smartsheet.com

Founded: 2005

Sector: Office 2.0, Sharing, Collaboration, Project management

Headquarters: Bellevue, WA

Management: Brent Frei, Founder and Chairman, Mark Mader, President (both formerly of Onyx CRM)

Funding: Angel

Secret Sauce: It’s an acknowledged fact of history that many of the greatest innovators were, in fact, great improvers. We’re going to be hearing a lot of noise from the ‘improvers’ in the Office 2.0 sector. Taking desktop office apps like spreadsheets and word processing to the browser is an obvious step up but do these apps stand a real chance to compete with Microsoft? At this point all bets are on; the SMB market is a big playing field, after all.

Case in point: The spreadsheet serves as a project planning tool for lots of users but the desktop version (ok, I’m talking about Excel) has some serious limitations. Smartsheet.com has spun the spreadsheet into a whole new application by adding features that focus directly on project management: sharing and version control, data changes and status alerts via email. For the novice planner smartsheet.com’s strongest selling point will be the extensive project templates available on the site. Price points start at free and go up to $149/month with 10G of storage, all options host unlimited users.

The debate about Office ‘improvers’ being simply features or actual standalone applications is only speculation at this point. Time will tell how products like smartsheet.com will pan out in the marketplace but having a very experienced team behind the wheel surely increases smartsheet’s odds.

Seen and Heard: Some positive press comes from CNet: “the company is using familiar tools to make project management better”. Webware adds, “it’s a very solid tool to keep track of all the moving pieces in a project or in a small company. And it doesn’t require a radical relearning of project management”.