With Office 2.0, software and application suites are definitely “in the clouds.” Application suites, social networks, collaborative work—the whole web 2.0 concept has been widely analyzed during this second-year conference.

• Interview with ThoughtFarmer, an easy to use Wiki
  Discover ThoughtFarmer, a knowledge sharing solution for the new enterprise. Watch the video interview at the Office 2.0 Conference 2007.
• Interview with ContactOffice, the complete virtual office solution
  Founded in 1999, ContactOffice allows the quick and economical deployment of a complete virtual office solution; either on its publisher’s servers or on the client’s.
• Interview with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho.com
  Starting up this video review with Zoho, a Pleasanton, CA based start-up company providing Office Suite products through dynamic web pages…

Mathieu Ramage
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier

Huret, Patrick de Schutter, Luc Claes and Brice Le Blévennec—ContactOffice allows the quick and economical deployment of a complete virtual office solution, either on its publisher’s or client’s servers.

It can be completely integrated into an existing website, both from a graphical and functional point of view. Its organizational, communication, and collaboration tools are equipped with numerous functionalities capable of meeting the requirements of any type of user. Through its multiple access channels, any type of usage on the same infrastructure is possible: fixed, mobile or occasionally mobile.

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ThoughtFarmer is a knowledge-sharing solution for the new enterprise. It’s used as:

• a standalone intranet or extranet
• a collaboration hub
• the knowledge-sharing component of an existing intranet

ThoughtFarmer embraces the good things wikis have brought us: an open, easy, democratic authoring environment with no barriers to content creation. It then adds structure and social networking to that wiki core.

Discover their great features here, and learn how to save $500,000 on a $2,000,000 tile job:)

Watch Dominique Piotet’s video interview with Chris McGrath, Co-Founder of ThoughtFarmer:

Mathieu Ramage
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier

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Founded in 2005, Zoho is a Pleasanton, CA-based start-up company providing Office Suite products through dynamic web pages.

Watch Dominique Piotet’s video of Zoho’s Ceo Sridhar Vembu:

Mathieu Ramage
Media and Editorial Manager of Atelier

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After the last of the 69 demos, Chris Shipley used a string of qualifiers to describe the trends represented by this year’s companies: rich-media, social, collaborative, secure, business-aware, creative, global and mobile. It about sums it up.

Because of the intense pressure weighing on the presenters for two days, the closing dinner felt like a collective sigh of relief with the sense of having survived a sort of baptism by fire. It is the custom for the conference to bestow DEMOgod awards to those presenters who performed most gracefully under pressure and best engaged the audience. One of the 2007 DEMOgod is Chaim Indig. For the 29-year old serial entrepreneur, the recognition was the crowning moment of an event that has already resulted in coverage of his company Phreesia, maker of an electronic patient check-in clipboard, in USA Today and several other media. For Indig, Demo has already paid off handsomely.

And now a closer look at six last companies.

Only three companies were presenting in this category despite its importance in the online user experience.

Exlead

This New York-based company is headed by AltaVista veteran François Bourconcle who claims that Exlead’s latest product, Baagz, is the first engine to capture the Web 2.0 by combining search with social networking capabilities. As you use Exlead’s search engine, the results show the “baagz” of other site users. You can grab some of their favorite sites and drag them into your “baagz”. Taking the social aspect one step further, you can ask other users questions and add them to your network of friends. Baagz is currently in private beta.

This track mainly addressed questions of security, rather than the issue of trusting content.

CodaSystem

Based in Paris, CodaSystem has been providing a photo and video authentication solution to large companies for a while (one example is a chain of stores needing to prove to its suppliers that they are displaying their products as agreed). Now the solution is becoming available to everybody with a smart phone running Windows Mobile or Flash. A watermark is inserted into the pixels and disappears if the photo is altered in any way. Photos are stored on CodaSystem’s secured servers. Applications in real estate, construction, display advertising and police work come to mind.

Pudding Media

San Jose-based Pudding Media will offer free calls over the Internet. The twist is that, thanks to a voice recognition technology, the site picks up on your conversation and brings up relevant content as you chat. Some of that “content” is targeted ads. “We don’t keep records and we are not backed by the NSA,” assured founder Ariel Maislos to respond to widespread criticism that his service is an Orwellian, eavesdropping scheme that takes targeting a little too far.

Myndnet.

On Wikipedia, experts share their knowledge for free. On Myndnet, they sell it. To customers looking for leads, new recruits and any type of information vital to their business, the East Palo Alto company offers a venue to post their question online. For example, a recruiter would be charged $35 per name (a refund policy comes with the product). The “expert” who provides a valued answer gets $14.

Truphone

James Tagg, the CEO of London-based Truphone, wants to bring the benefits of VoIP to millions of cell phone users. On stage here, he even demonstrated what he claimed was the first web call made on an iPhone. Whenever a cell user is within range of a Wi-Fi network, the calls transit over the Internet and become free.

mig33

Steven Goh and Mei Lin Ng, the two co-founders of mig33, say that their service is already used in 200 countries by 7 million users sending 30 millions messages a day. That sounds impressive and now they are bringing the service to the US. What is mig33 about? A sort of MySpace on the cell, it allows cell users to connect to their buddies on any web-based email system, to send them photos or to call them cheaply across borders.

Isabelle Boucq in San Diego

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Demo Fall 2007 Videos

Chris Shipley’s welcoming remarks

The Futur: Through the Eyes of Young Innovators

Behind the scenes

Returning to business after an evening of partying and mingling at Demo after Dark, 37 companies are presenting today and the room is feeling decidedly more energized on the second day of the conference.

The morning session covered meeting management tools, small business Office 2.0 applications and the customization of media content.

Two companies which were to demo this morning, Wixi and mEgo, were conspicuously absent without a word of explanation from MC Chris Shipley. Word is that they jumped ship and presented at last week’s TechCrunch40 conference in violation of their exclusivity contract. As a result, they got kicked out of Demo. It is a tough world out there.

Our closer look at six companies

For those who spend a lot of time organizing and attending meetings, a slate of companies had help to offer. As is often the case after a presentation here, one wonders if users will actually take the time to master that particular application or site. But those two companies got attendees excited.

This Montreal-based company is trying to take the headache out of scheduling meetings, particularly with people outside of the organization. Its plug-in sits in Outlook and can be sent to contacts you want to invite to join your group. Once somebody is on board, you can view their availability before sending them a meeting request and you receive updates to their calendar that might impact the request. Tungle Spaces is a more private version of the product to be used with those contacts with whom you don’t want to share your entire calendar. And it is free.

Mountain-View Vello’s CEO Mark Dzwonczyk made his demo very effective by collecting cell phone numbers on the first day of the conference and setting off a concert of ring tones when he called dozens of people in the room to show off how easy it is to put together a conference call using his service. Select participants in the application and click “Call”. For those who miss the beginning of the call or get dropped off the call, 1-888-myvello is the easy way to join in.

Announcing the first of the presenters in this track, Chris Shipley felt that “companies have been disrespectful to small businesses by offering them dumbed down software.” Most of the presenters claimed they understand the needs of small businesses. After all, they are small businesses themselves.

Yet another Silicon Valley company, CashView is based in Palo Alto. Its goal is to free business owners and managers from endless paperwork, invoices and bills. The web-based application is a cash-management service where a business owner can keep track of bills and invoices, schedule payments on a calendar and even get an alert if cash flow becomes a problem. By storing contracts, copies of cashed checks and establishing who needs to approve a particular bill, CashView keeps it all together. Word is that the company might have made a deal with Bank of America for their small business clients. Interestingly, CashView looks like the professional version of the winner of last week’s TechCrunch 40, online personal money management tool Mint.

Alexandre Rambaud, the French CEO of Texas-based AgendiZe, stormed the stage with his cowboy hat and French accent. His premise: businesses may get consumers’ attention online, but too often lose the sale to offline stores. His response: a call-to-action button that e-commerce sites can install to bring consumers to call them immediately, share the information they found by email or instant messaging or download it to their desktop to browse when offline. E-commerce sites who subscribe to AgendiZeMe get reports on their visitors’ use of the button.

The “your” here might represent either the consumer or the marketer as those two companies demonstrate.

Using technology developed by British Telecom, this UK company offers brands a tool to dissect their existing advertising videos (audio or graphics too) and repackage them for specific viewers according to their gender, geographical location or other relevant factors. The necessary information is collected from cookies or behavioral targeting networks. Najam Kidwai, the company’s CEO, calls this “adaptive content.”

This one will speak to everybody who can’t keep up with all the information landing daily in their RSS reader. “We make your feed reader smarter,” promises Dave Mawhinney, the CEO of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke. His application learns from a user’s reading habits and their explicit and implicit behavior. Did I forward this post to a friend? It must mean I found it useful. By customizing mSpoke to adjust to your changing interests, the idea is to cut down the clutter.

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Since 1991, Demo has been THE place for high-tech companies to announce new products. Skype, TiVo and the Palm Pilot are among the graduates of this conference which promises “a sneak peek at the future of the technology business” twice a year.

Chris Shipley (right picture), the sought-after producer of the event, says she meets with about 500 companies every year and looks at them “with a human eye for usefulness, practical advancement, and social change.” From this year’s crop, Shipley takes away two lessons: “Users are in charge and influence is highly distributed.”

For their 6 minutes of stage and a table in the demonstrator pavilion, companies from all over the world are willing to part with $18,000. What they buy is the attention of 700 venture capitalists, corporate business development executives, influential journalists and bloggers as well as fellow entrepreneurs. A good half of them are presenting consumer technologies and products. On Day One, video applications, “wisdom of the crowds” sites and mobile applications took to the stage. Below is a selection.

As impressive as these companies might be (and, frankly, some of them do seem a little flimsy), one of the “whoa!” moments came when three 20-something innovators sat down for a panel discussion with Shipley. Michael Callahan from Ambient demonstrated his thought-to-speech solution which he hopes will soon help handicapped people communicate and, further down the line, might find applications in games.

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Our closer look at six companies

Video killed the radio star

In the post-YouTube world, companies are looking for ways to work the video angle whether they want to distribute video, touch up cell phone videos or help consumers discover new video content.

Proxure
Hailing from nearby San Luis Obispo, Proxure is introducing Filmaroo, an application that allows Internet users to share their video with their friends very easily. More private than YouTube and the likes, it automates and secures the process of uploading the video to a delivery network. Social networking is still part of the picture with sharing features and synchronization with mobile devices.

MetaRADAR
This San Bruno-based company started from a simple premise: we have to learn every site we go to from scratch and we must remember an increasing number of passwords. The idea behind the company’s product, still under beta, is to bring all of the user’s favorite content under one roof. This “media masher” is an interface from which users can search and view content without going to the original site.

 The wisdom of many, many individuals

The companies in this space are trying to harness the infamous “wisdom of the crowds”. As central authoritative sources have been replaced by many voices, it has become more difficult to find useful gems of information and to separate good stuff from pure noise.

coComment
Most online conversations are not really conversations. “It’s just me throwing something at you,” says Matt Colebourne, CEO of the Swiss company coComment. To fix that problem, coComment gives users a central place to keep track of the comments they make on various social networking sites. The second feature of the site is to track conversations across thousands of sites on any given topic. After 8 months, Colebourne says that his site has attracted 500,000 users.

RelevantMind
People turn to the Web to make buying decisions, whether they buy online or not. There are hundreds of opinions out there about the products they are thinking about buying. After sites where consumers can review products à la Epinions, here comes RelevantMind which pulls conversations from all across the web and aggregate them on a vertical page about a specific product category (road bikes and golf only at the moment).

 Enablers

Propel
The San Jose company wants to help individuals manage their bandwidth so that time-sensitive applications get priority, i.e. a Skype conversation takes precedence over an upload. IT managers have able to do this for a while, but Propel brings their PBM (personal bandwidth management) solution to the masses.

Myxer
Take any site and build a store front where you can give away or sell its photos as wallpapers, its music as ringtones and so on. That’s what this Florida company is working on. Visitors can then enter their cell phone number and receive the data on their phone. It is as simple as that.

Watch videos of these companies here!

Isabelle Boucq - from San Diego - for Atelier

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When the iPhone was unveiled back in February, Steve Jobs claimed that it was years ahead of the competition. Most agreed, and many started thinking about what could make the iPhone even better. How could we out-do Steve and his team? The answer came two weeks ago, in the form of the iPod Touch.

I just got one yesterday, and I must say that I am very impressed by the device. It’s not flawless (the screen in particular is not as good as the iPhone’s), but it has two major advantages over the iPhone: it’s a lot thiner (8 mm vs. 11.5 mm), and noticeably lighter (120 grams vs. 135 grams). As a result, putting your iPod Touch in your pants pocket is a lot more comfortable, and putting it in your shirt pocket is possible. It’s also cheaper to buy ($299 vs. $399), and a lot cheaper to own ($0 vs. $59.99 per month).

Of course, the iPod Touch lacks one thing the iPhone does very well: making and receiving phone calls. But what if you paired an iPod Touch to an ultra mobile device like the Redux Model 1? Could the combination replace your iPhone and laptop computer altogether? If you add a good Bluetooth headset to the mix, it might…

The idea is to use the iPod Touch as some kind of a remote control for your Mini Tablet, using the iPod Touch’s web browser as user interface, and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi as a way to connect the Mini Tablet to the iPod Touch.

To make it work, the Mini Tablet would have to run a web server, following an idea suggested by my friend Andrew Baldwin in a comment to this post. The Bluetooth headset would be paired to the Mini Tablet, and the iPod Touch’s web browser’s home page would be served by the Mini Tablet’s embedded web server. When receiving a phone call, this page would display the caller’s information. And for making a phone call, this page would give access to the user’s address book.

Now here comes the really cool part: because the address book would be served from a web server, it could itself fetch its data from an online database, such as… Salesforce.com! This would address a need I have been trying to fulfill for the past two years, which is to get all my Salesforce.com contacts (close to 12,000 now) on my cell phone, without having to use Microsoft Outlook to synchronize everything. And because the whole thing would be done as a web application, it would be trivial for anyone to customize it in order to retrieve content from virtually any application or web service. Are you seeing where I’m going with this now?

Of course, what could be done with contacts could be also done with events and tasks. And using a service like Move & Play, one would get access to all the tunes, videos, and pictures stored on one’s home computer directly from one’s iPod Touch. This tiny device could even be used as a remote control to control the playing of music and movies directly from iTunes at home — more on this later…

Granted, such an architecture would pose some very interesting technical challenges. For example, power management would need to be finely tuned in order to keep the Mini Tablet’s GSM connection always on, while the display would be turned off, and to turn the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections on instantly whenever they would be needed. But all this can be done at the software level, which gives us some time to properly figure it out.

Another challenge would be to support two concurrent Wi-Fi connections, one between a Wi-Fi hotspot and the Mini Tablet, the other between the Mini Tablet and the iPod Touch. I do not know if this can be done with a single Wi-Fi module, but adding another one should be possible if we really have to.

Last but not least: we managed to get in touch with the good folks at Openmoko, Inc., and they seem to think that our project is totally doable, within the time frame we have. Good news: we should be able to get a high-resolution display with a video controller that won’t require the development of a custom driver, and we might be able to use USB 2.0 for video out. Bad news: Adobe Flash won’t be available, for it does not support the ARM CPU we are planning to use (same limitation on Apple’s iPhone). We asked for a quote for 2,500 units, 750 of them to be given to physical attendees to the Office 2.0 Conference, and 1,750 to be sold to individual sponsors. We should receive the quote within a week, at which point we will make a decision whether to continue down that path or not.

By Mathieu Ramage

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