You know the old adage about starting a successful enterprise: find a need and fill it. There’s a need to be filled that many people recognize…but it’s currently too hard for the needy to figure out how fill it themselves, and no one else is filling it.

I’m speaking about the need entrepreneurs, small businesspeople, non-profit organizations and others have for a Web asset that supports their business or organizational requirements. No…I’m not talking about yet another brochureware web site or simple ecommerce, but something that meets the demands, higher expectations and increasingly global reach of an accelerating participatory culture.

In an age of internet ubiquity and a flat world, people all over the globe are accessing, participating, creating, clustering with others, learning, raising their awareness, and increasingly demand a level of interaction that is making a Web asset a business and organizational imperative. Just look at the success of MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo’s offerings, all the Web 2.0 offerings and more to get a sense of what’s happening.

Over the last six months, I’ve been working with multiple different groups, entrepreneurs, disrupted status quo companies, all of whom have a vague sense that the world is changing beneath their feet…but are unsure what’s going on and how to address it. These folks have a knowing that they need:

• A multi-author, workflow-enabled, content management system
• A blog to engage with their constituents, be transparent and open themselves
• Forums to engage, support and augment interactions with their customers and learn from online discussions
• Ecommerce that facilitates digital downloading of their intellectual capital instead of just the buying and shipping of atoms in boxes
• Collaboration for project/task management, shared calendar, and more.

“But wait!” you say. “There are open source and Web 2.0 offerings that meet those needs.” Yeah…but stop into any office building and ask a small, ten person firm what they have for a Web asset and I’ll bet you find their internet presence woefully inadequate.

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