One of the day 2 morning sessions at the Office 2.0 Conference was a series of blitz demos, where the vendors were only allowed 5 minutes, followed by a few questions, followed by the audience voting on the top 3 by SMS. As an incentive to the audience, whoever get’s closest to the best 3 will win one of the Apple iMacs being used in the demo pods of the conference. All of the solutions were web based, SaaS solutions. Here is my quick summary and thoughts on each solution presented:Caspio Bridge is a web development environment where you can create web forms and databases to business enable your website. Some of the user interface intentionally looks like Access to make it easy to use, with wizards to help create the pagers. It looks a pretty useful tool if the price is right.
Vyew is a flash based collaboration environment for meetings. You can work on pages, drawings, and presentations together in real time. The system has APIs to make it easy to bring in data from other environments, and you can save presentations in PowerPoint format. An off-line client, and synchronous/asynchronous working are in development. The basic service is free, with a monthly fee for the standard service.
Synthasite is a pure Ajax product for creating web shops. You can link in to existing web services and build websites from components. It will be launched in Q1 2007.
BEA presented Builder, which can be used by a non-technical person to build web applications - for example, to support the activities of a product launch.
Smartsheet addresses team task management in a simple and straightforward way, with a spreadsheet style approach. Their aim is to provide a simple, straightforward project management environments which replicates the kind of task management people do in Excel with e-mail as an alternative to complex project management solutions. The UI is like Excel, with easy ability to drag and drop or promote tasks - all done in Ajax. Tasks and actions are then managed with e-mail alerts. You can share the sheet in your company or externally, and it’s easy to cut and paste from Excel, Project, Word. The personal version is $20 a month, and 5 full users would cost $75 a month. Since so much real world project management often reverts to using Excel and e-mail, I’m sure this product will be a success.
Approver provides a service to replace the e-mail attachment and allow documents to be created in the browser or uploaded. They aim to handle the simplest workflow that most documents needs for approval. You can see the document, deadline and who needs to approve it all on 1 page. Alerts can be by RSS or e-mail, or with a desktop widget. There is a 15Mb limit on documents that can be uploaded, so it will handle most normal documents, but not large design/graphic files. There is a free service which only allows 1 document at a time, or you pay $6 per month/$40 per year.
Wufoo allows you to build forms and to share data, for your website or your blog. It’s intended for secretaries or non-technical people to create quick applications, like “join our mailing list”, event invitations, customer satisfaction surveys and the like. It has an easy, slick interface to design the form and the database. It’s free for collecting 100 entries a month, with plans from $9 to $99 for higher volume use. Their intention is to make form building fast and fun, and I think they are going to do really well with this product.
Freshbooks are addressing the invoicing and receivables process with a straightforward solution, that already has over 96,000 users. You can use it to create invoices to be sent by e-mail, or even by the US postal service. They have an API to make it easy to integrate with existing accounting or other systems like QuickBooks or Simply, and they aim to make businesses become more intelligent with access to benchmark information. This looks well worth checking out seriously.
Preezo is for building PowerPoint presentations online. The user interface looks exactly like PPT, and it operates very, very fast. Their aim is to make it easy to collaborate, exchange, or get access to PPTs, which are often fat files that are inconvenient to e-mail or download. The product is all lightweight coding and HTML. There is a free, and then premium chargeable edition.
Techdirt Insight Community provides a mechanism to collect questions from customers or focus groups, and for experts to provide answers. They aim to provide a way for bloggers to offer their expertise and analysis, set a price for their answers and connect them to the customer/questioner.
Trovix is a very smart looking search engine that matches resumes to job descriptions for the recruitment process. The technology was developed at MIT, and interprets the CV/resume data and extracts the expertise, even if it hasn’t been presented overtly. This looks like it has potential.
SiteKreator is for building websites. It is an easy to use, comprehensive content management system for a non-technical person to build their website with content, forms, blog capability, forums, image galleries and the like. The approach to create, edit and manipulate the content and pages looked really slick. They have a free edition, and then a business edition that costs $15 a month. I for one will definitely be investigating this product in more detail.
Etelos provides a marketplace for you to pick web 2.0 applications, and then hook up with a hosting partner to provide the service. They are essentially providing both a marketplace, as well as a platform/ecosystem. For developers it would allow you to build applications, and help you distribute them. I’ll need to investigate how this compares with things like Jamcracker or AppExchange.
Koral is a content collaboration environment for business. Their intention is to make it “painfully easy” for people to collaborate with a nice drag and drop, widget based interface. Rather than store things in nested folders, where you can never find anything, their system has tag, folksonomy based approach. They don’t integrate with e-mail systems yet, but they provide an excellent repository, with mechanisms to push information out to the user with e-mail alerts and RSS. The pricing starts at $9.95 a month, with an Enterprise edition at $30 a month.
SystemOne is an Enterprise collaboration solution. It provides wiki based content pages with real time feeds to compare what you are writing, so that it can present you with similar content on the web, in your document repository or elsewhere. You can compare what you are writing with what others are writing - the kind of thing that would be really useful to any distributed organisation who doesn’t want their staff constantly re-inventing the wheel, if someone is doing something similar in another location. The interface looks really straight forward, with document revision history, and a nice visual mechanism for showing the timeline of a document’s evolution, and it’s related content. The applucation is being design with a self service approacjh.will cost $95 per seat per month and will be available next year.
My personal choice of 1, 2, 3 for the best demo was Wufoo, Koral, Smartsheet (with SystemOne almost equal third). The actual awards went to:
By the way, the best product award of the show was EchoSign, and the award for best office suite went to Joyent.
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