The Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters conference starts later today in Mountain View, CA. It’s a chance for lesser-known companies that provide web-based business solutions to strut their stuff. The 32 companies that will be presenting at the conference are promoting their ideas on how to make business more collaborative and productive. Here’s a roundup of those presenters that offer true social benefits with their services.
SlideAware - SlideAware provides online storage and collaboration solution for slideshows that’s fully integrated with PowerPoint. This provides transparency for the team. Presentations can be sent to clients, and metrics give details about who looked at the presentation, and how long they viewed a particular slide.
Big Contacts - Big Contacts serves up an online Rolodex, wiki-style. Keep track of meetings, anniversaries and clients’ spouses. One-click access to Word templates pre-populate letterheads and greeting cards for any contact. Added notes and assignments from multiple users are wiki-style to see the history on any client.
Koral - Koral is a private workspace for your docs that can be shared with a group. An improved search makes it easier to find the right document, and their sync function alerts other team members when a new version of your document has been added. Koral keeps everybody on the same page, at all times.
Spresent - Spresent provides a web-based alternative to PowerPoint. Their Adobe flash-based service is optimized to create feature-rich presentations that can incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Presentations are shared online, and prove to be far more engaging than a PowerPoint presentation.
Stikkit - Post-it meets wiki. Stikkit, a recent SXSW finalist, lets you type notes on your Stikkits, and they’ll be kept up to date. Shared Stikkits can be edited, making it a mobile wiki. Email yourself a Stikkit for it to be automatically converted into an email format for furthered sharing purposes.
Teqlo - Teqlo is an application that lets you mashup your widgets. It aims to provide a way for non-tech savvy people to create customized solutions, such as a drag-and-drop feature to place sales leads on a map and automatically provide a list of phone numbers every morning. Removing the need for coding and developer knowledge broadens access to the furthered democratization of business and social tools alike.
Worklight - Worklight uses ajax and RSS to offer better access for employees within the corporate structure. Other ways they update businesses are desktop and web-based widgets, bookmarks, and mashups. Businesses are usually slow to adopt new trends like these. So Worklight may not change the masses, but could usher in the next era of business communication.
Xcellery - Xcellery enables online collaboration of Excel sheets. Their service may seem to be very similar to other online document management systems such as Google Docs and Zoho Sheets. Xcellery’s main point of differentiation is the fact that revised documents aren’t replaced, but are extended. This is a useful feature that many of the established players have yet to take into account.
