I’m at Techcrunch50 this week (and will be here for most of the conference). The Enterprise group of startups showed yesterday. It was an interesting cluster of startups to include in At first glance I would have included only one in the traditional Enterprise. When I think of Enterprise in the Web 2.0 space I usually narrow my classification to either platforms (like Salesforce) or taking consumer applications behind the firewall (like Zimbra). Instead this session included a consumer-data company, dev tools and a startup service.
The only company that fit my narrow profile was Yammer. It’s a hosted Twitter that allows companies to have their own Twitter networks. I haven’t played with it yet, but it seemed like a very solid app that could take hold in this space. I just learned from the Techcrunch50 site that companies pay to claim and administer their networks. It launched today.
Open Trace was the most novel company and did well in the judging because of this. Tokyo-based Open Trace aims to show you where your products come from and what their environmental impact is.
This site is all about the data. It’s got to have a lot, it’s got to be quality and its got to showcase it. Once launched the site will be editable by anyone. For the site to be affective however they will need large data sets. Some of these will come from users, but more of them will come from partnerships or clients. As Marc Benioff suggested on-stage, Open Trace could benefit from working with FairTrade or a similar organization. Companies could pay to have their products maintained in the Open Trace database. Not very enterprise, but it could definitely service the enterprise as a vendor.
Connective Logic offered up BluePrint, a graphical interface for Visual Studio 2005. It promises to assist with multi-core issues.
FairSoftware provides a method for companies to incorporate and manage their new business. Shares can be allocated to partners and employees.