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This entry cross-posted to my new blog location.

Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors chaired Launch Pad, where four companies each had six minutes to talk about a new product that they're launching. David Coleman and Stowe Boyd each provided a minute of critique, then at the end we voted via SMS for our favourite.

Franco Dal Molin of Collanos: team collaboration across the corporate firewall, so that it can include outsourcers and contractors. They have a synchronized peer-to-peer workspace solution which is server-less, allowing for sharing information both real-time and asynchronously. You invite others to your workspace, and what you're doing synchs with what they're doing. It can include any types of content or file types, but also structure content such as tasks and links. There's versioning of the content. Each project is presented in its own tab for organization, and presumably you can share different different tabs with different people. Workplace was released about six months ago, and today, they're announcing a voice calling add-on to allow for voice and video calls, including voice mail and call forwarding. He invited us to join the Collanosphere. [I'm wondering if you're just looking at the product, is that a Collanoscopy?]

One of Stowe Boyd's comments was that the problem with P2P is that if you're never online at the same time as your collaborators, then you never synch with them; I see that in the Skype group chat that I belong to, where the chat history is actually maintained through P2P synchronization and I'll suddenly get a big chunk of missing chat history come flooding in when someone comes online.

Avinoam Nowogrodski from Clarizen, who I'll be interviewing later today: on-demand, collaborative project management. He had a lot of great marketing graphics that talked about collaborative project networks, but I'm not left with much of an overall impression of what their software actually does (aside from the fact that it's called "project management", so I assume that it does some sort of, um, project management).

Dave Peak of LiquidTalk: some of the challenges in business today are that an increasingly remote workforce limits collaboration; the Web 2.0 generation enters the workforce and have higher expectations; and roles are getting tougher, leading to higher turnover in employees. The result is a disconnected, disengaged workforce, and LiquidTalk counters this with mobile workforce engagement: create, find, organize and push audio/video business content to mobile devices. Personally, I'm not sure that I want to consume a lot of information via voice; although I listen to podcasts a lot, if I'm just trying to extract some key data, text is way easier.

Sam Weber of KnowNow was up last: his title slide claims that they're the Live Information Management Application for Today's Enterprise. He states that email is overused (and has become a storage device rather than a communication platform), static portals are broken, and search isn't the answer. They monitor a wide variety of information sources -- blogs, wikis, web servers, email, portals and more -- and aggregate it, apply filtering, then push it out the critical information via RSS to create channels in a user portal environment similar to Netvibes. I agree with the critics that aggregation and RSS feeds are the way to go for information consumption in the future, so this one may have some legs.

The audience vote on which of these has the game-changing proposition: KnowNow.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 02:21 PM in Enterprise2.0 | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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