Post and video by Miiko Mentz

Today concludes our video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo with a final interview with IBM. Of course IBM is certainly not the first company you think of when you think Web 2.0, but like last year’s Web 2.0 Expo, the show was filled with many startups and sprinkled with a few big players. This year’s big companies were IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and a few others. And much of the buzz was around ‘doing more with less’ through collaboration and cloud computing.

Cloud computing is all the rage these days and IBM is trying to get in on the action. At the end of last month, IBM announced an initiative dubbed “Open Cloud Manifesto” that calls for open standards to promote cloud computing. There’s a host of companies backing the manifesto, but oddly, the pioneers and leaders in cloud computing are absent.

According to Reuters, Amazon is reviewing the plan, Google has decided not to support it and Salesforce.com hasn’t publicly spoken on the matter yet. Also, Microsoft has publicly criticized IBM’s efforts.

On a lighter note, Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Kathy M. Mandelstein, marketing director at IBM Software Group, IBM Rational Software and WW Programs, Events and Web, about cloud computing, LotusLive, and Rational AppScan. IBM’s overall theme at Web 2.0 Expo was “Smart Work” and helping people and businesses to work smarter through collaboration and collective intelligence. Hear what Mandelstein had to say:

In addition to IBM, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed any of our interviews from earlier this week, check them out: ooVoo, MindTouch, Topix, chi.mp, and our Web 2.0 Expo highlight reel.

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

In the spirit of Che Guevara, MindTouch rallied the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo last week with its social enterprise collaboration revolution. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell caught up with the MindTouch team to learn about the newly launched MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities, and a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities.

MindTouch Marketing Manager Sarah Carr explains how MindTouch is revolutionizing the way people and businesses collaborate using MindTouch’s open source enterprise collaboration platform; and MindTouch Sales Engineer Mike Diliberto talks about the new MindTouch 2009. Check it out:

In addition to MindTouch, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed yesterday’s video, watch our interview with ooVoo and our highlight reel. Stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with Topix.

Disclosure: In addition to being a contributor to Bubblicious, I also work at FutureWorks where one of my clients is MindTouch, which I’ve chosen to include in my coverage of Web 2.0 Expo due to them being an exhibitor and fitting the focus of our coverage.

by Michelle Lentz

I’m a social media consultant but really, in Cincinnati, that doesn’t get me a lot of traction at the moment. So my bread and butter is instructional design and technical writing. It’s boring, but it helps pay the bills. In the process of technical documentation, I may get two or three versions of the same document, edited by developers, SMEs, and overzealous copyeditors. I then have to incorporate all those changes into my master document. In the past, that’s involved some hard copies, where I check things off as I integrate the changes.

It looks like that’s all about to change. TextFlow by Nordic River made some news early last summer, but they’ve released their Adobe Air application in a new beta, and it looks pretty awesome. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll be taking it for a test run in early January when I expect a documentation nightmare to appear on my desk.

TextFlow allows you to drag different versions of a document into their app. It will merge them, highlighting the differences, and allow you to show the changes, hide them, and integrate them. From the perspective of a technical writer, this is a real timesaver. They have a fantastic (but non embeddable) demo video on their site, but here’s a great video from C|Net’s Josh Lowensohn demonstrating the product.

__
Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

words and pictures by Brian Solis

Office 2.0 is so much more than just another ____(insert word) 2.0 conference. Now in its third year, Office 2.0 mastermind Ismael Ghalimi has created the official event that is documenting the migration towards an entirely new infrastructure of cloud-based business applications, content, and data.

Office 2.0 = the future of enhanced interpersonal, cross team, and business-to-business productivity and collaboration.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

Robert Scoble

A view from above

Chris Yeh

Guillaume Cohen of Veodia

Mindtouch Deki

Jive Software

Stowe Boyd

Vyew

ZOHO

Anthony Ha from VentureBeat

This has to be the world’s smallest notebook (UMPC)

Yuuguu

Pictures from the Opening Reception:

Susan Scrupski

Michael McDerment of FreshBooks and Gil Heiman of Clarizen

Gabe Rivera of Techmeme

Tom Foremski and Shel Israel

Bryan Thatcher of Empressr

David Spark

For additional pictures from Office 2.0, please visit my Office 2.0 album on flickr.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

by Michelle Lentz

DocStoc, an easy place to store and share your online documents, announced DocStoc MyDocs and DocStoc Sync.

With the MyDocs feature, you can now create a My Documents folder, like on your PC or even your Mac, in an online location. All of your documents, including DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDF can be stored in MyDocs and accessed anywhere you have Internet access. Your documents can also be marked as public or as private.

Docstoc Sync is a downloadable application that automatically syncs documents from your computer to Docstoc MyDocs. This is a great way to keep your My Documents folder synced between your desktop and the cloud.

Before these additions, DocStoc was a great way to upload and collaborate on documents. With the addition of these new features, DocStoc is now a suite of online collaborative tools and document storage.

__

Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.