The idea is to make it easy to quickly post and remove stuff from digital bulletin boards where the online communities of the future will gather to catch up and trade ideas, images, and work.
"We're turning the Web into a conversation," said Glenn Reid, chief executive and founder of Five Across Inc.
Reid's start-up and several other companies will offer their visions for accomplishing that on stage this week at the DEMO conference in Arizona, an annual showcase of tech innovation.
All are trying to address in one way or another an emerging trend of making the Web less disjointed and more democratized -- a richer, more organized forum for gathering and sharing information.
These companies, and many others, are all part of a growing industry specializing in what Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li calls "social media."
JotSpot Inc., a Palo Alto-based start-up, is betting on wikis, a type of Web page that can be edited by anyone.
Wikis could become a staging area of sorts for information, and JotSpot's new Web service targets businesses that want to give authorized users a common location in which to collaborate.
Co-workers can take a spreadsheet, build on it, customize it, integrate data from the Web or e-mails, and have all the information reside in one place on a wiki website. Revisions are tracked and archived so nothing is ever lost.
Behind JotSpot is Joe Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who cofounded the early search engine Excite.
Kraus became a believer in wikis after he and fellow cofounder Graham Spencer got fed up with exchanging hundreds of e-mails and attachments and tried using a wiki instead while working on a business plan. That ultimately led to JotSpot's birth in October, competing against Socialtext and a handful of others in the fledgling market.
"We're in this transition of making it ever easier to publish [on the Web] and integrate previously siloed information and personalizing it," said Kraus, who is also JotSpot's chief executive.
Others, including Five Across and iUpload, aim to use the power of another form of Web publishing, online journals commonly known as blogs, to help businesses or individuals streamline their teamwork or communication.
