DoubleDutch's Hyve-- Using a Conference Version as aStalking Horse to Win Corporate Accounts

A geolocation-based services provider is taking bold steps to expand its presence and could redefine an emerging market with a suite of new products

The company, DoubleDutch is the San Francisco provider of a the Hyve software suite, which was first launched at Demo 2010. Hyve has found a home among attendees of high end conferences such as T.E.D. and at annual sales meetings of corporations with large field sales forces or other types of remote workers.

Hyve added seven cloud-based mobile applications this week. The new applications run in a private cloud environment and are designed to give field and their home office supervisors workers access to comprehensive client information on-site.

Among a growing field of emerging enterprise applications designed to be used on smart phones, Hyve’s ability to create and complete tasks through the use of objects appears to be unique.

A Hyve object can be anything, from a organizational process or report, to blogs or photos, Double Dutch’s CEO and founder, Lawrence Coburn noted.

Another feature of Hyve’s location-aware enterprise are of analytical tools that let professionals in the field and their supervisors quantify the time and effort they spend with individual customers.

Hyve has at least one formidable competitor that‘s already set a high bar in the enterprise space , Salesforce.com. It also will compete with the geolocation site, Square.

What’s set Hyve apart from other startups is that on day of announcement it already had large corporate clients-- notably Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems, Mr. Coburn said.

In March DoubleDutch pulled in a $1.2 million seed round- based in a large part on the company’s winning HP and Cisco seats and phones.

But what sets DoubleDutch and Hyve apart from other companies in this space is its use of a conference version of the product as a marketing stalking horse to get its technology in front of opinion leaders and decision makers.

Unlike virtually all companies in this new category, DoubleDutch isn’t blinded by loyalty to Apple or Google.

The companies software toolset can be used to create objects that can be used on smartphones running Research in Motion’s Blackberry operating system and Palm’s WebOS, according to Mr. Coburn --Jim Forbes on 06/21/2011.