Etelos iPhone application for Office2.0

Some quick thoughts on the very nice platform that Etelos has provided for Office 2.0:

• The profile asks for our blog RSS, but automatically puts an http:// in front of it, rendering it useless.
• If the blog RSS can be fixed, where can we watch everybody liveblogging during the conference?
• The business card replacement is absolutely marvelous. Yesterday, at the Unconference, I flinched every time I had to exchange business cards. However… where can I see a list of the people to whom I have sent my information? Edit: within a couple of hours, Etelos solved this.

Office 2.0 Unconference – continued

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.

Office 2.0 Unconference

Back from the Office 2.0 Unconference and opening cocktail.

The Unconference was extremely rich in content and people met. A number of people suggested it takes a day or so to digest the discussions. So I will be heeding their advice and waiting until tomorrow to post more details about it.

In San Francisco for Office 2.0

I have just arrived in San Francisco; the next three days I’ll be participating in the Office 2.0 conference. To be exact, in the Unconference for the first day.

I’ll follow up with some thoughts for the panel discussion I’ll be participating in: Culture and Technology.

If anyone else is participating and wants to meetup, let me know at serrin@hivetalk.info, +1 626 807 8269, or http://twitter.com/Serrin. At about 500 participants, it’s certainly going to be an exciting event.