eCollaborate

e-Collaborate is a playground for scientists, techies, academics, and even large organizations to collaborate. Semantic web technologies are used to create intelligent ontologies that allow like-minded individuals to find each other quickly and efficiently. Basic collaboration tools and a searchable knowledgebase (with mash-ups connecting publicly available data sources) are available at basic (no cost) and premium (subscriber fee) levels.   A collaboration infrastructure (SaaS) is also available for premium (larger) customers to use with outsourced resources and third-party collaborators (including Contract Research Organizations). Finally, the site provides an infrastructure for organizations or individuals to post an intellectual challenge/problem and offer a monetary award for information leading to the answer.

Example use cases:

• An academic mathematician in NY is researching Partial Differential Equations and its applicability to data mining applications. He is looking for a collaborator in the engineering field. (Solution: Free collaboration tools)
• A pharmaceutical researcher wants to brainstorm with other experts about possible drug targets for Parkinson's Disease. (Solution: Premium collaboration tools)
• A small software company in California needs an infrastructure to collaborate with their outsourced programming team in India. (Solution: SaaS)
• Company X wants to know if anyone has tackled a technical problem it is facing. (Solution: Knowledgebase and premium collaboration tools). Company X finds out that no one has tackled this problem, posts it to e-collaborate, and opens up the bidding for experts around the world to offer their expertise in exchange for a monetary award.

1. Mary Beth Walsh - Co-Founder.  Currently a Senior Product Manager at Symyx Technologies, responsible for design, management, and implementation of enterprise software used by R&D organizations in the consumer products/pharmaceutical/biotech/petroleum/plastics industries.  Graduated from Yale University in 2001 with a M.S. in Biophysical Chemistry and is current MBA student at Babson College.
2. Matthew Weiss - Co-Founder.  Currently a Senior Research Scientist at Amgen.   Graduated from Yale University with a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 2001.

-Free service gives users access to basic information in the ontology, as well as limited netowrking

-One-time transactions -  commission fee paid to Let's Collaborate based on award paid to expert

-Premium service (monthly subscription fee for individuals; site wide subscription for larger organizations; discount pricing for students and academics)

-SaaS - dedicated service and secure login for collaboration interface (competitor to Sharepoint)

• Provides unique service:  High value technical information coupled with networking tools to find the right experts
• Individuals and large companies are already doing this, but no central "hub" is available today (unmet need!)
• Demand will increase as the globalization and outsourcing trends increase.
• Web 2.0 technologies and technical ontologies create high value and high barrier to entry.
• Due to limited resources in developing countries, SaaS is an ideal model for an outsourced collaboration infrastructure.