Josh and I spent a day working the Under the Radar conference last week (see all stories). Actually, Josh was working; I was onstage hustling start-ups on and off the stage. We saw about 40 business-related Web 2.0 companies. Most of them were very early-stage, so you might not want to entrust your business to them. But there were several apps that were more developed, and a few that are worth looking at even though they're not.
As I wrote after the Demo conference, I am amazed by what people are doing with Flash and AIR apps. Two apps from Under the Radar, Blist and SlideRocket, are Flash apps. Neither are available to the public just yet, but when they ship be sure to check them out.
There were a lot of good apps at the show, but we selected five that really stood out. Watch the video to learn why, in addition to Blist and SlideRocket, we picked Orgoo, Vello, and Nuconomy as our Best Five apps from Under the Radar.
My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.
Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.
Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as a template for your next "blist." In addition to monetizing for the enterprise crowd, Blist will start placing ads on the free version.
Cozimo is a video and image collaborative annotation tool (see coverage). It shares a few similarities with FeedbackFX with much more attention on real-time collaboration of rich media documents. Each member in a work group is assigned a layer where they draw and scribble comments, all of which are saved in the session even as it's synchronously presented to the group. Cozimo can also be used asynchronously through a collaboration widget that can be pasted onto any image on any Web site. Like other collaboration tools, there's internal IM, though VoIP services aren't yet part of the equation.
LiquidPlanner's collaborative project management software doesn't gauge your project's progress by how on-target you are; it measures its deficiencies (coverage). LiquidPlanner can calculate schedules and predict using mathematical probability when a project is likely to get done. It also cooks up a range of best and worst case scenarios to project the soonest you'll conclude assuming everything goes right, and how long you'll struggle if everything goes wrong.
LiquidPlanner calculates project management estimates.
SlideShare (coverage) is a site for uploading and sharing PowerPoint, PDFs, and OpenOffice presentations and also folds in some social networking elements like blogging and podcast hosting. CEO Rashmi Sinha said she sees her company traveling more along the LinkedIn model for generating contacts than a YouTube for all sorts of PowerPoint presentations. E-learning and business presentations make up the bulk of the content, but there's also a fair number of photo slide shows and even some more adult content. There's also a Facebook application for easy uploading.
Going forward, SlideShare will introduce a program for lead generation a la LinkedIn. They're also talking about ad deals to monetize the free service and will work on integrating Google Presently documents.
Blist, launching today at Demo 2008, is a Web-based database with a very slick Flash interface running against a SQL backend. The user interface shields the complexity of the relational database underpinnings from the user, but some intriguing capabilities are exposed that you see neither in most other consumer-focused databases, nor in the quasidatabase that most users default to: Excel.
It's very easy to get started building a table in Blist. You just drag field types onto a spreadsheet-like grid. Data types include names, phones, URLs, and images. Fancy features include the capability to keep an arbitrary number of items in a record. For example, if you have a "phone number" field in your database, you can set it up so you can enter many numbers, or none, in each record. You don't have to create a field for "home" and "work" and "mobile" phone numbers and have a lot of blanks.
You can also create database forms with a nice on-screen designer, and filter your display of your database by using what Blist calls a "lens" of your file.
I didn't yet see a reporting feature. I would also like a way to create an embeddable data entry form widget I could embed elsewhere on the Web.
Of all the types of productivity applications, none are more suited to the Web than databases, since most databases, by nature, are multiuser. With Blist, it's easy to invite others to use the database and to get people working together.
Since Blist is a Flex/Flash Web application, I would expect to see it as a standalone application based on Air very soon.
As of this writing, the application is still in closed beta, but it should be opening up today. Definitely check it out.
Competes with: Filemaker, Access, DabbleDB, and many other database applications.
You won't see a slicker database applicaton online, and might not in ordinary software, either.
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