Tech Coast Review
The startup and tech news weblog for Southern California
Showing posts with label Mashup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mashup. Show all posts

Monday, January 14, 2008

San Diego based, Mindtouch is a wiki software maker focused on the enterprise.   They originally launched in 2005 and have had a steady stream of new features and new high profile customers (including heavy weights like Microsoft, Fujitsu, British Petroleum, Stanford University, and Mozilla).

Business wikis are a huge and growing market, and Mindtouch is definitely leading the way.  Mediawiki (the most popular wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, as well as many other sites) is a huge and complicated beast and not exactly well suited for businesses who just want to plug and go.  Mindtouch's DekiWiki product has 100k installations, focused on the enterprise, with a much easier deployment than MediaWiki.  Meaning that as a business DekiWiki is probably your top choice.  For those who care about open source companies, DekiWiki is an open source platform,  just like MediaWiki, so if your dev team is really up to snuff, you can probably modify just about anything.

As mentioned, Mindtouch has been really aggressive with their release cycles and are really moving DekiWiki from just a standard wiki to a full on service application platform.  The big thing they've released just recently, is the ability to include mashups in their wikis.  While at first this may seem like an unusual match, wikis are the most deployed web 2.0 technology in the enterprise and its probably a great way to introduce businesses to another hot web 2.0 tech: mashups.  Of course while mashups in the enterprise are less deployed and arguably less useful then consumer facing counterparts, there are still plenty of reasons a business may be interested in mashups.  Combining internal wiki data with Google Mapping or Flickr photo streams are just two useful way I could see the mashups being useful in enterprise applications, and I'm sure there many others.  In reality the question, to me is not a matter of whether or not mashups and wikis are a good match in the enterprise (they are), but rather can and will customers that use Dekiwiki have the resources to take advantage of it.  I would guess that given Mindtouch's main market are businesses who are looking for somewhat of a turn-key solutions, I would say the answer is probably no.  But regardless, its nice to see that Mindtouch is continuing to trying to innovate in the enterprise wiki space.  


Screenshot:

 

Friday, November 30, 2007

I recently had the opportunity to watch one of the TutorLinker founders (a student from UCLA) pitch to a group of angels in southern california.  The pitch was rather rough in a couple ways: it didn't address what their market was, how they were going to bring any return on the investors capital, or really what their product was.  They assumed many of the angels were well versed in web 2.0 and how that applied to finding a tutor.  Needless to say the angels weren't and thus Tutorlinker didn't make it past the first round of pitching.

Despite the presentation snafu (and don't let it get you down TutorLinker), they have a well designed little site.  Basically its a place where tutors 
and those in need of tutors can meet up.  Naturally being a nice little web 2.0 site, it mashes up where the tutors are geographically using the Google Map API.  And while the site isn't particularly sophisticated in what it offers, what they do to (help find tutors) is done well with quite a lot of polish.  
Honestly, I'm pretty surprised these guys made it on TechCrunch a few months back, but it's defiantly a good sign.  The big question is whether or not they can take their "cool" little website and figure out how to turn it into a business.


Screenshot:

 

Sponsored Ads

<>