Tuesday May 20, 2008

Brightidea.com Announces WebStorm 5.0, The Latest Version of Its White Label Social Network Designed to Stimulate Innovation in Large Organizations

SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2008 -- Brightidea.com, the leading provider of Innovation Management software products, today announced the availability of WebStorm 5.0, which enables businesses to create turn-key social networks to collaborate with customers, employees or partners. Developed to address the innovation challenges that managers face every day, WebStorm is easy to implement, highly-scalable and designed to help organizations tap the innovation potential of any online community, either internal or external.

“Companies today must engage the entire enterprise in the innovation process to maintain their competitive edge,” said Michael Kanazawa, author of Big Ideas to Big Results. “As the leader in this emerging category, Brightidea.com makes it easy for organizations to connect all stakeholders and enable the collaboration that is essential to open innovation.”

At many companies, the collection of new ideas is a fragmented process of emails, phone calls, whiteboard sessions and sticky notes. But to compete in today's competitive marketplace, businesses need to be able to quickly generate new ideas, qualify concepts with the most potential, and efficiently allocate the resources necessary to turn those ideas into reality. Only Brightidea.com offers the end-to-end Innovation Management software businesses need to manage the entire innovation process from concept to launch.

The most-advanced tool of its kind available today, WebStorm 5.0 is a corporate social network that enables businesses to quickly and easily create custom innovation portals to establish communication channel with customers, employees or partners.

“Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don't expect it to improve the bottom line,” said Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com. “WebStorm combines features made popular by sites such as Facebook and MySpace with features proven to accelerate innovation in large enterprises.”

Building on the success of previous releases, WebStorm 5.0 includes:

• Advanced Social Networking: Enabling users to build detailed profiles with information and photos as well as the ability to create or join personal networks, send private messages, search for experts and earn points and recognition.
• Configurable Micro-Site: Complete with company branding to provide a seamless user experience. The site also includes a highly-configurable drag & drop layout and point & click content management that makes setup a breeze.
• Innovation Management Tools: Allowing users to submit, vote and comment on other?s ideas. WebStorm includes a real-time duplicate checker, the ability to categorize and tag ideas as well as keyword searches to make it easy to sort through the ideas collected.
• Dashboard: Provides real-time reporting on community activity and usage patterns including metrics on individual performance, site-wide activity levels, and trend analysis.
• Open Standards: Offers support for RSS, CSS, SAML 1.1, Unicode and REST APIs.

Brightidea.com's open innovation platform provides a powerful tool set to access the creativity and experiences of customers and employees. WebStorm 5.0 can be connected directly to a company's existing website or used as a stand-alone for private communities, making it an ideal solution for:

• Product Managers: To gather prioritized feedback from customer communities and internal stakeholders in order to prioritize product enhancement and feature requests and improve customer satisfaction.
• Corporate Strategy Groups: To support company-wide or department-specific innovation initiatives. These short term events have been proven to stimulate a culture of participation and innovation.
• Conference Coordinators: To create virtual communities that parallel in-person events. They are ideal for pre-networking before the conference as well as follow-through on initiatives after the event.
• Innovation Competitions: To deliver a seamlessly branded experience. WebStorm also provides the tools necessary to manage the collection and judging process as well as interactions with participants.
• Alliance Managers: Can foster systems innovation with multi-party alliances and partnerships with both private and public policy entities.

Pricing and availability: WebStorm 5.0 is now available for as little as $1 per user. For more information go to: http://www.brightidea.com/webstorm/

About Brightidea.com
Brightidea.com is the market and technology leader in Innovation Pipeline Management. Over 300 businesses around the world use its Software-as-a-Service suite to transform their employee, partner and customer ideas into a reality. The Brightidea.com platform is an integrated set of Web 2.0 and social networking tools specifically designed to stimulate innovation in large organizations. The company's software has been successfully deployed at: Adobe, Bosch, Cisco, Harley-Davidson, Experian, Thomson Corp, British Telecom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Honeywell, among others. Founded in 1999, Brightidea.com is closely held and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, please visit www.brightidea.com.

Kelly Krebs
Horn Group on behalf of Brightidea.com
415-905-4059
kkrebs@horngroup.com