ConnectBeam is a weeks-old startup looking to take social bookmarking into the enterprise sector. I love it when the cross-pollination between consumer services and business use starts with consumer practices and this is just one of many such developments recently. ConnectBeam makes tagging items into personal or shared archives simple, even in company intranets. It’s a straightforward use of social bookmarking technology with some nice touches and a fundamental business orientation.
Lead by Puneet Gupta and Prem Malhotra in Newark, California the company originated as a system for students. After academic publisher Reed Elsevier and other large vendors expressed interest in putting the system to use for business, ConnectBeam was reborn. Gupta told me that they are engaged in encouraging conversations with a number of large potential customers and are actively seeking funding as well.
I was impressed with ConnectBeam, both in terms of ease of use and security. The site is designed to incorporate just a little social networking into bookmarking activities. Users get their own archives, organized in topical pages, and can invite others inside or outside their company to view and/or contribute links to those pages. That permission can also be revoked, which is nice. Intranet pages behind a firewall can be bookmarked and accessed through IP validation.
User accounts are created in connection with your work email domain, commercial email domains can’t be used to start accounts. Readers here should be able to start free accounts at ConnectBeam to check it out with email addresses other than the big web mail names. The first five users per domain are free and a tiered pricing system will start once an organization’s user base has grown beyond five.
The ConnectBeam bookmarklet for adding a URL to your archive autopopulates all the requisite fields but also adds an image from the page, scrapes a summary of each page’s text and suggests tags. Archive project pages can be commented on and you can search either in your own archive or company wide.
Gupta told me that ConnectBeam can also work as a private label solution for companies with large web sites filled with various products and information. Most purchases are proceeded by online research and a bookmarking system allows potential customers to store and refer back to product and information pages later. Perhaps more importantly for vendors, Gupta says, the system could provide valuable forecasting and supply chain data.
I find anecdotal discussions about the usefulness of social bookmarking in large organizations and business all the time, but most use either public consumer grade services or an ad-hoc system developed in-house. I think that a vendor dedicated to providing this service has a lot of potential. I asked Gupta why companies would employ the services of a startup instead of looking to large established vendors to add social bookmarking to their offerings. He told me that startups have greater potential to be agile, disruptive and responsive. That’s a big part of the Web 2.0 story and I’ll be interested to see if ConnectBeam can find success in making it reality.
Large established vendors certainly are looking at things like this, and their functionality isn’t *too* far off from what ConnectBeam currently offers. Check out, for example, IBM’s Dogear project (http://elfurl.com/ifcsy). While it might not be incorporated in any existing enterprise product, I wouldn’t count out that possibility in the not-too-distant future.
This is very interesting and was wondering when someone would make a company like this focused on the business user.
I know several people using delicious inside companies to keep track of news/articles and such.
A while ago we started using http://www.centraldesktop.com to do exactly this. We track competitors, news articles, etc… all using a bookmarklet that tags items into a workspace that we grant users rights to. The functionality they have is somewhat hidden, not sure why they don’t talk about this more. The real bonus for us is that the articles are all searchable including a cached copy of the original webpage. It is working well for us.
Interesting concept. I think there is a lot of potential with Web 2.0 and the B2B market.
They should offer a server version that companies can install internally.
Interesting – sounds very similar to something I’ve been working on. Screenshots and more info available on my blog.
We’re just about to go into the first stage of a private beta, so if anyone is interested in taking a look, please drop me a note at niall@cogenz.com.
I think these folks have a great idea. They probably just filled a huge need.
Darren – I second that
The response has been phenominal.
This is an idea whose time has not come but long overdue. Enterprises are looking for a way to help people within collaborate while at the same time maintaining some “guidance” as to the way they do so. Those enterprises that don’t jump onto this risk having their employees and patrons do it “outside” the enterprise. Once and “outside” medium is created by default for any enterprise it will be impossible to bring it inside and hence not just out of control for the enterprises but also prey to hijacking.
The time for Entreprises to begin looking at this is now – those who miss the bandwagon do so at the peril of their future.
I really liked the idea of enterprise bookmarking. We are using delicious.com in our company to share information but with personal account and assessing socialmarc.com for the future use.