At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I saw a lot of presentations, met with a lot of vendors and saw a lot solutions, but a couple of things I saw were particularly neat:
- The Socialtext Social Spreadsheet , called SocialCalc , which was created for the company by spreadsheet pioneer, Dan Bricklin , was especially cool. The tool provides an online collaboration-style workspace in the form of a spreadsheet. You can link to pages within a sheet or to wiki pages and you can learn about the people who have created the data and the pages. Right now the spreadsheet is in private beta, but it should be available for general use some time in the third quarter of this year.
- In the spring, Open Text purchased Vizible , a widget company. The news didn't even catch my attention at the time, to be honest, but they showed me a demo of a 3D widget that captured live pictures from Flickr. You could spin this 3D widget in space and see all of the pictures in front of you. They remained pixelized until you chose one, at which point the picture came into immediate focus. The visual component was really dazzling, but you can use multiple data sources, even video or text (like blogs or other publishing sources) and you can track clicks and even provide the ability to click through to another site (like an eCommerce site). Check out the screen shot below to see what I mean:
