Enterprise 2.0 Conference

I had some local commitments so I could not fly up to Boston again (See earlier post on Johnny goes to Harvard) and thought I would miss the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Bummer. Little did I know that these people are trying to practice what they preach. I joined the Twitter stream #e2conf and am getting real-time tweets from all over the conference. Also there is a blog where I can read material from most of the presenters and see the opinions from other attendees.

Finally there is a e2TV video stream of the general sessions and vendor demos.

This morning I participated in the Launchpad contest. Four vendors who were finalists got a chance to do a quick demo for the audience and then the audience voted for a winner via SMS.

The four finalists were:

Bantam Networks - they have a enterprise project workspace that allow team mates to communicate, share info and manage relationships.

Brainpark - they also create a social network for projects. The difference seems to be an engine that suggests to the user people who have skills that might help, docs with info that might help, feeds/links with info that might help.

Manymoon - another social network for developers. This one has a good integration with Google apps and with external participants.

YouCalc - this is a different one... an analytics environment that can pull info from a lot of different sources and present graphic analysis. Also it is a product based on "wikinomics". The apps are created by the user community. If you create an app it must be made publicly available for others to use modify. The data that is analyzed remains private.

So the voting took place (I thought Manymoon was really good) and the winner was YouCalc with 53% of the vote.

As I am finishing up this post I am listening to a demo of Lotus Live from IBM. Last night they won the big Buyers Choice Award for best product of the show. This was a vote by attendees.

This type of virtual conference experience still lacks the level of deal making / networking that can happen in a f2f environment but you can't beat the price (FREE) and not having to sit on an airplane and then that ride in from Logan airport (Ugh).