There are a number of new events scheduled at this years conference including new cloud computing workshops and an open enterprise study.

The popular Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad returns in 2009 and a strong group of Enterprise 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs have made it to the round of 8. The comunity will choose 4 finalists to present at the conference based on each firms 2 minute product video.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference organizers at TechWeb have offered 1 free conference pass valued at $2200 that I will give away to one of the OnDemand Beat’s readers.

The pass will go to the first reader who can answer either via twitter to @ondemandbeat or via a comment to this post the answer to the following question:

“Who were the 5 finalists in the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference LaunchPad?”

If you do not win the Free Conference Pass you can still save 30% on conference registration or get a free Pavillion Pass by using code CNAPEB22 on the conference registration page.

Vince Casarez gives a great overview of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 technology. This video is part of the extensive group of “At The Whiteboard” videos over on ZDNet.

There are a number of conferences scheduled in the remaining months of 2009 with a Enterprise 2.0 focus.

Some of the more notable ones are:

• Enterprise 2.0 sessions at cEBIT 2009
  Although the Enterprise 2.0 summit is not being held in conjunction with CeBIT in 2009, there are a number of Enterprise 2.0 related sessions taking place during CeBIT 2009. In addition Martin Koser will host a Enterprise 2.0 meetup on Friday 6 March 2009. 
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference
  The largest of all the Enterprise 2.0 conferences is Tech Webs annual Enterprise 2.0 conference. The 2009 conference will take place from 22 – 25 June 2009 at last years venue at the Westin Waterfront. One of the highlights of the Enterprise 2.0 conference is the Launchpad where start ups get to demo their products/solutions in front of the E20 community.
• Office 2.0
  Although the Office 2.0 conference focuses on both consumer and enterprise users, its 2009 theme of “The Global Office” should have a number of Enterprise 2.0 sessions.
• Enterprise 2.0 Summit
  The Enterprise 2.0 Summit will be held from 6 – 8 October 2009 in Frankfurt Deutschland. The 2009 Summit will focus on how to improve business results with Enterprise 2.0.

Trampoline Systems; a London Based provider of Enterprise Social Software, recently launched SONAR FlightDeck at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC.

SONAR Flightdeck is the latest product in Trampoline Systems SONAR Suite product line. Flightdeck is a enterprise social networking tool that helps companies focus on knowledge and relationship identification.

Flightdeck works by gathering high value strategic information gathered in everyday corporate communications such as email, wiki’s, blogs and documents and helps managers visualize and identify the top influencers and performers , bottlenecks and even the social networking laggards within a company.

Flightdeck runs on top of the SONAR Server which is an analytical engine that is composed of natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms that identify the information flows, social networks and tasks occurring within a company.

Flightdeck would be most beneficial to companies that are engaging in merger and acquisitions, new product roll-outs or major corporate initiatives. SONAR Flightdeck is designed for managers within an organization whereas Trampoline Systems other product SONAR Dashboard is designed for general employee usage.

Trampoline Systems competitors in this space include Microsoft, (with its recent acquisition of Powerset) Autonomy and Semantra.

There are a number of great insights about Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the enterprise space that are provided by the top analyst firms and dedicated to executives & IT professionals.  Since my day-to-day experience at Yooplus is working with the Italian and European markets, I may be able to add some additional insights on Enterprise 2.0 adoption across Europe.

IDC’s View:

“The adoption rate for Enterprise 2.0 will nearly double in Europe in the next 18 months, and nearly half will use Web 2.0 to enhance internal collaboration,” according to a survey conducted by IDC that has been presented in September 2007 at the European ICT Forum in Berlin.  “Surprisingly, Spain, Denmark, and Italy are the early-adopting nations of Europe and will continue to show the highest adoption rates over the next 18 months, even ahead of the UK and Germany,” said Pim Bilderbeek, vice president of European telecommunications and networking consulting for IDC.

McKinsey’s View:

“July 2008. This year’s worldwide survey reveals continuing investments in Web 2.0. Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice.   Fundamental changes are beginning to take place among the satisfied companies as a result of their ambitious use of Web 2.0. These companies are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures. Some are taking steps to open their corporate “ecosystems” by encouraging customers to join them in developing products and by using new tools to tap distributed knowledge. Overall satisfaction of Web 2.0 adoption, in Europe, was split with 22% reporting the lowest dissatisfaction and 20% reporting highest satisfaction, leaving 58% somewhere in the middle.”

What I See:

• Managers and professionals don’t want to wait for IT or consultants to get around to implementing their social enterprise solutions: they are looking for rapid adoption and deployment. They want to test and determine the value, benefits and competitive advantages quickly
• They want to pick, choose and customize their social enterprise environments, they want the flexibility of all the tools (blogs, wikis, rss, tags, search, im, voip, etc) integrated in one social platform
• They want to empower their teams to collaborate and share information, ideas, knowledge, communications and productivity not just internally, but also externally with partners, vendors and customers
• The social enterprise paradigm is not just for the big corporations but for all sizes and industries, from start-ups to non-profits, from waste managements to financial services as it is for every department within companies, from marketing to human resources.

Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 or the “social enterprise” is happening across Europe, some countries more aggressively than others, but now I am beginning to see return on the investment and real business benefits for all sizes of companies.  There are also a volume of tools and technologies available from high-end consultant assisted solutions to rapid adoption and deployment of social enterprise platforms. Because after all “sharing is better!”

Thomas Christel  is co-founder and VP of marketing at Yooplus srl, a social enterprise company, providing the we+ workspace, a team collaboration and social software platform with all the Web 2.0 tools built-in (blogs, wiki, rss and tags). The we+ workspace provides the ability to capture and share knowledge, provide project/activity transparency and improve team communications, collaboration and productivity. To learn more visit, www.yooplus.com or contact Thomas at t.christel {at} yooplus(.)com

Jimmy Wales sat down this week with a group of Bloggers and analysts prior to his keynote address opening the 2008 SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas and discussed a number of topics relating to Wikimedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization set up to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia Foundation also operates Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media and MediaWiki, the popular open source wiki software behind a huge number of corporate wikis.

I asked Mr. Wales what the Wikimedia Foundation’s plans were to increase revenue, especially now that the foundation has increased its staff.

Mr Wales said that the Wikimedia Foundation has to date relied on individual donations and volunteer efforts to achieve its mission and one of the longstanding goals of the foundation has been to increase revenue so that it can expand its mission and keep Wikipedia and the various Wikimedia projects running.

Mr. Wales mentioned that the foundation has recently hired dedicated fundraising staff and is looking at several strategies to increase revenue including:

• Working with additional philanthropic Institutions like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to increase grants and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
• Spending time contacting wealthy donors who the Wikimedia Foundation in the past could not engage due to the small size of the foundations staff
• Utilizing the Wikipedia brand in co-licensing deals with Mobile Carriers for example, who want to offer a quick and easy way for thier customers to access Wikipedia
• Creating Wikipedia Branded Books
• Launching Wikipedia Branded Games

Mr. Wales said that all of the ideas for raising addition revenue have to adhere to the Wikimedia Foundations values and that the Wikimedia Foundation will never considered offering advertising on its varied projects. But with a dedicated fundraising staff in place he and the Wikimedia team look forward to working through the various ideas and strategies.

Mindtouch announced today a new version of its Opensource collaboration and collective intelligence platform. The new version of Mindtouch Deki, “Kilen Woods” introduces new data connection and enterprise integration tools to what is already a very robust Wiki platform.

Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO, said that:

“MindTouch Deki has evolved into a powerful platform that is the connective tissue for integrating disparate enterprise systems, web services, and Web 2.0 applications, and enables real-time collaboration and collective intelligence – dynamic data collection and application integration.”

New Enterprise Adapters introduced in MindTouch Deki include adapters for:

• SugarCRM
• Salesforce
• LinkedIn
• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server, Access and Microsoft ADO.NET
• VisiFire
• PrinceXML
• ThinkFree Office
• WordPress

This new functionality helps MindTouch Deki jump to the front in terms of competing Wiki Platforms as now within a single platform users can create mashups, dashboards, reports etc from within the Wiki interface. This type of enterprise integration will make Wiki’s (if more Wiki platforms are able to catch up with MindTouch and add this type of integration in the future) an easier sell for companies as integration with existing applications is always at the top of the list of wanted features.

MindTouch Deki also differentiates itself from other Wiki platforms in that its existing feature set allows drag and drop in a GUI interface for most of its functionality. This makes adoption within a company a lot easier than other wiki tools in that users do not have to learn html markup etc to create content.

Will be interesting to see if MindTouch can build upon the list of current adapters with integration for high end ERP (SAP, Oracle etc) and CRM (Seible) applications.  MindTouch Deki “Kilen Woods” should be available for download by the end of July

You know that you are officially in the acceptance (and some would say hype) stage of a technology when writers begin to churn out titles in the genre.

Niall Cook’s new book “Enterprise 2.0 – How social software will change the future of work” is due to be released on 21 July 2008.

In Niall Cook’s words:

“Enterprise 2.0 helps you navigate the emerging social software landscape and introduces you to the key concepts that make up ‘enterprise 2.0’. I explain how the culture of most companies will need to change as a result of the different ways of working that social software enables. The four Cs model at the heart of the book uses practical examples from some of the best-known companies in a range of industry sectors to illustrate how to apply these techniques to encourage communication, cooperation, collaboration and connection between employees and customers in your own company.”

This should be an interesting title as Niall seems to understand the core of Enterprise 2.0 with his focus in the book on the 4 C’s. Also Enterprise 2.0 adoption has been hindered a bit to date by a lack of of clear Enterprise 2.0 use cases and examples and Niall makes extensive use of use cases and examples throughout the book.

Finally “Enterprise 2.0″ has an associated wiki on SocialText that the author hopes will be used as an extension to the book.

My only quibble with the book is that it is only available in its first run as hardcopy (who in this day and age can carry around a heavy 180lb 180 page hardcopy book?) Hopefully future printings will be available in pdf and or paperback.

Heading back to Arizona today after a very interesting and informative Enterprise 2.0 2008 conference.

Had a chance to meet with the founders and CEO’s of a number of Enterprise 2.0 firms and have come away very impressed with the software solutions, business models, channel partner plans and ROI of most of the firms products.

There has been much speculation in the consumer Web 2.0 space as to when the bubble will burst on both the irrational valuations and fantastical (made up word:) revenue models based on advertising that consumer Web 2.0 has been built upon.

It not only is clear that Enterprise 2.0 firms are a different breed from their Web 2.0 brethren , it is also clear that many of these firms will not only survive the current economic slowdown but are thriving now that companies are looking for ways to contain cost. On Demand hosted solutions for the Enterprise are really gaining steam at the moment and look likely to increase in market and mind share based on the enthusiasm I have seen from attendees at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

A few of the Enterprise 2.0 firms (and Enterprise firms like Sun and IBM) I had a chance to meet with whom I will post follow-up articles and reviews about over the next few weeks include:

• Liquid Planner
• Serena Software
• Atlassian
• GroupSwim
• Small World Labs
• Sun for Project SocialSite
• IBM for Lotus Connections and Mashup Center
• Oracle for Sales Prospector
• Aegeon for Spaceo.us
• Veodia
• Igloo
• WorkLight
• Bungee

Stay tuned….