Showcasing the new breed of startup-style vendors who are solving old problems in a fresh way or offering a glimpse into the future of enterprise applications.
Dennis Howlett is a 40 year veteran in enterprise IT, working with companies large and small across many industries. He endeavors to inform buyers in a no-nonsense manner and spares no vendor that comes under his microscope.
Zack Whittaker writes for ZDNet, CNET and CBS News. He is based in New York City.
Larry Dignan's article about enterprise startups is an excellent primer for those wanting to pitch Zack and I but there are other issues I'd like to surface. Especially that which talks to the Silicon Valley echo chamber.
In time honored Gartner fashion, I'm now using T4E as a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to describe 'Twitter 4 Enterprise' style services that are coming out the woodwork at a rapid rate of knots. This time around it's Yammer, which provides a private form of messaging for use inside the firewall.
This is a dual post written and posted simultaneously. For the perspective of how Iceberg this benefits student, check the post over at iGeneration.
Being at a university and working for a government department allows me to understand this concept well. There are shared resources here, there and everywhere, provided by different people and providers, all open to a "certain type" of person - employees or students.
SocialCast has revamped its group comms service, given it a facelift, aligned itself more closely to consumery apps like Twitter and FriendFeed and then given it an enterprise twist. As far as I am aware, this is the first enterprise facing application that has gotten close to what I have long thought is the way to go for microblogging and information sharing in an enterprise environment.
It's a bit of a stretch to pigeon hole something coming out of Mozilla labs as appropriate to the start-up genre that Alley espouses but Ubiquity is such a useful Firefox add-in that I believe it is well worth attention on these pages.There's plenty of debate around mashups but many of the available tools remain firmly in the hands of geeks.
Regator, describes itself as giving "a bite of the blogosphere's best". After investigating this startup, from a technical standpoint the website looks quite swish: lots of AJAXy goodness and Web 2.
Twitter clones are starting to come out the woodwork. The latest candidate is StatusHQ, which surfaced last Friday and which my pal Luis Suarez describes as: "What Twitter could have been.
I'm keen to see startups in the accounting for small business space. Part of that is because I spent more years than I care to remember in finance roles, part is in the belief that accounting systems that reflect a 600 year old methodology are well past their sell by date.
It's rare for me to pick out individuals but Mike McDerment CEO of FreshBooks deserves attention by anyone in the startup game and especially those trying to develop business applications. I first came across Mike some two years ago when FreshBooks had about 70,000 registrants.