Here's another high-tech company with an innovative service that offers a special method for social networking.

FOUNDER

BrightSide Software was founded in June 2007 to address an expected movement in the enterprise software market to SaaS (software as a service) products. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company was formed by Dimitri Lisitski, Alex Maslov, and Eugene Kompaniets. Lisitski, BrightSide's CEO, previously founded Bonus Tec, a product engineering service company, and also worked on M&As for GlobalLogic before co-founding BrightSide. Lisitski also spent 8 years in marketing with brands including Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, and Kraft Foods.

STARTUP FACTS

Nuospace, an enterprise portal solution launched in March 2008, is BrightSide's first product. According to Lisitski, BrightSide's mission was to provide the small to medium-sized business market with an easy-to-use and efficient webbased document collaboration tool. "We believe that the new breed of web-based products will help small business and medium-sized business customers (SMBs) to do all of the complicated things that are usually done by large enterprises, but were too expensive and complicated for smaller businesses," says Lisitski. He adds that previous collaboration tools typically needed technology professionals to implement.

"Our main insight [into] the key problem in enterprise collaboration is you can't make it complicated," he says. "You have to make it as simple as possible to make sure people will use it. We started looking for a solution. We couldn't find the right combination of features and usability and simplicity to make sure that it works within an organization properly." So they created their own solution.

COOL TECHNOLOGY

Using the wiki concept of collaboration, BrightSide created Nuospace. When a user signs in, he or she can immediately enter and save text into a blank wiki page. "This is what people usually expect from wikis; to create text in the browser," says Lisitski.

Nuospace's page templates enable users to create and edit various applications on the wiki pages, from text content, documents, directories, forums, blogs, and newsletters. On a screen that resembles a typical word processing page, users can edit documents that are already stored on their desktops. They can also enter revisions and comments related to those documents and view input posted by other users (their colleagues).

To help further move the collaboration process along, users can click on buttons to approve or reject a particular document. They can also lock documents they're working on and freeze final versions-all in a secure environment. "You can also make [the documents] confidential," says Lisitski. "Only users you invite can see the document." Users will eventually be able to export the pages to a PDF file and print them.

Nuospace lets users access content about companies at any time through their organization's intranet or the web. Users access the tool with a username and password.

Lisitski says that Nuospace is being targeted toward company decision makers; executives in practically any functional area. Technology executives don't need to be included in the decision making because the product's integration and use are simple, he adds. The organizations best suited for Nuospace include consulting companies, law firms, investment firms, auditors and CPAs, advertising agencies, research companies, and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations).

There is no upfront investment required to use Nuospace, explains Lisitski. The service is free for up to 500 megabytes of content and 20 users. Fees are added depending on how much space a customer needs.

WIKI'S TRUE IMPACT

Lisitski credits the wiki for the idea that led to the creation of Nuospace. The wiki was created to simplify knowledge sharing, says Lisitski. "The same concept was reapplied to enterprise collaboration," he says. The main goal of Nuospace was to create a shared workspace for enterprise content.

When creating Nuospace, Lisitski and his partners kept four key concepts in mind, all of which they feel they addressed with this offering. The first was that the product was simple, simpler than the wiki. second, they recognized that most companies work with a variety of document types and that Nuospace had to support all types of content. "We also saw that it's really important to make sure that when you publish your content that you're able to involve your colleagues to discuss it and collaborate on it," says Lisitski. Another concept was the fact that information is an asset; steps need to be taken to ensure it isn't deleted or stolen.

FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Lisitski expects BrightSide to play a large role in future document collaboration over the next 5 years, as Nuospace becomes just the first offering in BrightSide's anticipated stable of solutions. Lisitski's goal for Nuospace is for it to become a prominent intranet/enterprise content management tool for the SMB market as well as a main platform for users' company documents. "Our key effort in communication will be to teach people how to collaborate more efficiently," says Lisitski.

By 2012 or before, Lisitski says that Nuospace will be able to support different types of content that is edited online, from text, email, and spreadsheets to presentations and charts. The tool will also provide seamless integration in Microsoft Office to enable offline editing as well. Nuospace will also support instant publishing from other systems, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management). There are also plans to launch mobile and offline editions of Nuospace, says Lisitski, as well as to offer consulting services.