Yesterday, I had the great privilege of speaking at the Longworth Ventures Annual Conference.

I spoke on a panel moderated by Dr. Andrew McAfee, and including fellow Enterprise Irregulars Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalimi and Zoli Erdos.

Bill Raduchel, former CTO for AOL/Time Warner and CIO at Sun kicked things off with a really interesting talk about the future of technology as we see a combination of information in mediums ranging from TV to mobile.   Bill concluded with the assertion that “Navigiation is the Killer App”.   He means this very broadly, as in tools to connect information from disparate source.   Seen in this light, Google could be considered a navigation tool.

Navigation is critical, but I disagree with Bill about it being the killer app.   Instead, I believe that Participation is the Killer App.

Whether it is end user participation in content driven conversations on blogs and wikis, or end user developed applications, mash-ups and widgets, I think that it is participation that key difference between Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 1.0

If participation is the key differentiator, then, as Dayna Grayson, a VC with North Bridge Venture Partners put it to me this morning , the issue becomes “do you have a platform that enables many to many participation?”   For example, MovableType and WordPress began as one to many tools.   Their many to many capabilities are limited.   MT has some many-to-many tools in their Enterprise edition, and WordPress MU is capable of it.   However, the admin experience is very different when compared with tools that were designed with many-to-many functionality from the ground up, including iUpload and SocialText.

Quick Notes:

• Paul Margolis, who is a partner with Longworth Ventures, says that a key differentiator in the Enterprise 2.0 space is who buys the product.   Paul’s suggestion is simple: “sell to the individual in the enterprise; not to IT”
• Read McAfee’s 9X post.   Very interesting description on the challenge for adoption.