Four Startups at Office 2.0 Worth a Second Look

September 8th, 2008 Theresa Shafer

We plan to take a closer look at four services that exhibited at Office 2.0 last week. They each have one or more compelling features that may fill gap in our current set of productivity tools.

Vyew

• It’s a zero configuration (100% browser based, provided you have Flash and Java installed) conferencing service that makes it easy to initiate a web conference.
• We will try it for white board collaboration on flowcharts and block diagrams.

Sliderocket

• It can import PowerPoint and make each slide editable in a slide tray paradigm. This could be very useful when you are collaborating on a new pitch and want to play mix and match from what you have.
• Collaborating on PowerPoint is a real problem for us. Today we are left emailing PowerPoint documents around.
• PowerPoint output and stand-alone presentation tool also look interesting.

Empressr

• The most speculative of the four. Worth exploring as we need to move beyond slide-based presentations to animation and multi-media in the next two to three years.
• It can also import PowerPoint and make each slide editable in a slide tray paradigm.

Officescape

• Combining on-demand meeting rooms and office space with SaaS productivity tools is a very compelling concept.

Our real challenge is to move away from PowerPoint toward an HTML/CSS solution that would allow us to create wiki pages, word output, and presentations from a common source.

Entry Filed under: Tools for Startups, tshafer