Online customer interaction is crucial in the Web 2.0 world. Here's how two tech firms stole the lead on the competition.

For our Britain’s Digital Elite awards, Real Business partnered with Microsoft to scour the land looking for firms that are using technology to gain a competitive edge over their rivals and become masters of execution.

We spent months looking for companies who stand out not because of what they do, but the way that they do it. Four judges – including two entrepreneurs who made their names using technology to shake up industries – sifted through the deluge of entries in ten different categories.

Earlier this week, we announced that the turbo-charged widget Zebtab had been crowned the winner of the Customer Interaction category. Here we reveal the two other finalists...

Highly Commended: Moo
Even your gran’s probably got a digital camera. You can’t go to a party, school play or, if you’re an England cricketer, the local strip joint without flash bulbs going off. But what to do with the pics? Moo.com prints your snaps onto stickers, business cards and dinky little minicards.

Being a Web 2.0 sort of firm, Moo allows you to do all the ordering over the internet. To
ensure the ordering process is part of the fun, Moo has created applications within Flickr, Habbo Hotels and Second Life so you can order pictures of your avatar as well as normal snaps. And extra functionality means you can insert your own speech
bubbles into photos â“ all part of Moo’s strategy to get close to the user as much
as possible so that established rivals such as Boots and Prontaprint don’t
get a look in.

Highly Commended: Tailgate
Retail websites worry incessantly about drop-out rates. A consumer starts to order, wanders off to make tea or opens a new window to do more product research,
and their basket never gets to the checkout page.

Tailgate’s interactive advertising banners address this problem by letting consumers buy direct from inside the banner. All it takes to buy is a quick bit of form-filling and then two clicks and hey
presto – the deal is done without ever leaving the page the ad is located on.

Tailgate’s patent-pending technology is as secure as any web cart and offers the fastest purchasing experience on the web. “For impulse buys or lowcost purchases, this is extremely convenient,” says judge Simon Hughes. Navman Sat-Navs and Boots are already using Tailgate’s banners to ensure that their online ads are as capable of closing a deal as wooing the customer.

To read more about Zebtab and to watch our video interview with the co-founder Richard Edwards and the CEO Damon Oldcorn, click here.

To read more on how Microsoft's technology can help you cut out the competition and to see the rest of the winners, visit our Focus On... Britain's Digital Elite.

Related tags: moo, tailgates banners, zebtab, flickr, habbo, interactive advertising, britains digital elite, technology in business,