Product: HyperOffice

Key developer: Drew Morris

In IT, ideas never truly die. They tend to come back, but in a new form. Take, for example, Rockville, Md.-based HyperOffice, which began as a part of the services offered by WebOS, a dot-com that dissolved in 2001. But it wasn't dead yet. The next year, several investors, including Drew Morris, the initial architect and primary developer of HyperOffice at WebOS, resurrected the concept as its own company. The difference is that WebOS targeted individual users, while HyperOffice targets businesses of up to 500 employees.

HyperOffice provides users with a hosted office environment, including e-mail, document management, calendar, project management and collaboration tools, at a cost of around US$7 per user per month. End users still have their own desktop applications; the company doesn't have to purchase and support a server and collaboration software. It can be customized to incorporate links to other software.

"In the second inception of HyperOffice, the product was refined to allow corporate users to provide all the necessary collaboration and communication technologies they need for multiple types of stakeholders, including employees, customers, contractors and partners," says Morris, HyperOffice's chief technology officer.