Office 2.0 Conference September 3-5
I've attended every Office 2.0 conference so far and found it to be a fascinating cutting edge experience, and a source of both great contacts and intriguing and useful information.
Office 2.0 is a collective experiment organized every year in San Francisco, CA and aimed at discovering the future of online productivity & collaboration. It is a unique gathering of visionaries, thought leaders, and customers using innovative online services for getting things done at the office, at home, and on the go.
Last year I spoke on an enterprise collaboration panel and also organized PlayStation 3's running Firefox on Sony Plasma TV screens. Plug a keyboard and mouse into a PS3 and you have a pretty good cloud computing home workstation - we had the session schedule up and running in this format. All pretty cutting edge in the spirit of this conference which is a personal favorite of mine.
Last year I attended as Senior Manager of the Sony PlayStation game developer's internal collaboration space, which means you get buttonholed every ten yards by badge spotters anxious to tell you how much they love PlayStation and happen to have a unique solution to your every need. (That sounds harsh - I actually met a lot of great people last year and learnt a lot).
Ismael Ghalimi, globe trotting CEO of Intalio and uber connected entrepreneur, is the mind behind this conference. The first year all event info came on an ipod, last year attendees received an iphone (or a PS3 if they already had an iphone). This year the device is to be either an The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC or a Gigabyte M528 running Linux.
The concept is to use cutting edge technology, and SwissCom are again providing stellar conference wifi so these devices will be a major part of back channel interaction by attendees while those on stage (including me) speak.
There is a terrific set of speakers, including keynotes from David Allen of GTD (Getting Things Done), and Dr Sukh Grewal, manager of GE's supportcentral collaboration environment. I'm helping organize this year so if you're attending please come and say hello! There will be a full website up here very shortly with the full list of sessions - we are still finalizing speakers. Everyone involved in organizing are already extremely busy with other projects but rest assured this will be an extremely worthwhile experience!
Today is the last day to benefit from the early-bird rate ($1,195 vs. $1,495), so make sure to register now and to book your hotel room promptly if you want to save some money...