Solid first day at the Office 2.0 show. The event is super swanky even compared to some of the more exclusive events I go to: the St Regis isn’t within hailing distance of cheap, the conference gift was an iPod Nano, and there are huge Macs all over the place. But in between the glitz it seems that Ismael has put together a lively and vibrant conference.
Because Frontier sold out their early morning flight, I didn’t get in until about 10, but was at the St Regis 16 minutes later (seriously) thanks to the scariest cabbie ever. Because of that I missed Senor Farber’s keynote Q&A with Esther Dyson, but Bob’s got us covered there.
I’ll have more on the actual content in a follow up post, but in general the sessions have been good. The crowd includes a few of the usual suspects, and it’s been good to catch up w/ the likes of Bob, the aforementioned Mr. Farber, Peter Yared, and – in about a half hour – Steve Gillmor. But it’s also a much different mix than the folks I usually see; there are so many small companies here that one of the presenters this morning candidly admitted that he “had no idea what to do” with his company, and that he was open to any and all advice. Transparency indeed.
Otherwise, there’ve been a few interesting announcements; the folks from Google, for instance, officially launched Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formerly the separate Writely and Google Spreadsheets offerings) which was interesting even though the news actually broke last night, and Joyent’s David Young dropped their new offering Jill’s Team on the audience.
Only negatives so far for me are:
- Wireless:
I even tried booting into Windows to make sure it wasn’t a flaky Linux driver problem, but I never did manage to get connected. I was forced as a result to patch through the EDGE/UMTS connection on the phone which was minimally acceptable downstairs, and completely non-responsive up. Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow. - Panel Structure:
The panels here have been of decent value, but I’m not a fan of the “let the panelists present for several minutes” nor the moderator dominated Q&A. I’m biased, because I’ve more or less abandoned that approach myself, preferring to let the audience drive the bulk of the panel sessions I sit on, but I do think the structure utilized in two panels I attended this afternoon acts as a break of interactivity. Could just be me, though.
Anyhow, as you’ll see in my reaction piece, the conference is perhaps raising as many or more questions than it’s answering, but that doesn’t surprise me. First because the direction and meaning of Office 2.0 is nebulous at the present time, but also because it’s got immense potential – in my view.
In the meantime, if any of you are unhealthily real time in your blog reading habits, I’m headed over to the Thirsty Bear in about 20 minutes to meet Mr. Gillmor, and you are all obviously welcome.
