The download includes the Apache Derby database, which acts as a local e-mail store, said Satish Dharmaraj, the company’s CEO. Future versions will not require users to do the manual download, he said. The first release of Zimbra Desktop is an alpha version. The beta version, due this summer, will work with POP and IMAP e-mail servers and will include access to the company’s calendaring server. When the company releases its 5.0 product, it will include the offline capabilities.

Dharmaraj said the company has sought to replicate the experience people are used to with products like Outlook. He is scheduled to show Zimbra Desktop in San Diego at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, which starts Monday. "All this innovation has been happening on the Web side (with browsers and Web services), and we want to bring innovation to the desktop as well," he said.

More Web development technology that bridges the desktop with the Web is starting to come out. Adobe Systems earlier this month released an alpha version of Apollo, which allows people to write Web applications that can run on desktop machines. And last week, online-collaboration-software company Joyent detailed Slingshot, software that lets developers convert Web applications written using Ruby on Rails to hybrid online-offline applications.

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

IMSafer: The products for protecting children online are overwhelming for parents, hard to use, and require too much work on the part of the parents. IMSafer is “simple,” “easy to use” and “effective.” The basis of what we do is built on the perception of trust and communication. We don’t allow parents to spy on every conversation their child has online, if our language analysis identifies a threat, we let parents see that threat and enough of the conversation to give them proper context.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

IMSafer: Our language analysis notes text that may be inappropriate or may be indicative of predatory behavior and gives parents a notification with a ‘snapshot of the conversation’ along with a ‘rating’ of that screen name that is generated by other parents. They can then vote themselves on that person to help other parents make informed decisions. Users of our IMSafer Social Networking Service can also be notified when their children receive links to social networking sites.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

IMSafer: Parents of kids and teens that go online who respect their children’s privacy as well as their duty to protect their kids should check out IMSafer and give it a try.

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

IMSafer: We are constantly improving our language analysis engine. We think of it like an anti-virus database, people are always trying to figure out new ways to do harm, and we’re trying to stay a few steps ahead of them.

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

IMSafer: We’re going to stay a few steps ahead of the predators. For example if kids start moving away from social networks and into something new like mobile group chat, that’s where we’ll be.

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

IMSafer: Criticism comes for the most part from people that don’t understand how our service works. A parent’s first job is to protect their child. We give the parents a tool to help them do that while giving the child as much freedom and privacy as we can to still be effective. Once kids see that we aren’t spying and that their parents only get alerts on clearly bad language, they are generally in support of the program.

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

IMSafer: Each of us had at least one conversation with a guidance counselor who said, “If only you could use your powers for good.” This is our chance.

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

IMSafer: We started with a simple plan: to rethink the problem of protecting kids online. “Simple,” “easy to use” and “effective” are our guiding principles. The products for protecting children online are overwhelming for parents, hard to use, and require too much work on the part of the parents. IMSafer is simple, easy to use and effective.

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

IMSafer: IMSafer does not disclose current funding.

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?

IMSafer: We launched IMSafer on October 3rd, 2006 and added IMSafer Social Networking Service on October 18th, 2006. Today, 1/17, we announced support for Microsoft Vista and the Mac. We’ve tied in to Vista’s Parental Control API’s to build on the great work that Microsoft has done and created a Wizard to make it as easy as possible for parents to protect their kids online. Our complete announcement is up at http://www.imsafer.com/splash/press

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

tag2find: The idea started at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria (in the heart of Europe). After so many times having trouble finding our files on the desktop we came up with the idea to develop a tool based on tagging. We do believe in a future where intuitive information retrieval will no longer be a difficult task, rather than something people will enjoy.

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

tag2find: We combine several sophisticated technologies in a very tiny and easy to use application that is highly flexible and will grow along with the community development. Our idea is to embrace existing technologies and existing desktop search engines and integrate them and provide additional features. Therefore, tag2find is positioned between the information and the desktop search.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

tag2find: tag2find empowers the user to find his files on the desktop by simply using tags. Based on this technology, the file directory hierarchy is no longer relevant on an operating system because it does not matter where your files are stored. Speed and ease of use are the main concerns of the software. No overwhelming user interface distracts the user from his task, but simple and ready-to-use integration in the existing desktop software provides fast access to all tasks at hand. While entering tags, the software supports the user in deciding the appropriate tags for given files by providing tag suggestions.

tag2find helps migration from current, traditionally hierarchical file structures to the new, interlinked tag structure by providing tools for setting up initial tags based on existing documents and structures within the system. A fully tagged environment provides the huge advantage of searching and finding information based on semantic relations - those relations are easily defined by the users. A stored file can be found by any combination of its attached tags, releasing the user from the burden of having to remember strict and unique paths to the files. At the moment, even with strict guidelines for placing files within folders, situations arrive every minute where the user has to decide about the correct placement of a file. With tags, he can simply attach both, providing him and his colleagues the possibility of finding a file both ways.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

tag2find: Everyone who is seeking for a convenient way to organize their files or information in a very flexible way.

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

tag2find: We are working on the next hot upcoming features which will get the user to a next step for tagging (see http://www.tag2find.com/upcomingfeatures.html) on the desktop. Based on the current feedback, the look & feel of tag2find will change as well as some parts will be re-implemented. Cooperative tagging is another topic we are working on.

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

tag2find: We will incorporate the continuous community feedback and this approach proves to be just the right thing to do. We will grow as more and more users are coming across our tool and appreciating the powerful features and the convenience for their daily use.

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

tag2find: As a start-up we are still facing some bugs we have to fix. Fortunately, the test users are supporting us with a lot of feedback and feature requests. Of course, we are just beginning and there is still a way to go to make all our visions come true.

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

tag2find: We are guided by the vision to eliminate inflexible hierarchical folder structures on the PC and create a new experience and a new level of productivity when cooperating with others, based on simple, yet efficient means, like tagging.

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

tag2find: Combining tagging with sophisticated features into a useful application to create something that provides a great value to customers.

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

tag2find: We just released a very early technical preview, which is just a glimpse on what is about to come. At the moment we are setting up some financing for 2007.

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?

tag2find: Our first, very early technical preview version was published on December 23rd, 2006. This version is more or less a working demo, yet incomplete regarding features and performance. We are now collecting feedback and improving tag2find.

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

That’s it. Registration just takes a couple minutes and your information is completely private.

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

KickApps: KickApps is a fully hosted ASP platform that quickly enables any website with all the functionality typically found at portals like MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, including user-generated video, photos, personal pages, video blogging, tagging, rating, transcoding, video player customization, etc.

The KickApps platform deploys in a fast (hours, not months), highly customizable fashion by automatically generating custom media widgets with a number of unique viral features.

The KickApps platform allows websites to dramatically increase their page impressions and ad inventory and includes an administration, media management and reporting/data mining console. The platform also enables ad insertion including banner, pre-roll video and post-roll video.

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

KickApps: KickApps deploys rich functionality on major media websites in just a few hours with very little engineering integration. AJAX, Flash and html elements blend into a robust, seamless experience on a highly stable and scalable JAVA-based platform (Spring Framework, Hibernate). There are a number of features unique to the KickApps platform, including user-generated content and social networking deployed simply by the platform’s instant widget generator. The platform is also supported by a sophisticated media management platform which allows websites to invite rich media user participation while protecting their brands and advertisers from pornography and inappropriate material. Media screening includes automatic removal of media flagged by users as inappropriate as well as a media management console that allows webmaster to pre-screen content, adjust meta-data and disable unruly members. Web services include single sign on, reporting and module support. While many platform support widgets, those widgets have minimal functionality and are generally skin deep. KickApps widgets click to deeper user experiences, all supported by an integrated platform.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

KickApps: Video, photo and audio file uploads, transcoding and hosting within a sophisticated media management system easily controlled by our affiliate websites in an efficient administration console. User personal pages are automatically generated and multi-media enabled thru a media management system that gives detailed control to both website visitors and webmasters. The platform also includes multi-media community boards and Flash video blogging that allows users to create and post videos instantly with an inexpensive webcam.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

KickApps: Major media and high traffic websites that currently have an audience but do not yet invite true user participation. Radio station websites, television show websites, talk show websites, gaming websites, reality show websites, major music artist and celebrity websites, record company websites, etc.

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

KickApps: New features will allow websites to also use the KickApps platform to manage and play their premium with a selection of easily customizable and programmable video player widgets.

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

KickApps: KickApps has launched as a platform that enables a wide array of highly integrated community and video features, but will evolve into a multipurpose platform that will provide webmasters with a complete range of hosted applications, deployable at their web properties in a number of ways (e.g. widgets, web services, other APIs). Integrated administration, media management, reporting and data mining services will continue to evolve and will be fully accessible in dynamic fashion. For major media websites our platform will be increasingly customizable and extensible to support almost any front-end implementation. For smaller websites our platform will continue to develop simple but effective turnkey solutions.

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

KickApps: Very little thus far, however we have many requests for new features that for the most part will be added over the next few months.

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

KickApps: Technology and budget limitations should not prevent webmasters from including state-of-the-art rich media and community functionality on their websites.

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

KickApps: Impact thousands of websites, large and small, by solving difficult technical problems with simple, hosted solutions.

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

KickApps: KickApps is a well-funded NYC-based venture backed by Spark Capital and Prism ventures. Board members include former NFL and MTV President Sara Levinson and former E! Entertainment founder/CEO and Liberty Digital CEO Jarl Mohn.

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?

KickApps: KickApps launched its first wide release product in the Fall of 2006.

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

LogMeIn: LogMeIn, Inc. offers the world’s largest remote connectivity service with more than ten million users. The LogMeIn® family includes LogMeIn Free, LogMeIn Pro, LogMeIn Rescue, LogMeIn IT Reach, LogMeIn Backup and LogMeIn Scout. These services, along with RemotelyAnywhere and LogMeIn Hamachi provide secure remote access, support and administration to mobile professionals, helpdesk and system administrators worldwide. LogMeIn, Inc. is based in Woburn, MA with European headquarters in Budapest, Hungary.

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

LogMeIn: Our “secret sauce” is the fact that connections – after going through our secure gateway – often then go to point to point – speeding up the connection, and keeping the traffic down on our infrastructure. This lowers our cost and enables us to offer a fully secure, robust free version of our remote connectivity tool LogMeIn.

TechAddress: What are some of the main features?

LogMeIn: LogMeIn Hamachi - www.LogMeInHamachi.com - Hamachi is an instant VPN service that enables quick and easy set up of a computer network to access and share information. Computers connected via Hamachi can communicate over the Internet as if they are on the same local area network (LAN), allowing for a number of valuable uses, including remote access, remote control and file management. Introduced in beta in January 2005, Hamachi has more than five million beta users - adding close to a million new computers each month.

LogMeIn IT Reach - www.LogMeInITReach.com - provides sophisticated remote access, support, management, and reporting tools to any size enterprise. It can easily be deployed to a few or few hundred computers in minutes or hours, with minimal end-user interaction. Through its web-based interface, it easily ’snaps’ into existing networks and infrastructures, without conflicting with existing applications.

LogMeIn Rescue — www.LogMeInRescue.com — is a web-based remote support tool that allows a technician to connect to a remote PC in seconds, without pre-installing software. It is designed for ease-of-use, multi-tasking, and simplified administration, and scales to meet the needs of both large and small IT support organizations. PC users can receive on-demand support by downloading a small applet that allows a support technician to remote control their desktop.

LogMeIn Free - www.LogMeInFree.com - is a free service that provides fast, secure and easy access to a remote computer from virtually any web-enabled PC or Pocket PC with a high-speed Internet connection. Users obtain on-demand access to their work and home computers - viewing desktops, files and network resources - regardless of where they are.

LogMeIn Pro - www.LogMeIn.com - provides mobile professionals with the same fast, secure and easy remote access to their business or home computers as LogMeIn Free, but with the added productivity benefits of file transfer, remote printing, large file sharing and guest invite features. LogMeIn employs state-of-the-art-security, with 128-to-256 bit SSL encryption to prevent unauthorized access.

LogMeIn Backup is a computer-to-computer backup storage program that quickly and easily protects important files such as:

* Financial records

* Digital photos

* Music

* Videos

* Outlook email

* Contacts and calendar items

Users install LogMeIn Backup on two or more computers, and designate groups of files and folders (”Backup Sets”) to be routinely and automatically sent to their machines on which Backup Sets are stored (”Storage PCs”). Backup Sets are stored in a proprietary format on the Storage PC and are easily restored later if disaster strikes, such as a hard drive failure or virus infection.

TechAddress: Who’s your target customer or audience?

LogMeIn: Anyone who’d like to securely connect to remote devices to access data and productivity aps, or to support or maintain these devices. Nearly 50% of our 10 million + users define themselves as IT professionals, ½ the rest define themselves as senior executives in SMBs .

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

LogMeIn: http://corp.logmein.com/pressrelease.asp?id=54

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

LogMeIn: Opening up this connectivity beyond computers and PDAs to mobile phones, consumer electronics, even automobiles – allowing users to support and manage their digital life (devices, photos, music, videos and their network) from a simple user interface.

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

LogMeIn: Well, we’re adding close to 1 million users a month now, get hundreds of “love letters” a week and, as you can see if you scroll through http://corp.logmein.com/releasearchive.asp we have quite a few Editors’ choice awards and top reviews.

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

LogMeI