Davorin spoke about the need for social web tools in the workplace. He discussed how employers can implement easy-to-use tools such as the consumer social networking tools that are currently taking off in popularity. He also talked about what employees want and how bringing their social networking applications to the office empowers them and allows them to work more efficiently. Davorin talked about the Intrix solution being a semantic solution and how that helps remember work-flow and work habits of employees and recommends the best processes for employees, therefore increasing productivity.

On Tuesday, when Davorin was done speaking at European Venture Market, Stowe Boyd from Enterprise 2.0 Conference announced Intrix as one of the “Sweet Sixteen” Finalists in the competition to speak at E2.0 Launchpad, happening in June 24 Boston.  We were chosen as a finalist based on community voting for our Twitpitch, so thank you to everyone who voted for us.  You’re not off the hook yet though. For the next round we had to prepare a video.

Starting today you can vote and view our video by clicking this link http://launchpad.enterprise2conf.com/node/67.  Help us get to Boston to present at E2.0 Launchpad!

Enterprise Social solutions need to provide benefits that are needed to achieve new levels of productivity in a challenging market economy.

Imagine having your business application personalized by your needs with your data as it fits to your workflow – all without calling the IT department who will do it for you. What about if you could change the view next week, when you will be working on something else? What if I could change the color of your business application and share the »my view of information« to my colleague who is new in the company? 

There are a lot of possibilities when you give enterprise worker the same Web tools and apply them in the enterprise environment. It’s time to be prepared for the next level interactive and proactive user.

Intera was selected from among 210 finalists for the Red Herring 100 Europe list after CEO Davorin Gabrovec presented the company’s mission to help businesses create, collaborate and control content socially across the enterprise.

“Globalization and increased competition have put pressure on enterprises to work more efficiently and innovate quickly in the face of competitive threats. At the same time, the popularity of consumer social networking sites means that employees are demanding similar, easy-to-use tools at work. This has brought about the need for social enterprise software that can make real-time collaboration easier and more productive,” said Gabrovec.

Intera’s Enterprise 2.0 service, Intrix, simplifies collaborative, user-friendly business solutions and puts control into the hands of the user. It takes a profile-driven approach with many built-in socially-aware features that add a social layer to business applications and enable true collaboration throughout the enterprise. Intrix has already built a national community of 2000 users from government, large enterprises and more than 50 SMEs.

The Red Herring 100 Europe award is given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year. Red Herring’s lists of top private companies are an important part of the publication’s tradition of identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Past winners include Google, eBay and Skype.

Almost 200 million people already using Facebook of their own volition socially is not even close to being the same thing as sitting down at work on a Monday morning in front of enterprise software, but with Intrix we are doing a good job of attempting to close that gap. Will explain - soon.

Intera will present its vision for merging the enthusiasm, pro-activity and power of classic social networking into the enterprise environment during the Red Herring Europe 2009 Conference, scheduled for March 31- April 2 at the Berlin Radisson Hotel. Red Herring will honor all Red Herring 100 Europe finalist companies at the event, as well as name the 100 winners of the award.

Intera’s Intrix service provides a collaborative, user-friendly environment for business intelligence by putting control into the hands of the user with a profile-driven approach. Utilizing many built-in, socially-aware features, Intrix users simply state their role and are provided immediate and customizable solutions that easily adapt or evolve over time.

“We are proud to be included in this prestigious list of technology innovators. Our product, Intrix has many built-in social features that add a social layer to business applications and enable true collaboration throughout the enterprise,” said Davorin Gabrovec, CEO and founder of Intera. “This recognition by Red Herring is supportive of our work to unlock the value of collaboration throughout the enterprise and pursue international expansion, including localization and integration across all levels of the enterprise and beyond.”

First off, let’s take the concept of “no technical jargon” as mentioned in our earlier post and put some meat on its bones.

Under the skin of Intrix is a semantic framework that deals with Ontologies. At the pedestrian level, ontologies are simply a system of describing information and the relationships therein. The benefit of using such a framework is that we can define problems in human (re: informal) terms and have the solutions formalized through semantics.

So, what does that mean?

Concepts common to Place_Acronym_Here are knowable to Intrix as part of a larger symbiosis of “other” things. In other words, things have a defined place and relationships to other things.

At this level, we are speaking strictly about information management. What if we extended this to include the issues of where you are, what you do, what you’ve done? What is common to these questions? What can we do to mold the information system around these points?

The common ground is that we’re talking about context. We’re talking about people, places, preferences and the entire scope of human experience and behaviour. This may sound philosophical –and to some extent it is –but it does have a place in the Enterprise.

We solve the problem of context by extending our ontologies to cover the “personal” –or “profile” concepts and mapping those to other things. As an example, your profile may indicate you require certain parts of the traditional CRM solution, parts of some Project solution, and parts of a traditional ERP solution; but not in their entirety. However, within your Enterprise, there _are_ people who do need compete CRM et al plus your requirements may shift over time –your business may evolve, you may be promoted, gain additional responsibilities, and so forth.

The traditional model of software delivery requires adaptation to support such “filtering” and “shifts”; energy and money must be spent (typically) resulting in systems whose complexities undermine usability & comprehension. By taking the semantic road, we avoid these issues and (yet) are able to provide the full power and integrative features necessary for businesses in the 3rd millenium: location, preference, user & industry profile and utility are all factors that provide TheUser the solution they really need; both now and tomorrow.

We’re well ahead of the pack when it comes to the point of Context-Driven solutions; so keep your eyes & ears open for more. We’ll see you again soon.

Enter-the-prize.

Essentially, we have been operating as an Enterprise 2.0 provider since the inception of our Intrix product line. What we lacked in terms of collaborative features, we have actively pursued for implementation. We are merging & expanding the entirety of our existing solutions into one cohesive package and have developed a broad range of features that will assist our customers conduct their business(es) more effectively. But, how do we know this will succeed? How are we different from the rest of the Enterprise 2.0 providers?

First, our latest offerings include full, enterprise-wide integration with all existing infrastructure. We took the simple route by sticking to a collaboration-through-syndication approach. In other words, we don’t pretend to know or support every last detail of our customer’s business intelligence. Instead, Intrix (now) happily accepts custom feeds as part of it’s integration system. If you have some funky project management system or ERP, simply flesh out an RSS feed and it will be consumable by Intrix. This is nothing revolutionary, but it will certainly help our customers to iteratively & strategically migrate legacy systems into the realm of Enterprise 2.0.

Second, we prefer cleanliness over complexity. We don’t see Intrix as the end-all-be-all solution for every business. We know that there are (often) tools ‘out there’ that are needed by our customers. We like that diversity and actively encourage it. Where Intrix comes into the equation is 1-part beautification and 1-part simplification. As a filter –or umbrella –over a company’s infrastructure, Intrix makes the day-to-day (aka nominal) tasks actually enjoyable. Intrix is to Enterprise 2.0 what the iPod is to music; a tool that is enjoyable and non-intrusive.

Third, we’ve thrown out all notions of anything technical; you’ll never see it and we know why –it’s nonsense. From top to bottom, Intrix is built for human consumption. Without getting into any pillow talk about technologies, let’s just say that Intrix is a semantic application; you’ll hear more about this in a future Blog. Where’s the catch? What’s cool about that? Nothing really but we’re the only company who delivers a <buzzz>Semantic-Web Enterprise 2.0</buzzz> solution; so there! There’s your pillow talk.