Whodini tracks down your company's in-house experts

Instead they want you to type "SIP trunks" into its database of profiles to find the exact person in your company who can best help you out. Whodini's software combs over company emails and calendar entries for frequently-used terms that it at that time attaches to a worker's official profile. People within the company who are looking for someone with a certain type of knowledge can at once search Whodini to see which employees have what areas of expertise attached to their profiles. Whodini director of business development Bjorn Stromsness says the company was the brainchild of COO and cofounder Ani Chaudhuri, who got the idea during working as the director of Web Services Initiatives at HP.

One major red flag with any program just as Whodini, clearly, is privacy. Anytime you have an algorithm that's combing over work emails and calendar appointments for frequently-used phrases you're going to make people at your firm nervous. When all is said and done, your top networking engineer probably doesn't want the rest of the company to know that he's as well the firm's foremost expert in fantasy football strategy to boot to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) troubleshooting.

Whodini began Alpha testing with three small businesses this week and Stromsness says the company is slated to begin beta deployments with larger companies over the at once month, with plans to have the program available for general use in the first quarter of 2012.