April 2008 — News
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Web 2.0 Event Draws the Bleeding-Edge Cloud Crowd
Sprout's Widget Tools
Sprout launched a new software development kit (SDK) at the show. The company is a provider of an online platform for creating, publishing and managing Flash content on the Web. The platform enables the creation of "Sprouts," which are widgets, mini-sites, banners, mashups and other forms of rich media content. The SDK is designed to provide developers with a range of property types and editors for manipulating and customizing components.
Backbase's Web Apps
Backbase announced at the show its Customer Engagement 2.0 product, a suite of AJAX-based rich applications designed "to ease and expand customer relationships," according to company literature. The Rich Dashboard application unifies content and functionality in a single personalized start page. Rich Forms lets users create online forms. A Co-browse & Chat feature can be used to increase conversion rates through collaborative browsing.
Symphoniq's End User Monitoring
Symphoniq released the 2.0 version of its TrueView user monitoring solution for RIAs, a tool for customer Web application management. It relies on Symphoniq's TRUE technology to provide visibility into a range of Web apps, including AJAX, Flash/Flex and Silverlight, to monitor how usage and performance are affecting the end user.
Socialtext's Enterprise-Grade Wikis
Socialtext showed its enterprise-oriented Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People solutions at the Web 2.0 event. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes wiki-based social solutions for businesses. Its namesake products, currently in beta, are expected to become commercially available later this quarter.
Kapow's Mashable Data
Kapow Technologies, an enterprise mashup provider, rolled out its new OnDemand Service at the show. Kapow falls into a category that Gartner calls "Mashup Enabler," which defines products that provide data that is "mashable." OnDemand is a Web-based hosted service designed to enable an automated, high-volume collection of Web intelligence and market data "to help companies make more informed business decisions, sooner," according to company literature. The service is aimed at financial and business analysts who need to incorporate Web-based data into their business analysis on a real-time basis.
Collaboration Driving Business Web 2.0
The enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 technologies is getting emphasized partly because of a growing need of companies to integrate geographically dispersed teams while operating complex business processes, according to researchers at The Butler Group. Organizations are reexamining their corporate communication and collaboration strategies to better support business activities and objectives with key Web 2.0 technologies in mind, according to "Communications and Collaboration Report -- Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility," which was recently published by the analyst firm.
