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My current collaboration column for BusinessWeek.com called “Smashing Silos” describes how to reduce Silo Syndrome. You can read the column here.

I spent Tuesday and part of Wednesday at the Dow Jones VentureWire WebVentures conference in San Mateo, California—and collaboration was top of mind for just about everybody attending.

The format of the conference is that CEO’s of startups present to venture capitalists in shotgun-style break-out sessions. This means they have 25 minutes to deliver their message and motivate their audience. VC’s who have either passed up enterprise collaboration investments or folded too soon have renewed interest in the space in light of Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx (see my March 16 post). One VC peppered me with questions about Cisco’s motives as we waited for a presentation to begin. Here are some of the collaboration products/services/companies that caught my eye:

UK-based Trampoline Systems,which just completed a $ 5.8 million financing round, empowers employees to leverage relationships through its SONAR product. SONAR analyzes data in systems including email servers, contact databases and document archives and then maps collaboration and communication patterns and social networks. CEO Charles Armstrong, an ethnographer, is trying to make enterprises more like villages, which often collaborate more effectively than organizations do. By revealing collaboration and communication patterns and the key themes people are interacting about, SONAR makes it easy to find and connect with colleagues who have a relationship to a topic. Breaking down barriers and creating value is what Trampoline is all about.

Qwaq, which I blogged in detail about on March 13, is gaining traction and there was great interest in the company from VC’s at the conference. Also, Fortune 100 enterprises were seeking out CEO Greg Nuyens out in hopes of beta testing Qwaq Forums, the company’s immersive 3D collaboration product. What’s compelling about Qwaq from an investment perspective is the deep talent of the team in highly-scalable, distributed systems and the disruptive nature of the product.

Genius, which has secured $10 million series B financing, is a company founded and run by people with real-time collaboration backgrounds. CEO David Thompson was chief marketing officer of WebEx. VP of Marketing Felicity Wohltman ran marketing for the Breeze product (now Adobe Acrobat Connect) at Macromedia and also worked in marketing at WebEx. The Genius platform provides real-time data to sales and marketing people on the behavior patterns of specific customers and prospects on corporate web sites. Among other features, a salesperson can invite the customer to participate in text chat. The genius of Genius is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales.

Clarizen, which has closed $7 million series A financing, combines project management with collaboration in an on-demand, web-based service. CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski is used to marrying collaboration with other applications. He previously founded SmarTeam, which combined product lifecycle management (PLM) with web-based collaboration. Dassault Systemes bought Smarteam. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I wrote about how Boeing and Toyota use Dassault Systemes tools for near 24-hour global product development.

Serial Entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan is bringing collaboration to online gaming through a company called Winster, which has secured $1.5 million series A financing. The business model is pay-per-play games targeted at middle-aged women. To earn prizes, players collaborate by trading game pieces. As they help each other win games, players chat and develop relationships. Winster is about creating value through collaboration through a beautifully simple interface and business model. In the book, I wrote about realigning organizational recognition and reward systems around collaboration. Jerry has certainly done this in the consumer space.

Social networking has attracted the attention of traditional media, bloggers, venture capitalists and others. But there is confusion about the relationship between social networking and collaboration. As Cisco acquires WebEx for $3.2 billion in cash, let’s clear the air.

Social networking has two components: productivity and play. The term collaboration usually refers to productivity and the creation of value rather than play. However, there are distinct parallels. Whether we’re playing networked multiplayer games or we’re using a networked 3D modeling application to design a car or produce digital effects for movies, we are still collaborating in real time. Whether we’re writing a wiki about chess or microprocessor design, we’re still collaborating asynchronously.

Cisco has already made social networking investments focused on play and consumer communities, namely Tribe.net and Five Across. Acquiring WebEx, with its more than 28,000 customers and over 2 million registered users, plunges Cisco deeper into productivity and business-oriented collaboration. Cisco’s broader strategy is to use the network as a platform for consumer and business applications and services.

Some of the coverage of the acquisition requires clarification. The San Francisco Chronicle called WebEx the “leader in videoconferencing” in a story in today’s business section. Actually, WebEx is the leader in web conferencing or what the company prefers to call the “collaboration services market.” Video can be used as an add-on, but most WebEx conferences are one-to-many presentations without video rather than truly interactive sessions. Now that Cisco will drive WebEx, video will undoubtedly play a bigger role. Clearly, the acquisition sets the stage for Cisco to challenge Microsoft in the collaboration services arena.

There is something missing from the innumerable stories about Toyota that fill the pages of newspapers, business magazines and leadership journals. Rarely do these stories mention one of the key reasons for Toyota’s success: collaboration.

In researching The Culture of Collaboration book, I visited Toyota facilities and explored how collaboration has created substantial value for Toyota and other leading organizations. I had discussions with people throughout the company including Japan-based executives, U.S.-based executives, plant managers, learning and development people, and team members who assemble cars. The book describes how Toyota, among other companies, elegantly extends its collaborative culture through tools including videoconferencing and product lifecycle management.

Mike Morrison, dean of the University of Toyota, provided valuable perspective on many issues including how cross-functional collaboration enhances product development and manufacturing. Mike is quoted in a story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Toyota University Opens Admissions to Outsiders.” Based in Gardena, California, the University trains Toyota employees in its business philosophy and instills principles including nemawashi (consensus-building), kaizen (continuous improvement) and yokoten (moving knowledge around the organization).

One of the University of Toyota’s clients is the Los Angeles Police Department’s jails, according to the story. And what better test of how to turn a command-and-control culture into a collaborative one! The relationship reportedly began after Mike volunteered to help at an officer training meeting. Subsequently, the University of Toyota helped the LA jails team develop breakthrough solutions to several persistent problems.  If police supervisors can become collaborative, perhaps even the most hierarchical, star-oriented corporate culture can shift to the Culture of Collaboration.