Welcome

Early stage investments in creative and well executed ventures.

Collision of the enterprise and web 2.0

I’ve been reading with interest about a few companies such as Huddle who are developing an productivity application that tightly integrates Facebook and your desktop. I’ve long joked that Facebook is “the other Internet” and I’m finding that the lines between my social interactivity and my business networking is beginning to blur. Many business conversations are now happening on Facebook and I haven’t yet moved many of my new contacts out of Facebook and into my contact manager (e.g. Outlook). Incredibly, Moli has raised another whopping $29.6 million, bringing total money raised to $55.6 million! The company envisions you creating one profile for interacting with your friends, another for your coworkers. Why would you want to do this? Because, as I say, the lines between your social life and your work life are being made ever more transparent and you might want to better manage whether your business colleagues get to learn all about your bar hopping habit, party pics and afternoons basking in the sun when you should be working. What does all this mean? Increasingly, you’ll see more business apps on Facebook. Historically, Linkedin has been the business platform of choice for savvy professionals but I think that is about to change. Whether we’re talking about sales, marketing, networking or collaboration…there is little doubt that much of the data going into Facebook and other online networks needs to get back out. It needs to be useful. You need to get other business data in as well. Want to know how your beta is performing? Need a feedback platform to track bugs, comments and overall sentiment? Facebook is where people congregate. As a beta testing universe it is probably second to none. And, in a way, it is already an interesting collaboration system of sorts.

IT departments are increasingly accepting of software as a service and “Web 2.0″ in general. Second Life, Facebook and others will certainly remain as platforms of choice for social interactivity but they will also because paramount to businesses looking to interact with each other and with their constituents. In order for that to happen more effectively, better applications need to be developed that tightly integrate with these types of services.

January 28, 2008 | Filed Under Inspiration, Start-ups, Technology, Venture capital 

comments

One Response to “Collision of the enterprise and web 2.0”

  1. Chris Bailey on February 10th, 2008

    This is my same feeling! I’ve been skeptical of Facebook, but I can’t deny it’s viral/social networking abilities. It will become the real deal as productivity and business apps emerge as “useful” apps on the platform.

    http://codeintensity.blogspot.com/2008/02/facebook-and-business.html

Leave a Reply




  • Pressplane

    Pressplane is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We aren't saying too much right now because we still have a lot of work to do but we thank Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Seattle Times and others for mentioning our latest effort!

  • CafePress

    Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic.

  • Imagekind

    Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists.

  • Shelfari

    Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers

  • Fanzter

    Fanzter was founded in 2007 by veterans of leading media, technology, and consumer products companies and is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut. Their first product, Coolspotters.com, launched in May 2008.

  • Wishpot

    Wishpot is a free social shopping service that makes it easy to save and share interesting things you find in stores and online. Items are easily collected online or from stores and organized using simple online lists. Lists and items can be kept private or shared with others. You can collect and discover products you like, recommend your favorite stuff, share and explore gift suggestions or ask for opinions and advice.

  • FeedDigest

    FeedDigest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds originally built by Peter Cooper. In August 2007, Feed Digest was sold to its new owners, Informer Technologies, Inc., and in 2008 rebranded to Feed Informer.