CentralDesktop

Founded: 2005

Sector: Office 2.0, Collaborate, Organize, Web Desktop

Headquarters: Pasadena, CA

Management: Isaac Garcia and Arnulf Hsu are the co-founders of Central Desktop. Two of their past team efforts resulted in buyouts from CNet.

Funding: Self-funded

Secret Sauce: A clear play for the SMB market, Central Desktop aims to be the central meeting and messaging space for all sorts of workgroups. It’s a good idea, as anyone who’s gotten tangled in a web of emails between co-workers can attest. Group task management, calendaring, document sharing and tracking, RSS updates on group activities and wiki-style collaboration – there are a lot of tools for $25+ a month. But they may not be flexible enough (as is the case for most webtop apps) for the real-life office.

Despite what the FAQ says, you do need to download software to make this work, so Central Desktop is actually a hybrid of Ajax and some extra stuff that runs from your box. It’s not an issue of purity that we care about, it’s ease of use. Hosting a web meeting is limited to Explorer only, which we only found out after clicking the final button to start the meeting. And with Explorer you have to download a web client. Vyew can manage a really smooth and (and highly-featured) web meeting with no downloads, so it’s not an impossible goal. The same problem applies for the two options for integrating Central Desktop with Microsoft Outlook Calendar – both require a download.

The big news for Central Desktop these days is their recently inked AppExchange integration deal with Salesforce.com. What was once a huge competitor is now a vehicle on the road to the holy grail of web-based desktop apps: enterprise-level credibility.

Seen and Heard: After a look, Web Worker Daily liked the ability to “edit the raw HTML — always having been annoyed at non-standard wiki markup, this is a feature I could come to love.” Zdnet blogger Phil Wainwright approves of the: “business-friendly templates so that even people who’ve never heard of a wiki can quickly get productive with its collaborative capabilities.”