortunately boilerplate legalize does not help protect the respect and confidence in your conferences ability to pick winners. If you guys where going to pick winners using your MAGIC algorithm in a back room then why have a public vote, why waste peoples time by getting them to drum up support on twitter etc.
I am extremely surprised that a respectable conference like Enterprise 2.0 find anything wrong with putting a democratic vote with public results into some MAGIC algorithm to help pick winners.
Sorry guys this is just plain wrong. You guys could not even fix up a decent voting mechanism so how are we supposed to have any confidence in this MAGIC algorithm that you came up with. For all you know there are major bugs in its code and the result is hogwash.
Guys to be very fare you cannot subvert publicly available vote results. If you think your voting mechanim was broken then its too bad really. But this vote had been really badly managed and will now hurt the credibility of this entire conference. Who was responsible for this voteing system ?
i agree with above and are very disappointed by the unfair standards used to pick the finalists. The very fact that standards chosen are hidden from the public makes it questionable. In that way anyone can pay to win this. Your advertisement states tell your friend and their friends.
We strongly condemn this.
George Smith
We donot agree with the standard used to pick final four, this should be re run with new system, which could not be manipulated.
Final Four are really not final four
The last round should be rerun. the company self admits that their system has problems. See their Note above
Dear community. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and for participating in the Launch Pad program we initiated.
In its second year, this program has been able to kick off a lot of goodwill by showcasing the great enterprise 2.0 innovation, creativity and company prowess across the industry.
As a conference we put a lot of effort into our marketing and PR thus all the companies participating in Launch Pad benefit from the behind-the-scenes effort the team puts into promoting the event, the special programs, and highlighting individual and organizational members of our community.
But let’s not forget that this is not marketed as a popularity contest. We ask people to vote on the basis of what is the best idea, the strongest company, the newest innovation that our marketplace is launching.
We recognized that the system was not perfect, but it was what we had to work with this time around. And when we began noticing some issues with the voting, we informed participants that we’d screen the votes against a filter that we deemed fair and appropriate.
We used a filter to de-dupe ALL duplicate IPs based on range and time-stamp (to prevent fraud) - and applied the SAME filter across ALL elite nine companies.
We then accepted the top 4 companies with the highest average vote (on a scale of 1 to 5) - and resulted in our winners.
Please note that Launch Pad is not selling a product or a service. We are not biased toward who the winners are. We are simply a platform to showcase ideas, and an arena for folks to discover.
We hear your rumblings and accusations, but I just want to reiterate that this is a program we ARE NOT required to have. Myself, Stowe Boyd, our GM Steve Wylie and our team have dedicated many many resources to making this program come to life over the course of the last month and we’re disappointed at this feedback.
We congratulate ALL the participating companies for their diligence and strength in an economy that’s been as trying as 2009 and wish the greatest success to all the members of our ever-growing enterprise 2.0 community.
Thank you,
~ Janetti Chon
Community Manager
Enterprise 2.0 Conference
For the record, the finalist winners announced above will be the ones to present live at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston next week, June 24th.
If we decide to hold this program next year we will require that all votes be tied to a registered email account and verified to eliminate any potential for fraud.
You state your system was not perfect but this is what we had so we used it. It just looses the credibility of the comapny. People should not waist their time on the broken system.
Hi folks,
We’re not going to run another vote. They voting in the system is fine, it just doesn’t have any defenses against scripting. The fact is that we have not filtered legitimate votes. We have filtered votes that our web experts tell us are being generated by scripts. I’m not saying any of the finalists are doing this but it seems there are some overzealous fans out there trying to run up the voting and that’s unfortunate. That’s not in the spirit of this program.
The voting is fair and will stand.
Steve
It could stand but it is NOT FAIR
Janetti, your reply is just a re-write of your blog. And again I would just point you to my post above since your reply does not really address any of the issues.
I am disappointed that you find this so hard to understand that publicly counted votes going into a *MAGIC* filter and out comes the winners is not equal to a fair democratic vote. There is no justification that can fix this.
Let me summarize your reply and your blog post for everyone “We suddenly decided that the voting system was broken so we decided to pick the winners ourselves”. Please think about this for a second, I know you are trying very hard to justify what you did but it does not make any sense.
Also public threats are a really a terrible way to address a concerned community that is trying to address their concerns on your blog. And yes “I just want to reiterate that this is a program we ARE NOT required to have” does sound like a threat so on top of subverting the vote you are trying to stifle decent.
You live in a democracy you should really understand how important perception and trust is towards having a fair vote”
wait for the press release, be prepared to give more answers. this launch pad bogus
Vikram, Kathleen, it’s time to stop whining. The conference has not lost any credibility because of yet another imperfect selection system (Web 2.0 LaunchPad is totally closed doors, FYI, and just about any other is the same).
What matters to me as a conference attendee is that these are four outstanding companies that deserve to be on stage.
And they do. I can’t wait to see them.
FLK , what ever your real identity is.
These are not the only four companies, there are also other much better and more deserving companies, which did not get fair chance.