Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 is a wrap! This week has been phenomenal, with tons of press coverage, photos and buzz. Amongst all the great keynotes & general sessions at the conference, I wanted to take a moment to reflect and recognize the Launch Pad program and our Four Finalists.

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.

If you haven’t done so already, be sure to take a moment and peruse our 8 Launch Pad quarter-finalist videos and cast your vote before tomorrow evening.

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!

After reviewing the impressive submissions and internal deliberation, Enterprise 2.0 is pleased to announce the Launch Pad 9 quarter-finalists from Round One’s Twitter submissions. They are, in alphabetical order…

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 :)

If you’ve been working hard on that 140 character pitch, a friendly reminder that we need your Launch Pad submission tomorrow to be considered for the chance to present on the main stage at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco on November 4, 2009.

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!

Get ready - the fame and the glory that is Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is coming to the West Coast.

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.

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.

Round 3 videos are up for Launch Pad. Cast your vote and on June 11 we’ll see which 4 companies will get the chance to present live at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

See original Elite Eight announcement link here.

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.

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.