FreshNetworks Blog

After spending yesterday morning at Plug and Play, the Web Mission 09 team spent the afternoon meeting with some Silicon Valley investors. Each firm had a five-minute slot in which to pitch their idea. It certainly felt rather dragon’s-den like, with the key difference being the entrepreneurs on Web Mission 09 tend to be running businesses which are already successful and have clients, products and traction in their market.

The highlight of the pitching came from Simon Campbell of ViaPost. He went for a full-on re-enactment of Steve Ballmer’s famous “I love this company” speech and it certainly got some attention.

That evening we had a night off from formal events. I managed to get tickets to see Gavin DeGraw play the Great American Music Hall. It’s a lovely venue and proved to be a great night out. Oh and if you’re a DeGraw fan, you can hear his new album early on Spotify, the web’s best music service.

This morning was one of the most discussed sessions of the week: a full day at Oracle getting an insider’s view on their Enterprise2.0 developments and plans. Highlights included finding out about Beehive, Oracle’s Collaborative Enterprise Platform, an insight into their Social CRM offering and one-to-one meetings with the Global head of M&A.

Beehive is a central plank in Oracle’s social and collaboration strategy. It provides enterprise customers with team collaboration tools (blogs, discussions, tags and wikis) and tools for synchronous collaboration (conferencing, presence, instant chat and voice chat). They are pitching it against a host of Microsoft tools and claimed that a deployment for a 5,000 person firm would save a company 54% on hardware costs and 70% on software if buying Microsoft.

I had to rush back early to San Fran. I’d left it a little late and decided that rather then wait for a cab I should walk to the train station. Crossing over yet another 5-lane dual carriage-way I noticed a sign to San Fran and decided, for the first time in 15 years, to see what would happen if I tried to hitch a lift back to the city. Within ten seconds a car stopped for me.

By co-incidence it was driven by a software developer who built the Imbee, a Social Network for kids with strong parental supervision capabilities. Even more of a co-incidence, Imbee, like our own community platform, is based on Drupal, the open-source modular framework and content management system. So we spent a happy 35 minutes discussing the 100,000 strong Drupal developer community. He even dropped me off at my door. Thank you.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.