Office 2.0 Conference

Announcement: Office 2.0 Conference 2009 Registration Open

Office 2.0 Conference 2009

September 21-23, 2009

St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco ( Book)

125 Third Street, San Francisco, California 94103 ( Map)

 

The Office 2.0 Conference 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.

 

Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governments , and top 100 universities as possible. Here are quotes from past attendees.

 

Attendee Registration | Sponsorship |  Contact

Timeline

  • September 8, 2008: Registration System and Sponsorship Packages
  • November 3, 2008: Call for Speakers
  • December 31, 2008: Last Early Bird Registrations and Sponsorships
  • May 4, 2009: Final Speaker Selection
  • September 21, 2009: Unconference
  • September 22-23, 2009: Conference

Attendee Quotes

 
 
 

More attendee quotes

 

Online Attendees

Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:

 

Recent Blog Posts

AJ

Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. Meditation often involves turning attention to a single point of reference. Buddhist meditation techniques can be just as effective at combating depression as medication, a study has found.

 

The treatment, known as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), helps people focus on the present instead of dwelling on the past or planning the future. Fifteen months after an eight-week trial, 47 per cent of people with long-term depression who underwent the therapy suffered a relapse, compared to 60 per cent of those taking anti-depressant drugs.

 

Professor Willem Kuyken, from the Mood Disorders Centre at the University of Exeter, said MBCT could shorten NHS waiting lists for psychological therapies. He said:

 

'Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that's because they tend to work. 'But, while they're very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse.

 

'MBCT takes a different approach - it teaches people skills for life. What we have shown is that when people work at it, these skills for life help keep people well. 'Our results suggest MBCT may be a viable alternative for some of the 3.5 million people in the UK known to be suffering from this debilitating condition.' He said the therapy is less costly than other treatments because one psychologist could treat many people.

 

Di Cowan, 53, of Sampford Peverell, East Devon, took anti-depressants for more than 15 years before undergoing the group psychology. The retired maths teacher now practises meditation techniques four of five times a week.

 

He said: 'It's helped me immensely. It's given me the ability to come up against something that would have previously thrown me, think it through, come up with a solution and then move on.

 

'It's helped me deal with recurrent thoughts. My view of the world has changed and I look at life in a new light. I'm much more cheerful and positive. Other people noticed a change.

 

For more details on Meditation 'as effective as medication' in treating depression visit www.halfvalue.com  and www.halfvalue.co.uk For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com. Also visit our partner sites www.shoppingsolow.com , www.findcollegesindia.com , www.findhotelsindia.com and www.findlawindia.com

0 Comments Permalink
AJ

NEW YORK - MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. MySpace users with mobile phones are about to find out if they can walk and watch TV at the same time.

 

On Wednesday, News Corp's online social network will make video clips from its members' pages available for viewing on mobile devices including the BlackBerry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95 and Samsung Instinct. Members will be able to look at video on their own homepages as well as friends' pages.

 

They also will be able to view professionally produced video from TMZ, the celebrity news and gossip website owned by Time Warner Inc; the National Hockey League; National Geographic magazine; satirical newspaper The Onion and others.

 

The free service will be supported by advertising. MySpace and many other companies are trying to exploit the small but growing mobile advertising market. MySpace declined to comment on the cost of the project or how much money it would make them.

 

"These are the big guys doing it, and they're going to make some noise about it," said David Card, a media analyst at Forrester Research who called it a medium-sized deal in terms of significance. "Mobile is one of those things where people keep saying, 'Is next year going to be the year of mobile'?"

 

MySpace video will be sent, or "streamed," from the social network's pages rather than downloaded onto mobile phones. For this reason, the clips will not be available on Apple Inc's iPhone, which runs downloaded video. MySpace, one of the world's largest online social networks, plans to support mobile video downloads in the future, a spokeswoman said.

 

MySpace's growth strategy includes developing mobile phone applications, as well as international markets and building up its music service. Acquisitions are central to this strategy, Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe told the Reuters Media Summit on Monday.

 

The company will work with technology from a company called RipCode to make video available on mobile handsets that have different technical specifications for how they handle video. RipCode also will allow MySpace users to stop having to save their video clips in different formats, something that it said would save hardware, energy and storage resources.

 

For more details on MySpace delivers video to mobile phones visit www.halfvalue.com  and www.halfvalue.co.uk For more information on books visit www.Lookbookstores.com. Also visit our partner site www.dealsolow.com

0 Comments Permalink
David H. Deans

There's a new term in the managed services space -- Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and it's an obvious extension of the SaaS model. Desktone is a company that provides DaaS capabilities to service providers. Its customers, according to CEO Harry Ruda, currently include Verizon and Softbank Telecom.

 

Ruda characterizes DaaS as a service whereby users obtain their computing services through a remote connection over a network. The physical compute power, if you will, is delivered through a service provider and paid for on some usage basis.

 

In other words, users can access operating system and applications through a completely hosted system, and the service provider would be responsible at the back-end for storing data, upgrading applications, updating virus protection, among other activities.

 

Computing Power of a Utility
It relies on the whole concept of utility computing, in which compute power is delivered the same way electricity is -- when you want it in a metered fashion. DaaS proponents even promise that their service, like electricity, is instant-on, because there's no booting of an operating system.

 

I'm skeptical about a technology that even its proponents admit doesn't work well over wireless connections, when you consider that laptops now outsell desktops because of their ability to work even when users are disconnected.

 

However, proponents insist that by handing management of PC resources over to a service provider, companies of almost any size can cut maintenance and technical support costs, as well as increase security because the service provider can focus more on patches and virus protection.

 

Another pioneer in this new category, MokaFive offers a DaaS subscription service for $100 per user per year that uses a virtual machine, which they describe as "centrally managed but locally executed."

 

That means end-users can choose from among any number of devices -- laptops, Macintoshes, smartphones, tablets -- and have corporate data protected, but can still use their chosen device for other applications or personal information.

 

Evolution is Easier than a Revolution
The arguments and variations of DaaS go on and on. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the DaaS model may be the fact that it requires extensive re-thinking of one's infrastructure -- either by replacing desktop computers with disk-less computers or significantly upgrading the network bandwidth, or both.

 

In contrast to DaaS, most of the current "fill-in-the-blank" as a Service models have been tried and proven, because they're a logical evolution from existing operational models. My skepticism remains intact.

 

Source: Business Technology Roundtable

0 Comments Permalink Tags: daas, desktop, as, a, service, managed, cloud, computing, hosted, application
Jason M. Lemkin

It is an understatement to say how rapidly things have changed in the global economy in the past 60 days.  In the last post on the blog, we discussed the impact of AIG and Lehman on the enterprise buyers.  Now, those seem like the good old days, with even Google now having lost confidence in its ability to execute in the short term.

 

But the global recession will actually truly and finally focus the role of Office 2.0 technologies.  An early thesis was that the value proposition around Office 2.0 was a combination of (1) free and/or dirt cheap and (2) collaboration.  Free actually is harder to give away in a down market.  The reason being that any product, even free, requires an investment to understand a new business process, and a new product.  When businesses of all size are struggling to make their plans, there isn't much incentive to experiment, and free isn't enough to make up for any perceived distraction from protecting the core business.

 

Collaboration per se, while core to the Office 2.0 thesis, loses a huge portion of its perceived value in a downturn.  Much of the boom in SaaS, Office 2.0 and webservices in 2007 and 1h '08 was around improving efficiencies in scaling organizations.  When organizations instead shrink, communication is probably actually even more important -- but investment in communication whose ROI is tied to faciliatating growth is essentially dead.

 

So where does that leave Office 2.0?  In an extremely interesting place that was almost unthinkable in 2006 (where many saw it almost as a joke or a hobby for webheads). Office 2.0 in Q4 '08 and 2009 is and will be about (x) increasing and (y) protecting revenue.  That is the only place money, and effort, will be spent.  We're seeing this firsthand at EchoSign, where paid customers are accelerating -- not to bring order to their business processes (the 2007/1H '08 theme), but rather, to protect revenue, to close that ever-rarer beast, the ready-to-buy customer, with an electronic signature before they change their mind.  I would expect our friends at Freshbooks for example are seeing a similar trend.

 

Forget about cost savings from Office 2.0.  Instead, the Office 2.0 that leaders have revenue-centric ROI that can be measured instantly, or in days, will thrive.

0 Comments Permalink
Jason M. Lemkin

This year's theme of taking Office 2.0 into the enterprise was a good and timely once with terrific speakers and case studies.  However, I wonder if the theme will be as on point in 2009.  With HP laying off 25,000+, Dell and others forecasting large IT cutbacks, and the implosion of the largest buyers of IT software, financial services ... I would posit the hope for Office 2.0 2009 is the SMB.  With the VSB the target of 2006; the early adopters for 2007; and the enterprise for 2008, hopefully 2009 will be the time for the traditional laggards, the overworked and underresourced SMBs, to adopt Office 2.0 more rapidly.  I believe we are seeing a very rapid and fundamental shift in Enterprise 2.0 buying habits from "bring it inhouse now, it's dirt cheap and great and works now not later" to more traditional ROI analyses with much longer sales cycle and cost justifications.  Combined with IT spend freezes spreading across companies as I type, the enterprise boost for Office 2.0 may prove to be just that -- a boost but not the long term driver of adoption and change.

1 Comments 0 References Permalink
Francois Ragnet

During the panel, a number of very interesting questions were raised. where does my document end up in the cloud? Can I trust the infrastructure to hold it?

 

Among the topics for discussion that I believe we only scratched the surface, were:

  • Document 2.0 and legal / preservation constraints

 

  • Document 2.0 and Information Overload

 

  • Enterprise adoption of Document 2.0 and barriers

 

  • Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0

 

 

If there is interest, we could continue the discussion here, possibly on the Office 2.0 panel page. Please reply on this message (unless we can use some kind of voting capability?) to let me know.

 

- Francois

1 Comments 0 References Permalink
Ismael Chang Ghalimi

One of the many processes we would like to improve for next year's Office 2.0 Conference is the exchange of contact information among participants. We're trying to make it paper-less, without requiring any custom software to be installed on the mobile devices used by attendees. After looking at many different options, we believe that 2D code scanning is the best one. Here is the scenario:

 

A 2D barcode (DataMatrix Code, EZcode, QR Code, or similar) is printed on all attendee badges. Attendee A and Attendee B are both registered on the office20.com community website. Their respective profiles contains all the information usually found in a vcard. Attendee A wants to get Attendee B's contact information. Attendee A takes a picture of Attendee B's badge with her camera phone, and sends it as an email attachment to id@office20.com. A reply email is automatically sent back to Attendee A with Attendee B's vcard. Attendee A can also log on to the office20.com community site and download all her vcards at a later date.

 

In order to implement such as scenarion, we're currently looking at services like ScanLife and scanR. If you know others that we should take a look at, let us know.

6 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: conference, contact, vcard
Ismael Chang Ghalimi

The Office 2.0 Conference 2008 is over now, and we've received a lot of feedback. Overall, the conference was a great success, and its content has significantly improved from last year. Yet many attendees pointed out that putting the show together in less than two months is making it very difficult for a lot of people to participate, either as attendees or sponsors. As a result, we've decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition.

 

The location remains the same, dates are set to September 21-23, 2009 (Monday through Wednesday), registration is open ($1,495 until December 31st, 2008), and we will keep our tradition of giving away a mobile device to every paying attendee. Also, we have made some changes to our sponsorship packages in order to simplify things, and make sure that early-stage companies get proper representation. Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governments, and top 100 universities as possible.

 

This year, we got 500 registrations, 450 of which happened once the conference's website was released, less than a month before the event took place. For next year, the website is already online, more than a year before the opening keynote, so we expect to sell out quite early. As a result, we will reduce the number of press passes down to 50, and the number of free guest passes down to zero, so make sure to register early if you want to guarantee your spot at the event (the hotel cannot accomodate more than 750 people). The same is true for sponsors. We look forward to meeting you again in San Francisco next year.

 

For reference purposes, the video recordings for all 2008 sessions are now available from the agenda.

 

Update: GE (#12 on Fortune's Global 500 list) just confirmed that they will come back next year.

3 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: o209

Platinum Sponsor

Gold Sponsors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silver Sponsors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronze Sponsors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VC Sponsors

Gear Sponsors

 

 

Media Sponsors

 

 

Copyright Notice

Copyright © Monolab, Inc. 2008