Location: Chicago, ILLaunch Date: 1999

In the company’s own words, what is it? We’re a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally. We’ve been in business since 1999 and love what we do.

We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. We build easy to use web-based products with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features. We’re focused on executing on the basics beautifully.

While our products are mainly built for small businesses and individuals (we call this group the Fortune 5,000,000), companies of all sizes use them every day. From 1 person to teams of 3-5 people to companies of 5000. Everyone loves simple tools that help get the job done and then get out of your way.

Outside quote about company: Farhad Manjo of salon.com said, “Basecamp and Backpack represent the future of software on the Web not just because they’re elegant, easy-to-use programs that will likely make your life better. The two applications are also interesting because they were created in a novel way, using a new programming model that allowed 37 Signals to build each program very quickly, and with very few people. Indeed, this method of creating applications — doing it fast and on a tight budget — might well be called 37 Signal’s animating philosophy, its central mission.”

Features:
* Project management and collaboration (Basecamp)
* Real-time group chat (Campfire)
* Information organizer and calendar (Backpack)
* Simple to-do lists (Ta-da List)
* Collaborative writing (Writeboard)
* Open-source web-app framework (Ruby on Rails)
* Blogging read by over 30,000 a day (Signal vs. Noise)

Management/Directors:
Jason Fried, Founder
David Heinemeier Hansson, Programmer
Ryan Singer, Designer
Sam Stephenson, Programmer
Marcel Molina, Programmer
Matt Linderman, Designer
Jamis Buck, Programmer

Relevant Links:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_47/b3960428.htm
http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977005.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/bestof/editorpicks.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122928-page,4/article.html

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

WebEx: WebEx is the leader in software-as-a-service collaborative business applications. These on-demand applications enhance high-touch business processes, such as sales, support and training, with efficient web-touch interactions. To some, Web 2.0 is just a lot of hype, but WebEx is delivering on the promise of on-demand every day, generating business results delivering across 70 countries, 2 million registered users and 82 percent of the Fortune 100.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

WebEx: All WebEx applications are delivered via the WebEx MediaTone Network, a private global network consisting of 36 linked hubs. Built from the ground up, MediaTone offers unprecedented network reliability and connectivity that competitors can simply not provide. With over $150 million dollars invested in research and development, the MediaTone network helps 3.5 million people use WebEx every month to deliver tangible business results.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

WebEx: WebEx applications, and custom applications built on the WebEx on-demand platform, increase the reach, speed and cost effectiveness of doing business by unifying web collaboration with business services, processes and content. WebEx was founded as an on-demand vendor long before its SaaS was a popular concept. This unique legacy has enabled us to understand what users need better than most others. We focus on ease of use, creating specialized solutions for our customers with industry leading reliability and security. Plus, with our distributed global network we can offer flexible deployment and award-winning support for our customers most vital business requirements.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

WebEx: We target businesses of all sizes that strive to increase productivity, enhance collaboration and remain competitive in today’s intense global marketplace. As a result we have multiple products to serve such a wide range of customers and allow them to integrate WebEx into their daily business workflow.

WebEx provides organizations the ability to use online meetings to meet with anyone, anytime demonstrating products and services, sharing presentations in any format, and resolving open issues in real-time with a secure and reliable technology. We provide much-needed impact for live events, hosting large scale events over the Web such as all-hands meetings, shareholder presentations, and prospect webinars with interactive and dynamic multimedia presentations. WebEx also delivers interactive world-class training, enabling users to reach more people with online training and e-learning via live online classrooms. We empower customers to resolve technical issues faster, increasing productivity and client satisfaction while reducing support costs with both unattended and attended remote support. And finally we can shorten the sales cycle for large enterprises and three-person business enabling users to connect with anyone, anywhere with dynamic online sales presentations.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

WebEx: We recently announced WebEx Connect, the first on-demand platform designed to enable developers and customers to create collaborative enterprise “mashup” solutions from web-based, on-premises and desktop applications in late September of this year. The requirements of an enterprise mashup platform are:

• Customization—needs to allow customers to integrate their existing solutions. Can’t be a proprietary platform.
• Collaboration—need to offer IM, email, presence, and cross-company collaborative capabilities
• Control—needs to work with enterprise policy and directory services solutions.

We expect to deliver a product in Q1 2007.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

WebEx: SaaS is moving beyond cost-efficiency and towards business productivity. There are new classes of applications that leverage the web to bring us together to make us smarter, more productive and better connected and WebEx fully expects to be at the forefront of this movement, changing the way people around the world do business.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

WebEx: People sometimes think that WebEx meetings are a replacement for *all* face-to-face meetings, but they are not. WebEx meetings allow you to be more as productive and spontaneous as you would be in person, but we still believe that occasional face-to-face meetings have an important role in business. WebEx helps create a continuum for communications–from simple text chat to phone calls, web meetings to face-to-face interactions. Having WebEx meetings as an option means you can meet in-person for the right reasons.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

WebEx: Continue to bring innovative collaboration solutions to our customers.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

WebEx: Continue to be the proven technology leader in software-as-a-service collaborative business applications.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

WebEx: As a publicly held company traded on the NASDQ under the ticker: WEBX

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date? If you have already launched, when was your launch date?

WebEx: Our WebEx Connect platform was launched on September 25, 2006. We expect to deliver the first version of the platform in Q1 2007.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

System One: We’re a 2 year old company in Europe, roughly around 20 people with a longer background to be found here http://journal.systemone.at/spaces/journal/nodes/2005-09-13-hello-world/. We offer a platform that merges enterprise collaboration and search behind a radically simple interface, so companies can tap the large and growing savings available in their daily information workflow and people can come home to their kids earlier.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

System One: Simplicity of the platform, a bunch of additional benefits in your daily routines and strategic support to get things started.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

System One: Essentially it’s Semantic Web based Wiki that taps various data sources, searching and presenting related information in real-time without being intrusive.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

System One: We have a top-down marketing approach, so currently we target teams within large corporations in certain industries. By early next year, we’ll also offer a self-service solution for smaller teams, organizations and groups.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

System One: Better interfaces for dealing with (semi)-structured data, a bit like do-it-yourself microformats on steroids. Also some neat new approaches to search and interact will be released from our labs http://labs.systemone.at soon.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

System One: Obtaining a leading position in the ‘Whatever’ 2.0 in the enterprise segment. Beyond that, when every piece of information has its corresponding ‘user generated’ platform and all that has good API’s, algorithms will matter most. And our current setup gives us the chance to already work on that.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

System One: Our current website needs to be less academic, so it will be soon. On a daily basis we’re often dealing with road-map defending IT departments and handling social objections, often fueled by enterprise Social Software projects that went wrong.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

System One: Bring meaningful cutting-edge approaches to the daily lives of knowledge workers. Interdisciplinarity is very important, and the chance to really have an impact without an “everything’s new and great and we especially” attitude. This brought us a company culture we’re proud of without framing it.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

System One: Help companies to grow beyond structure and processes. Your daily work is becoming more and more unpredictable while being interdependent of too many things than you can cope with, more ‘graph’-like if you will, so you need tools to support that. Technically, it’s the Semantic Web back-end that lets us do many new things now and in the future.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

System One: We’re starting to bring our platform to the enterprise market now, with the self-service ASP offering following in a few months. Funding came from the founders with a huge commitment by the Austrian government (2.3 million EUR in total). That’d let us grow well organically for the next 12 months, but we’re currently planning an A round to fuel growth internationally.

DSSS: Data Security Systems Solutions (DSSS) is a leading solution provider of 2 Factor Authentication Enterprise Server Appliance with solid customers in the finance industry in Asia. DSSS is also the inventor of the One Time Private Key (OTPK) technology to implement On-Line Digital Signature.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

DSSS: DSSS 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) Server with our OTPK technology is the only solution in the world today that takes care of 2FA as well as On-Line digital signature. We not only authenticate the user, but we also using the strong 2FA to implement Digital Signature for Non-Repudiation to defeat Man-In-The-Middle attack and allow digital signature every where all the time for the Mobile industry, Enterprise and e-Business.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

DSSS: DSSS 2FA servers support multiple types of tokens, it has an integrated Fips 140 Level 3 certified HSM, and it is a network security appliance that provides a 2FA solution to the enterprise.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

DSSS: Finance, Health, E-government, E-commerce application like consumer banking, PayPal, eBay, eTrade all can use DSSS 2FA and our OTPK technology.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

DSSS: Yes DSSS OTPK; we are trying to push the technology to the market via partnership OEM and other ways.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

DSSS: We are trying to pave the way to the US market first, build strong partnerships, then together move to Europe, China, India and Japan.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

DSSS: Not that we know; we work very closely in Asia with IBM and we are also Sun Microsystems’ partners.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

DSSS: Innovation, creativity and determination to move forward.

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

DSSS: For many years, companies and industries have been trying to bring the digital signature to the consumer market; now WE CAN DO IT with our OTPK technology.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

DSSS: DSSS is a small company, self-funded and profitable.

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date?

DSSS: Our 2FA server is in the market and installed in 7 major banks in Asia. Our OTPK is still waiting for the partners to move in.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

Swarmteams: Our company is called swarmteams and our value proposition is to better connect groups. www.swarmteams.com.

Mobile Group Messaging
Anywhere in the world
Across Mobile SMS, email, Instant Messaging, RSS, and the WEB

We have 4 products in the swarmteams family: “Swarm-it!”, “Swarm-pro!”, “Swarm-web!”, and “Swarm-api!”

The individual value propositions are summarized in http://home.swarmteams.com/products. The benefits from each product are shown in the table below:
Swarmteams User
Specific Benefits

An Individual(swarm-it!)
a. Massively reduces the effort and pain involved in organizing your social group life
b. Puts you in control of your social group communicatio

A Group or Team or Network or Community (swarm-pro!)
a. Improved productivity and quicker decision-making by reducing group ‘down-time’
b. Better team member performance by giving everyone instant access
to the whole group’s ‘know-how’

An Organization or Enterprise (swarm-pro!)
a. Instant 2-way notification capability for the whole organization, no matter where anyone is in the world
b. Better use of the organization’s resources and effective sharing of knowledge

A Website or Web Application Owner (swarm-web! or swarm-api!)
a. Broader reach of the application or web-site to fully include people on the move and mobile phone users
b. Encourages much more user engagement and participation - turns user crowds into user communities - improved loyalty

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

Swarmteams: The four fundamental differences about Swarmteams are:
1. Its primarily about communicating first and social networking second - your social network is the by-product of your group communications
2. It runs on every mobile phone in the world - no downloads needed - no fancy phones - no wifi coverage required - just global SMS
3. It fully integrates mobile phone messaging and internet messaging
4. Its based on the theory of self-managed fast moving teams as opposed to slow command and control teams – it’s got a philosophy behind it: http://home.swarmteams.com/concepts

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

Swarmteams: Swarm-it is for individuals in public communities
a. No downloads needed to your PC or phone
b. Any mobile phone or browser
c. Intelligent message routing across mobile, email and web
d. All replies neatly organized on web
e. Follow-me: all replies forwarded to your mobile phone
f. Group chat: all replies auto-forwarded to all members
Swarm-pro is for organizations in closed communities

All the features of swarm-it plus
a. Setup and configure closed swarm ecosystems involving many interlinked swarms
b. Brand and sub-brand the user interface for resellers, community owners and end-users
c. Range your messages to different swarm ‘rings’
d. Message and network between the different swarms in an ecosystem
e. Create automatic sub-swarms and issue reminders to those who have not replied
f. Manage and report on message delivery
g. Support star (owner managed), peer (user managed) and hybrid swarms

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

Swarmteams: Our end users are: Individuals, Communities/Networks, Distributed Enterprises. However, we reach these through hub organizations such as Virtual Community Owners, Membership Organizations, Information Publishers, Mobile Network Operators, Media Subscription Organizations, Distributed Enterprises, and eParticipation Organizations. We reach these hubs through partners, Mobile Phone Operators with large mobile phone user communities, Web Application developers who wish to include mobile group messaging in their apps., and Consultancies who work in various community spaces such as business and not for profit.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

Swarmteams: Just about to release ‘Smart Messaging’: If the system has to reach you and you have SM switched on it will check to see if you are present on your instant messenger by pinging its presence server. If it finds you the message will be pinged to you. If it does not find you then the message will be texted to you via SMS on your mobile phone. Then the Swarm Directory: a public directory of joinable tagged Swarms. Public swarms can either be free to join or by subscription. Among other things it’s a great way for people with content to ‘repurpose’ it for SMS and groups.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

Swarmteams: A major area for us is the release of the swarmteams api, which will allow web developers to build mobile group messaging into their applications. This is particularly relevant to social software, CRM and team applications. Our research has indicated that helping these applications break-out to mobile is a HUGE MARKET.
Market Size: $1.4 BN
Mobile Social Networking: $400M by 2009 (Frost & Sullivan)
Team Collaborative Applications: $750M by 2009 (IDC)
Mobile CRM: $500M by 2010 (IDC & Visiongain)

The current approach is to load the application on the mobile phone - this restricts it to high end phones in good coverage areas with constant download and upgrades to the phone software - we believe most people won’t want this. Our solution is that the web application sends text messages to the users phone which they can reply to our use to jump onto the web if their phones support it – that’s where we come in with the off-the shelf API.

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

Swarmteams: Most of our reviews have been very positive – here are all the ones we know of: http://home.swarmteams.com/newsitems/index/1

We have had some problems with the reliability of our SMS delivery - we offer global coverage through external providers and delivery responses can be patchy. We have addressed this by building in a portfolio of SMS providers with duplication of cover for key regions. We have built an SMS heartbeat which pings each of the providers to let us know their current round trip times. If it goes out of limits we can switch suppliers for a region. The second feedback we sometimes get is, “This is neat but what’s it for?” Because our ideas are so novel people sometimes don’t get it - like the early days of social software. We are building some wizards into the website to show people what it can be used for. Also some case studies are now being published: http://home.swarmteams.com/newsitems/index/2

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

Swarmteams: For groups to work better. In today’s fast moving environment, groups need to learn from nature.
a. Instant communications to any group member anywhere - this means mobile phone
b. Groups need to be more self-organizing and less leader controlled
c. Groups need to message and talk more and generate emails and documents less

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

Swarmteams: We think we are the only ones [in the mobile group messaging space] with a business model for organizations (with full supporting services) and not just individual consumers with all the commodity pricing pressures.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

Swarmteams: We have just released first versions of the product. Next 3 months is getting reviews and customer pilots. Will need to be generating revenue and/or using external funding early 2007. So we are keeping our eyes open for innovative funders who understand how we have positioned ourselves and see the potential.

Below is an interview with Alex Iskold – Founder and CTO of adaptiveblue. We hope you find the interview informative and useful. Please visit their website and check it out! http://www.adaptiveblue.com.

TechAddress: Tell me a bit about your company, what it does and what’s your value proposition?

adaptiveblue: adaptiveblue is a smart browsing and personalization company. We started the company because we were excited about delivering personalization technologies powered by people’s browsing habits. Since the browser is our window on the web, we believe that it should personalize your web experiences for you.

TechAddress: What makes your company stand apart from your competitors?

adaptiveblue: We are very focused on semantics of things. We go through the pain of automatically parsing objects like cars, movies and wine out of html because we want to create personalized and meaningful web experience for our users. A lot of companies do bookmarks or clippings, but these are not well structured and can’t be used to understand what people really like.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

adaptiveblue: The users can collect everyday objects like cars, movies, wines, books out of web sites and blogs. There is also automated mode, which allows the users to capture objects from pages that they visit more then certain number of times. Once objects end up in collections, it is super easy to find them again. You can use tags, smart filters or free form search to do that. Perhaps more intruiging feature is the ability to find related information. For example, for a book you can lookup more books by the same author, for a wine you can find more wines with similar tastes and for a movie you can lookup photos of the stars. With that, we bring the best web services to people’s finger tips. And there is much more, so please get a quick visual summary of features here: http://www.adaptiveblue.com/features.html

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

adaptiveblue: Anyone who uses Firefox or Flock.

TechAddress: Any new things in particular that you’re working on right now?

adaptiveblue: Whole bunch of things actually. In the near future we are going to roll out blueorganizer 2.6 with support for blogs, autobluemark, smart filters and tons of new integrations. After that, expect photo and video. We are also planning to do a lot of work soon with microformats and notes.

TechAddress: Where do you see your company heading in the future?

adaptiveblue: Longer term we’d like to build an array of personalization technologies and contribute to the attention ecosystem. You can learn more about where we are heading with attention on my blog: http://alexiskold.wordpress.com

TechAddress: Any negative feedback or criticism regarding technology and services?

adaptiveblue: There is always that - it’s hard to please everyone. People complain about different things that they do not like. If a couple of people complain we try to address the problem. But majority of the feedback is positive, asking us to add a collection or to integrate with another site or service.

TechAddress: So what would you say is the guiding principle behind your company?

adaptiveblue: Be honest, be cool, do the right thing, work very hard and breakthrough. Take a look at our vision and founding principles here: http://www.adaptiveblue.com/about.html

TechAddress: What is the mission of your company and what are you bringing to the market that is innovative?

adaptiveblue: Our mission is to bring smart browsing and personalization to early adopters and hopefully to the wider audience in the future. We are unique because of our focus on semantics, productivity and personalization.

TechAddress: Where are you in terms of funding and your lifecycle?

adaptiveblue: We are self-funded and are not actively raising money.

TechAddress: If your technology or service is not formally launched yet, when’s the launch date?

adaptiveblue: We formally launched at DEMOfall 2006. The show was a pretty big success and validation for us, which is very energizing. To get the latest version of the blueorganizer visit http://adaptiveblue.com/

Location: Headquartered in Los Angeles, California

Launch Date: Founded in 2003

In the company’s own words, what is it? Fonality is the leading provider of affordable IP-PBX phone systems to small and medium businesses. Fonality believes that a sea change is upon us in these transitory telecom waters. As customers migrate toward IP Telephony, the business phone system is becoming another extension of the business computer system.

This process of standardization requires the PBX to interoperate with existing IT infrastructure, expanding its capabilities and responsibilities exponentially. Fonality intends to become the industry leader of this market transition by making the enterprise PBX both affordable and standards-based for the first time ever.

Outside quote about company: Barry Schwartz from RustyBrick says, “Fonality has a strong and professional bunch of tech people on hand. They continue to expand the base system they have and we benefit from those updates. So on both a software upgrade, support and reliability level and a hardware support and warranty level - we have them to go to.”

Features:
*Flash Tutorials
*Auto-Attendant (IVR)
*Unlimited Extensions
*Conference Bridge
*Outlook Integration
*Many more

Management/Directors:
Chris Lyman-CEO
Adrian Otto-CTO
Dan Rosenthal-VP of Finance

Relevant Links:
http://www.voipplanet.com/solutions/article.php/3516491
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/11/78093_20TCpbxtra_1.html
http://telephonyonline.com/voip/marketing/fonality_voip_pbxtra_062005/
http://www.fonality.com/press.html

September 11, 2006

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fox Interactive Media, Tribune and LookSmart are among major media owners who will auction non-premium advertising space to generate more revenue from existing Web pages.

The publishers will use a product called Publisher Media Exchange from Right Media that they can adapt to their own Web sites. Right Media said on Monday the PMX system will help the publishers consolidate ads on pages, such as older archive news, on their own auction-based platform, enabling advertisers and online ad networks to compete for each consumer viewing an advert in real-time.

Companies using the PMX system include News Corp. Inc.’s Fox Interactive Media, home to social networking Web site MySpace, and Tribune Co., which owns several major newspaper Web sites, including chicagotribune.com and latimes.com. Others include search network LookSmart, blogging service Six Apart and Tickle.

The auctioning of ad space or advertiser links in real-time has gained currency in recent years following the success of products such as Google Inc.’s AdSense and AdWords products, which are both automated. Companies such as Yahoo Inc. have also had success with similar models. The publishers will also have access to the external Right Media Exchange, which includes more than 11,000 buyers and sellers of online advertising.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters, All Rights Reserved.