After being at the Office 2.0 conference last week, I had to spend Monday in my office, with most of the day on conference calls. I originally had planned to go to San Diego to Demo’08 but want to keep my carbon footprint down, so decided to follow the TechCrunch50 conference (which is just over the hill from me at the Concourse center) on UStream.tv, which was actually really cool.

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As a matter of fact, I was at the conference (and saw all those in the demo pit I wanted to see) yesterday and saw some of the panels in person, and then left early to get back to work, but watched the rest (interesting interview with Mark Cuban) through Ustream.tv since there were no good seats left in person. I can follow both Demo and TC50 twitter (back channel) streams on twitter.com/launchweek. I wish that Demo had streaming video so I could watch that also (hard to be in 2 places at once). I believe Mike Arington stated yesterday that while there were 500-1000 people in the audience, there were 5,000 watching through Ustream.

The DemoPit:

Although I saw about a dozen companies in the demo pit yesterday, the one that impressed me the most was CollectiveX, who I had looked at about a year ago. CollectiveX (based in Maryland) has been live for about 18 months, it took them about a year to get to their first 1000 groups, but after than they are growing at 1000 groups a month, and today are at about 18,000 groups. Some of those groups and the rapid growth can be due to what CollectiveX calls “expats” i.e. groups from LinkedIn or other social network that moved over to CollectiveX. To show the viral nature of CollectiveX, about 50% of users will create a new group in the first 90 days they are using the service, and the number of groups seems to be doubling every 4-5 months.

CollectiveX Stats:

The average age on CollectiveX is not the 15-25 year olds that everyone else seems to be targeting, but is 38.5 year olds. CollectiveX sees themselves as “Ning for professionals.” They seem to be pretty transparent with statistics on their public group sites (80% of sites are private). What was interesting was to see the spike in usage on Mondays. When asked, the CEO told me that the default for most groups was to send out a weekly digest on Sunday night, which prompted people for higher use on Mondays. They also track inactive groups and estimate that about 65% of all groups are active, but I think they need to have more complete statistics, and start to track their churn.

They also offer an Enterprise edition (which I think is mis-named and should be an SMB edition) which is $500/ year for an initial license(1 group site with all premium services) and $5k for an unlimited license (and includes all of premium services offered). Premium services are offered at $9/mo/group site, and include things like extra storage (3GB) since they only offer 25MB for each group site initially. Only the removal of “Create and find Groupsite links” (which is their main viral mechanism) costs $18/mo.

A Work in Progress

Although CollectiveX is only 2 years old, they have come a long way. There most recent update was on the page size and layout and the inclusion of widgets. But in looking at the tool, they do have blogs and forums (threaded discussions) but not wikis yet, nor do they include IM/Chat or things like task or project management which many other VTS (virtual team spaces) like Near-time, Huddle and Central Desktop do include (not all have every function… yet).

Overall, I think CollectiveX does have a good model for “prosumers” and maybe for SMB (small, medium, businesses), but not yet for the enterprise. I will check back with them in a year and see where they are. My guess is that they will be between 60-100K groups and have some offerings for the enterprise (and groups within the enterprise), will have fixed some of the holes in their functionality and should be on the radar of some of the larger companies in this space.