After making it through two rigorous rounds of voting, CubeTree, The Garland Group, Twiki and XWiki made it to the Final Four and presented live on the keynote stage on Wednesday, November 4, 2009. Each of the presenters had 5 minutes to demo their product, and after each company had their turn, the audience participated in a live text-to-vote, courtesy of our friends at Mozes.

The results tabulated in real-time percentages, and with 42% of the vote, CubeTree was crowned the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Launch Pad winner. When CubeTree’s CEO & Co-Founder was asked to explain how he felt about winning Launch Pad in 140 characters or less, Carlin Wiegner succinctly replied that he was happy. Nice one Carlin.

I wanted to personally thank Steve Wylie, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference GM, for letting me serve as chairperson for the compeition. Big thanks to Carlin, Brad, Jitendra, Milind and Ludovic for doing such a great job and helping to make this program a huge success! Cheers guys.

We saw some really innovative new tools, but the cream rises to the top:

CubeTree

CubeTree’s hosted collaboration suite helps companies create internal social networks. CubeTree’s social networking features include profiles, microblogging, tagging and activity feeds for 30+ types of feed items A company’s CubeTree network is private to the company, free for any number of employees and comes with enterprise-ready security and administration. To help employees collaborate better, applications like wikis, microblogging, file-sharing, link-sharing, polls and group chat are integrated into CubeTree’s social networking platform, and included for free. CubeTree supports 20+ built-in integrations, from consumer software like Twitter to enterprise applications like CRM and Google Apps, and a rich API enables custom integrations.

The Garland Group

We’re a compliance and collaboration company focusing on the community bank and credit union industry.

We have built a collaborative compliance management platform called RiskKey to bring transparency & legitimacy to banks and the industry that are supposed to be in the business of protecting consumers money as they were supposed to do.

Twiki

Twiki, Inc. is the leading enabler of Enterprise Agility. The Twiki Open Collaboration Platform transforms corporate intranets and portals, creating a powerful knowledge infrastructure for the organization. Users can share rich web pages and existing enterprise documents with powerful search and connect with enterprise social networking. Twiki situational applications, dashboards and reports that model enterprise business processes can be created using a simple markup language that does not require deep programming skills, enabling true agility in the enterprise.

Twiki is based on an open core that has a 10 year track record of community driven innovation. The platform has been downloaded over half a million times and has over 60,000 installations in 130 countries and 14 languages. Over half of the Fortune 500, leading government agencies, public websites and universities use Twiki with installations that scale securely to tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of pages. The Twiki platform is available OnSite behind a corporate firewall, or as an OnDemand Platform as a Service, with applications that span knowledge management, content management, operations management, CRM and project management.

XWiki

XWiki builds open-source collaborative solutions for Enterprises. The XWiki platform is highly extensible and allows to structure content and build applications on top of a Wiki.

A few thank yous also need to be made:

Firstly, a big thank you to all the companies that took time to Twitter pitch for the San Francisco Launch Pad competition. Secondly, a very special thank you to the quarter-finalists who submitted their 3 minute video and helped spread the word about the contest.  Lastly, I’d like to tip my hat to the E2.0 community at large who voted on our Round Two videos.

Congrats to our Four Finalists! See you in San Francisco.

Our 8 quarter-finalist were chosen to by the E2 team as the best, brightest and most innovative tools from the general pool of submissions. We’re now looking to the E2 community to check out their 3 minute videos and select your favorite. Please note that you can only vote one time for the vid you would like to see move to the next round.

The 4 finalists with the most votes will be announced on October 16 and provided the chance to a give a 5 minute demonstration of their application live on the keynote stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 4.

Are you one of the 8 quarter-finalists? Help get the word out to your network to start voting using #e2conf-lp and #e2conf.

Rock the vote!

Ally Software

allysoftware: @e2conf #e2conflp Managing complex projects is stuck in Web1, too many emails & meetings. Harmony simplifies complex project & schedule mgmt

Covisint

MikejMorley: Connect employees to the purpose of the org, allow emp’s to see what eachother are working on&realize the Harvest of human capitol #e2conflp

thegarlandgroup: @e2conf - RiskKey, our real-time compliance mgmt tool for banks, promotes transparency, collaboration, and trust. They need us. #e2conflp

HashWork

@e2conf #e2conflp @Hashwork provides a social presence on web for any company and its community of custo - http://bit.ly/YlnGk by @wlansford

IncentiveLive

incentivelive: #e2conflp An enterprise wiki, blog, social network and widget platform? Great GUI & .NET? Well you’ve guessed right, it’s not Sharepoint :)

We’ll announce the 9 quarter-finalists on September 28 . Those lucky 9 will then move on to Round 2 video submissions.

Interested in entering? First let us know who you are, and then Twitter pitch to #e2conflp. For more information check out the official Launch Pad site.

Best of luck!

Standing at least 6′ 3″ tall, his spiky head of blond hair is easily recognizable. Known in the open source world as the founder of Drupal, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and instrumental player in Drupalcon, it’s obvious that Dries is a very clever and busy guy.  I caught up with Dries at the recent OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about how he manages to be so successful.

1) You are the founder of the Drupal content management system and CTO/Co-founder of Acquia. How did a Belgian like yourself get involved in CMS?

I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and Server-Side Includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.

After I relaunched my internal message to the public internet as drop.org in 2000, I continued to build on it for a year or so and added a lot of features. More than anything, it was an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds, blogging and content and user rating.

As my experiments evolved, they drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start their own experimenting and applying their own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to open source, and also how the community started.

So it was mostly by accident, and it quickly got out of hand.

2) Why did you feel the need to form Acquia and what does Acquia contribute to the Drupal community?

Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of Drupal, and by offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.

As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.

3) There were over 1,400 at Drupalcon in Washington DC, 2009. What is driving this community’s significant growth year over year?

A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including more than 4,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength.

4) There are a lot of open source projects out there today. What makes Drupal unique?

Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development.  But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.

This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do.

Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users.  If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster.  This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.

My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer.  Eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming.  In other words, one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.

5) Can you name some of the biggest sites that run on the Drupal platform?

A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more.  I believe there are two primary reasons people have chosen Drupal.  The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project.  Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.

6) What are the most common barriers to open source software adoption in the enterprise?

The biggest barrier is education - people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar.  The good news is that “open source” as a category of technologies is pretty mature in the enterprise - particularly in the data center.  Technologies like Linux, Apache, Eclipse and others are now standard tools in any data center infrastructure.  The next step in this evolution is for business buyers, outside the data center, to adopt solutions built on open source applications, like Drupal.

7) How do you overcome these objections?

This is where Acquia comes in – Acquia gives organizations the confidence they need to adopt Drupal based solutions.  They can access the same level of customer service support and guidance that they have come to expect from proprietary software products – in many cases, better customer service – while taking advantage of the innovation and value of open source Drupal.

8) What’s next for Drupal? Can you share any future plans with us?

We are currently working on Drupal 7.  We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding lots of new features in core (e.g. a new database backend, better file and image handling, improved access control, theme system improvements) but also improving usability and scalability.

Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search.  For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal’s database and doesn’t surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can’t pick it up as a product, and they’d fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

9) Is it true that the genesis of the name Drupal was actually a typo? What’s the story there?

Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.

Thanks again for your time Dries!

Register your company here, and we’ll email you instructions on how to Twitter pitch. Round 1 Twitter submissions will close September 25, and the Enterprise 2.0 team will announce the 8 finalists on September 28.  Those 8 finalists will then submit video pitches and go through one more round of voting by the E2 community. The final four will be given the opportunity to give a 5 minute live presentation from the main stage, plus a complimentary exhibit space on the Enterprise 2.0 show floor.

Launch Pad is the premiere platform for unveiling new social tools within the enterprise. To get a sense of the innovative companies that have submitted in the past, take a peek at our four finalists from the Launch pad at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2009 last June.

Want more detail on rules and key dates? Take a look here for more information.

Best of luck!

If you are an Enterprise 2.0 start-up with a compelling tool or an existing company with a new application, we want to hear about it.  Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is an incredible opportunity for companies to present to the Enterprise 2.0 community from the main stage and win a complimentary exhibition pod on the show floor.

How does it work? We’ll have 3 rounds to whittle down entrants to our four finalists.

• Round 1. Twitter Pitch: E2 staff narrow down the field of entrants to 16 quarter-finalists.

• Round 2. One Minute Video: A round of voting by the E2 community to select 8 semi-finalists.

• Round 3.Three Minute Video: A round of voting by the E2 community to select our 4 Launch Pad finalists.

Those 4 finalists will be announced in early November and will asked to give a 5 minute demonstrate of their applications live on the keynote stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA on November 2-5. The winner will be chosen by live conference attendees after the four finalists deliver their demo.

Start perfecting those 140 characters and stay tuned for the official Launch Pad Twitter hash tag and website  - we’ll open up Round 1’s Twitter pitch on Friday, August 28.

Some highlights and prevalent topics include:

• Tons of case studies and tales of adoption
• Mobility
• Cloud computing
• Micro-blogging & emerging platforms in the enterprise
• Driving the social media bus
• Building an Enterprise 2.0 culture
• Internal & external communities

A big thank you to all that took the time and effort to submit an abstract. Steve and the Advisory Board have got some reading to do.

There’s also an intriguing case study from Adobe that’s worth reading. Bottom line - providing your fanbase with the opportunity to interact via promotions, giveaways or contests will lead to more community enthusiasm and perpetuate the viral nature of Facebook.