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With the growing number of online services, it's becoming more economical for small business to rely on web-based tools rather than expensive enterprise software. Not too long ago we brought you 5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized, and now the website Business Pundit has released their top 10 list of online collaboration tools for small businesses.

Call it Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0; the fact of the matter is that online services just make more sense for businesses on a budget. Because these software platforms are web-based, users can use any computer to access them at work, at home or even on the road. They eliminate the need for expensive software and fewer IT employees are required for setup, updates and patches to systems.

Since Google Wave's launch, we've seen a slew of real-time, short-form collaboration tools.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as "a Twitter-like project collaboration tool," and it fits right in with this trend.

Who does not love to make predictions? Tis' the season, right?

We posted our Top 10 Enterprise Products for 2009 and so it feels like a good time to provide some perspective on what the enterprise can expect in the year ahead.

Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO's were unsure what unified communications really meant.

But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting.

If you ever wanted to quickly share or collaborate on a simple sketch online, here is a fun new tool to try. With FlockDraw, you can draw simple sketches collaboratively in your browser in real-time. Up to 50 people can draw simultaneously on a single whiteboard. FlockDraw doesn't limit the number of people who can watch. FlockDraw feels a bit like a pre-Windows7 version of MS Paint, and isn't anywhere close to being a replacement for a full-blown design app like Balsamiq, or a browser-based image editing suite like Aviary. The service, however, makes it very easy and fun to create simple drawings and sketches in real-time.

Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now?

According to "Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy,"
a new report from Forrester Research, two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now:

The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace.

We see so many different collaboration tools that at times if feels like we are looking at the same environment over and over again.

Proton Media is entirely different. It is the most advanced collaboration environment we have seen in the market. We say this without hesitation.

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

We write a lot about the battles for the enterprise, the merits of Sharepoint and Google's pitches into the corporate world.

But it's always good to watch the new players who use existing open-source software to build something pretty quickly that people can use. OfficeMedium is a service that is a fit for the small business user with just enough social features to give it a decent chance of winning over companies looking to establish a community platform for their users.

Wikis, micro-blogs and collaboration technologies get a lot of attention for their use in the enterprise but one need remains constant.

Search.

Who wins the search battle will come home with a lot of prizes and big wins in the enterprise. Search may even prove to be a differentiation for companies that are choosing collaboration platforms.