Thirty-two start-ups and 11 established companies pitched their Web-based business products at the Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters event last Friday. That's a lot of productivity right there. Webware bloggers Josh Lowensohn and Erica Ogg covered all the start-up pitches--click the "UTR" tag beneath this blog to read about them.
From the 31 start-ups, we picked five favorites (see video). They are:
- Calgoo has a neat solution for working with schedules from your work and home lives. It's a problem we all have. See previous Webware coverage.
- Sandy is the new e-mail assistant from the team that makes Stikkit. You cc: "Sandy," the e-mail bot, on your correspondence, and the agent will decipher what you're saying, like "let's have lunch tomorrow," and put the right information in your calendar. It will be very cool, if it works. (See also: Wrike.)
- Xcellery adds real-time collaboration to Excel spreadsheets. We like the idea of making the spreadsheet tool, which we all know how to use, into a Web 2.0 application. See previous Webware coverage.
- ConceptShare is a beautiful application for sharing creative work, like photos and layouts. It's targeted at a niche of users (designers and their clients), but it could bring Web-enabled collaboration to a large number of people. See previous Webware coverage.
- WuFoo is my favorite Web application. It's a simple, cheap, and reliable database service masquerading as a forms designer. We use it (and pay for it) at Webware.com. See previous Webware coverage.
This group of presenters at Under the Radar is focused on tools that let regular people (read: not coders) create Web sites and tools to make things easy for site visitors and customers.
My Payment Network provides small-businesses and education payment systems aimed at cutting administrative costs and the hassle of paper checks. For schools, it's a chance to add an online payment system for things like sports enrollment fees, and equipment costs. For small businesses, it's another way to handle payment processing. My Payment Network is comparable to PayPal, but offers customizable controls for those in charge of collecting the money.
SiteKreator is a Wysiwygeditor that lets users build and design complex sites through a Web-based editor. CEO Ivaylo Lenkov just spent a few minutes putting a site together using their new plasticy-theme, Aurora, and showed off some of the other slick-looking designs (not to be confused with "templates.") SiteKreator has several subscription models, ranging from a free, ad-supported sites, all the way to paid-for business plans. Previous coverage here.
Terapad is a hosted, Wysiwyg, blog service. What separates it from something like WordPressis the option to add and manage various components, such as an online store, a job board, or photo galleries. It has the standard content management tools like page templates and a blogging tool, along with aggregation tools for popular Web services like Flickr, Digg and MySpace. We took a hands-on look with Terapad in January.
Wufoo is a form-building tool that can be integrated into your Web site. There's a Wysiwyg, drag-and-drop interface to build and design forms. We use Wufoo at Webware to take care of our "Contact Us" form and it works great. Wufoo is working to build integration with PayPal to add payment tools to your site. Previous coverage here.
It's time for a confession: Although I write about Web 2.0 applications all the time, I use very few of these apps for more than a day or two. In most cases, once I've poked around in a product and written up my thoughts, I don't come back to it.
There are, however, wonderful exceptions, and I want to make it a practice to give a second look at the services that are more than interesting, they're so useful that you can rely on them day-to-day.
Wufoo: Just plain great
(Credit: CNET Networks)First up in this category: WuFoo, the online forms service (previous coverage). I cannot tell you how much trouble this little service has saved me. We use it on Webware for our contact page. Not only has feedback to our editors increased (compared to our previous contact method, a mailto link), but building the form took me all of 10 minutes. I started with the free version of the product but am now paying for it and putting it on my expense report. At $10 a month, several years of Wufoo service will cost CNET a lot less than it would have if we built the form and the data collection system ourselves.
My relationship with Google Spreadsheet: It's complicated
(Credit: CNET Networks)Second: Google's spreadsheet (review; kvetch). I rely on this product even though I loathe its Visicalc-era feature set and occasional "Connectivity lost... reloading" bug. Even so, it does the job. Google Spreadsheet is Webware's air traffic control system: several people here use it simultaneously, to track the services we're covering.
I'm putting Google on notice, though. I am considering changing over to EditGrid (review), which has features Google lacks. I'm also planning on checking out Xcellery, which claims to enable real-time sharing of Excel spreadsheets. Neat trick, that. (I have flirted with SmartSheet [review], but found that it lacks both flexibility and real-time collaboration.)
Since no good deed goes unpunished, I have asked WuFoo CEO Kevin Hale and Google product manager Rajen Sheth to join me on a panel on small business Web services at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo.
Bonus tool that works: It's not strictly Webware, but I rely on LogMeIn for remote access to my own PCs and to my family's computers when they want me to do tech support for them. Latest update: On March 12, LogMeIn will release a client application that lets you connect to a remote PC without going through a browser. Robert Vamosi reviewed the product. I just got it and have already used it for real--not just to evaluate it--several times. It'll run directly off a USB stick, too, which is very handy.
Feel free to share your own Tools That Work in TalkBack...
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