ReadWriteWeb

The new surge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is giving companies, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, more alternatives when it comes to company intranet portals for team collaboration and project management. In fact, it has taken those portals, once only available behind the firewall, and put them online as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. One such SaaS portal for information sharing among company employees launches today at DEMO08: Qtask, a project-centric collaboration environment.

The selection process for DEMOfall 08 (RWW is a media partner) is coming to a close and Chris Shipley has been blogging her thoughts about it. She's identified a number of trends in the 'class of DEMOfall 2008', one of which is this claim: the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. She also makes a case for an end to the 'free' model for web businesses.

I'm not sure that I buy either argument.

As mentioned earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with a couple of conferences this year and one of them is DEMOfall 08, the long-running launchpad for startups. DEMOfall 08 is on September 7-9 in San Diego. They're just announced the sessions, including a "head-to-head" between tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. The premise of their debate will be: what lies ahead for the Digital Age?

The startup launchpad conference DEMO has just begun here in Palm Desert. Word on the street over the past few years has been that the conference is losing its luster -but here on site it's feeling pretty relevant still today. You can judge for yourself via live streaming video embedded here below the fold. The conference runs through Wednesday night.

You're likely to see a lot of press about DEMO over the next few days, we've posted a toolkit for tracking the event, but below are some of the arguments for and against the continued relevance of this high-profile event. The live video player below from BitGravity may make you want to turn down your volume but that's what it's like here at the event, too.

Coverage of the venerable startup-launch conference DEMO will begin on blogs and traditional press early tomorrow morning, but here at ReadWriteWeb we're taking a different strategy. This post is the first part of that strategy. Instead of racing other journalists to cover the best of the 77 companies launching, we've assembled a body of resources that anyone can use to track and participate in the event as it unfolds.

From Monday through Wednesday you can read our unorthodox coverage of DEMO here, but for now we'd like to offer the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for DEMO08.