Huddle.net takes first place almost unanimously. Huddle presented an elegant way of creating external teamsites and allowing access to back end SharePoint sites. When documents are uploaded to a SharePoint site, they are automatically synched with the corresponding Huddle teamsite. The SharePoint sites of the members of the same Huddle teamsite are in effect synched across the firewall using claims-based authentication, SharePoint 2010 supports SAML 1.1 authentication. Conversely, if certain site members have restricted site permissions, Huddle inherits those, thereby only exposing content that the user is allowed to access. As the first place winner of SocialFest, expect to see Huddle at the next E2.0 conference with the marketing support of SharePoint - other joint marketing activities are in the works. Thanks to all the companies who participated, as one judge says “it was great to see young talent take interesting approaches to making use of SharePoint.”
  
Vispi Daver, Partner, Sierra Ventures; Mike Kwatinetz, General Partner, Azure Capital; Vivek Mehra, Partner, August Capital and Sergio Monsalve, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners shared their insights on the applications BizSpark startups had built on Sharepoint 2010 yesterday.
SAAS and open source software are still strong investment themes, but in the wake of the financial turmoil, international investments and investments in innovative monetization models have picked up. The VC’s believe that social applications will be tightly integrated into enterprise systems; they won’t remain separate applications.
To quote the investors directly…
“These startups were much higher quality than we tend to see.”
“I would like to follow up with some of these companies - I like the potential they demonstrate.”
“It’s great to see Microsoft embrace these partners who are nibbling at the fringes of some of the SharePoint 2010 platform capabilities.”
Thanks to all the startups who stood up and did their pitches on the spot. There’s a lot of work to do, but I am confident they will dazzle us all today with their demo’s!
I managed to get a sneak peak at what startups have built on SharePoint 2010, for tomorrow’s final judging. Here’s a taste. Post your comments on Twitter using #socialfest
Calinda MindUP developed a SharePoint 2010 “mail space” which groups related conversations, helping teams get a view of their projects, enhancing collaboration.
Confer's SharePoint 2010 integration extends the simplicity of Confer’s microblogging web application into an organization's SharePoint installation. Confer bridges the gap between internal and external employees, and simplifies the communication process.
Cortex Intelligence’s market intelligence service for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 allows SharePoint 2010 users to pull-in relevant data from external sources enabling users to share, discuss and act on the insights triggered by the market intelligence.
With Huddle for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, enterprise teams can invite external users into their daily workflow and synchronize their SharePoint document libraries with content stored on the Huddle network, or even on other SharePoint sites.
Leverage Software DesignSpace transforms a set of email threads into an on-demand social workspace - automatically, with no data entry or administration required - and then lets you share that information with others in your company through Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Liaise for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 turns text in email messages into structured KeyPoints (actions/issues, due dates, people and priorities) and ensures SharePoint is always up-to-date.
With Loqu8 Prelude users can instantly access their SharePoint data by hovering their mouse over a word in their document. The Loqu8 Prelude pop-up window will display contextually relevant information from SharePoint 2010. After reading this great NY Times article featuring Sunguard’s use of Yammer, I was inspired to post my thoughts on why real-time collaborative tools will lead the charge in changing executive behavior. Email, which still dominates corporate-wide communication, and IM not far behind for 1:1 communication, can be greatly complemented by tools like Yammer that provide some sort of middle ground by removing the distraction from IM and the burden of having to read yet another email. There’s no psychological burden in following people, it’s optional, unlike email that you are expected to read. And, likewise the most junior of employees can be heard, can challenge upper management in an open forum. Sending an email to an executive about a competitive threat seems to carry much more weight than a simple update on Yammer. I would like to see better integrated search, analytics and alerts to help those not using such tools find value in them. Microsoft released the public beta of SharePoint 2010 in November of last year receiving accolades for its rapid business application development platform from the likes of InfoWorld, as well as Global 1000 customers. Confer, Liaise, Leverage Software, Loqu8, Huddle.net, Calinda Software, and Cortex Intelligence, several of the most innovative emerging Enterprise 2.0 companies will test these development capabilities as they build their applications on top of the SharePoint 2010 platform in a one week competition - the first ever SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, to be held on the MSFT Silicon Valley Campus during the week of January 25th. These companies were selected because they demonstrate strong potential to extend the SharePoint 2010 platform in one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise software - social computing. Yammer made the list, but unfortunately cannot attend. Not only will the developers receive around the clock SharePoint development and engineering expertise, they will present to a tier one group of venture investors, Fortune 500 customers and SharePoint/E2.0 experts: Vispi Daver, Partner, Sierra Ventures Mike Kwatinetz, General Partner, Azure Capital Vivek Mehra, Partner, August Capital Sergio Monsalve, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners Helen Loh, Vice President Digital Marketing, Charles Schwab & Co. Andy Zimmerman, Portal Manager Corporate Communications, McKESSON Jeff Dachis, CEO, Dachis Group & co-founder, Razorfish Owen Allen, Senior Product Manager, SharePoint Christian Finn, Director, SharePoint Tom Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint This is an invite-only event. If you are a startup interested in learning about future events or more about BizSpark and BizSpark One partnering please refer to the Microsoft Startup Zone home page . I just got off the phone with one of my top partners ActionBase. They too have a rich SharePoint product like many of the ISVs I partner with. What sparks my interest in solutions like ActionBase is that they take email messages and create conversations in SharePoint. Calinda Software is one of my international ISV partners who brings group emails into SharePoint – creating conversations. Liaise, the 2009 DEMO winner is another partner who has the potential to do the same. Bringing email into SharePoint is not a nouveau concept nor of significant value, however, its the follow–up, tracking and process management associated with email that gets natively integrated with SharePoint workflows, data services and team sites that brings true value to the workplace. Thereby creating a new way of managing tasks, projects and people. What I hope to see about SharePoint conversations is the inclusion of micro-messaging from applications like Yammer, another of my ISV partners. Which makes me ask, what about discovery and real-time analytics that can be driven from all of these conversations. Despite the ‘glass is half full’ outlook, the venture industry is poised to for resurgence. Straight from Venture Summit on Sand Hill Road today, 65% of respondents in a PWC venture outlook survey think the fundraising environment will significantly approve or remain the same, why? The IPO market will take off in 2010. Twitter is somehow poised to ‘save’ the industry. The audience, the panelists all somehow seem to be hanging their hopes on a twitter exit. Seems like we’ve been waiting for a Facebook exit for 2+ years now… Despite the dismal outlook, the one bright spot in my view continues to be seen in the seed stage funding arena. Angel activity has increased significantly. Aydin Senkut, Garage Technology Ventures, Ron Conway were a few names from the angel panel. This week SharePoint unveiled its 2010 release. Startups will love this release for several reasons, but I will focus on a few: First, Business Connectivity Services, the new BDC. Bi-directional database calls are support through REST APIs. This means that startups could build a web part to give their users a unified point of access to their application through their SharePoint site. Second, the BI and search capabilities complement startups nicely. The new Power Pivot capability lets users point to any XML data and perform visualization and analytics form within the SharePoint browser. The search APIs allow for numerous events to processed by the FAST search engine – startups can stage content for tuning and improved relevance. Both these features allow startups to extend and enhance the value of their application data. If you want to know more, please check out SharePoint 2010 for Developers This week SharePoint unveiled its 2010 release. Of the many features that impressed me, social search is one worth highlighting. People and behavior are what define social search for SharePoint. Not only are your profile properties indexed, so is your email. The more you email about a topic, the higher your expertise ranking in SharePoint social search. This is done through a suggestion mechanism in one of your profile properties. The relevance tuning impressed me even more. I can control which properties get indexed and what weighting they should have. On the fly! If you want to know more, please check out SharePoint 2010 Today, Yammer launched two new applications developed for the Microsoft platform at TechCrunch50 As part of the Emerging Business Team, based in Silicon Valley, I have been working with David Sacks, CEO and co-founder and Adam Pisoni, VP of Engineering and co-founder of Yammer for several months to help them build these and other Yammer applications for the Microsoft platform. As a member of the Microsoft BizSpark partner program, Yammer could quickly and easily access the tools and support as well as server licenses for this development. In my view, Yammer is a complementary communication tool to email. As such, being able to compose, read and reply to my Yammer feeds within Outlook makes good sense and provides an efficient and seamless desktop user experience. I was also pleased that Yammer dedicated the resources to developing a Windows Mobile application, and I will continue working with the Yammer team on developing and bringing to market future applications built for the Microsoft platform. | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/lynda_ting/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/lynda_ting/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/lynda_ting/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/lynda_ting/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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Lynda Ting
Collaboration and Communication
In a former life I was an early stage technology VC investor in Toronto, Canada. Before that, an M&A investment banker. If you can refrain from holding both of those professions against me, I hope you will find my content of some use. So here I am, a valley girl, and a member of the Emerging Business Team at Microsof...
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Recent Posts
And the winner is…
January 30, 2010
What the VCs had to say about the Microsoft BizSpark startups at Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest
January 29, 2010
Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest – A Sneak Peak at What Startups are Cooking Up!
January 28, 2010
How Yammer helps to Flatten your Company
January 17, 2010
Announcing SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
January 9, 2010
Why SharePoint is leading the Conversation
January 7, 2010
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is Avetrium, based in Canada. You will find below an interview with Tim Smith, COO of Avetrium. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
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