Office 2.0: Booming!

I'm spending most of my Thursday and Friday at Office 2.0, a conference here in San Francisco on the future of Web-based productivity.

Last year's show was a bustling success. This one puts that one to shame, with most of both days filled with multiple tracks of panel discussions and demos, mostly involving dozens of very small companies doing very interesting things.

Office 2.0 is the right show in the right place at the right time: There haven't been so many new productivity tools out there since the golden age of PC software back in the 1980s. How many of these companies will make it is anyone's guess--not all of them have figured out how to make money--but I admire their creativity, and we'll cover a bunch of their wares in various places around PCW.

This morning, conference organizer Ismael Ghalimi, who says he's sworn off using desktop software except for Apple's iWork, explained how the conference was organized and run almost entirely without paper. (The one exception: Some sponsors paid their fees with paper checks.) Ghalimi uses Web-based services like Zoho, ThinkFree, and SmartSheet to plan and run the show.

As part of the conference's paper-free initiative, the admission price included an iPhone: Instead of getting a printed schedule and other dead-tree materials, we all have access to a Web-based iPhone app developed by Etelos. (Journalists like me, who get free press passes, don't get the phone; I brought PCW's iPhone with me.) The app is pretty slick, but it does point out a major issue with phone-based productivity tools: Most of the people at the conference probably already had Internet-connected phones, but any Web-based applications that would have worked on all of them would have been pretty crude.

You know this stuff is pretty immature when the conference has to provide pricey new phones in order to avoid handing out cheap paper schedules. (And honestly, while I admire Ghalimi's passion, I kinda think a pocket-sized printed agenda would have been handy in ways no electronic one could be.)

At the moment, Ghalimi is talking about his plans for next year's conference--which he says involve holding a competition to design a cheap and useful mobile device which they can distribute to all conference attendees, since he says that no current device (including the iPhone) really fits the bill...

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