SmallBizResource Blog -- Internet

Web 2.0 Expo All About Small Business

Posted by Fredric Paul Friday, Apr 25, 2008, 01:49 PM ET

This week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco wasn't explicitly aimed at small business, but if you ask me, small companies stole the show.

Sure, the big boys were all over the show floor, from IBM and Microsof and Quicken, to AOL and Disney and Yahoo!

But for me, the real point of the show was the incredible enthusiasm of all the small companies, startups, and entrepreneurs flooding the halls. Even though I had never heard of many of them, they all seemed to have cool new products and technologies to talk about. Best of all, many of those very same products and technologies are intended to help small and midsize companies leverage Web 2.0 concepts to compete against big companies.

I'm sure many of these small companies won't be around in five years. But I'm equally sure that a handful of them will be household names. If I knew how to tell which ones are which, I'd be a rich man by now.

Instead, though, let me highlight a couple things with particular relevance to small businesses.

One of the biggest themes at the show was something called Platform as a Service, or PaaS. Software as a Service (SaaS), is all the rage, but PaaS takes it up a level so that software developers can use the cloud to develop more, better, cheaper applications easier and faster than before. Everyone from Intuit (QuickBase), to LongJump to BungeeConnect to Coghead were pushing their PaaS solutions, and they all promised the ultimate result would be more and greater choice of applications -- at lower prices -- for small businesses. Sounds good to me.

On the SaaS front, I sat down with Raju Vegesna from ZOHO, who touted his company's alternatives to the recent SalesFoogle announcement linking GoogleApps with SalesForce. He calls ZOHO cheaper than SalesForce and "deeper" than Google Apps.

I also shared drinks and stories with the folks GIS Planning about their new ZoomProspector product, designed to help companies find new locations.

But the most outrageous company I saw, though, was adding self-destructing IM to it's line of self-destructing email products. To promote the idea of protecting your communications, BigString was handing out condoms. Now what big tech company would have the... the... the... guts to do that?

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