IdeaPlane thinks it has a new take on the enterprise social network

Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Monday, December 19th, 2011

IdeaPlane is a new “enterprise social network” platform set up by James Fabricant, one of the founding team behind MySpace International. But this is no flaky platform for young bands as MySpace was. Aiming at highly regulated industries, it’s launching with two top-ten global investment banks as founding clients, though these remain unnamed, so there’s no way of confirming that.

Launching out of the UK, Ideaplane is not an, er, new idea. Social networks for enterprises have been around for some time. Take a look at Trampoline Systems for instance. What’s potentially different is this focus on highly regulated industries, like finance.

It remains to be seen whether it will be make much of an incursion into the space, but we’ll be watching it with interest.