by Brian Solis

I recently spoke to a highly visible and influential tech blogger who observed that today’s online applications are reminiscent of the desktop experience surrounding Windows 95. With hosted apps and SaaS gaining traction within business, this sentiment is now shared by many.

Simply stated, we sacrifice functionality, performance, and aesthetics in many cases to have tether-free access to our apps from any computer at any time – as long as there’s a Web connection.

This is temporary. Innovation is constant and online applications will scale to meet our expectations and demands.

With that said, Google Docs has rolled out a Google Docs Gadget for Google Desktop.

The Docs Gadget allows you to search and open your Google documents right from the desktop. The team has also added drag-and-drop uploading for documents – individually or in bulk.

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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.

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by Brian Solis

The Office 2.0 Conference opens its doors in San Francisco next week I’ll be attending the event from the opening reception to the very last panel – along with The Bub TV crew.

Now in its third year, this is one of the few conferences that I genuinely look forward to. I’m an avid enthusiast of online workflow applications and mashups and not only do I have the opportunity to see what’s new and what’s next, I also can meet the creators as well as thought leaders who are forging the next landscape for collboration and productivity.

Visit the Office 2.0 site for the full agenda.

Paid attendees will receive the new HP Mini-Note UMPC. Register here.

Speakers include:

In memory of Marc Orchant.

Visit my albums on flickr for pictures from the event last year.

Opening Reception

Day One

UPDATE: Office 2.0 is seeking last-minute sponsors to help ends meet. Please contact Ismael Ghalimi directly.

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by Michelle Lentz

This week, NPR has been running a series on Morning Edition on The Email Age. Two of the pieces, in particular, caught my fancy.

You see, I lived in Outlook. My whole world is loaded into the contacts, email, tasks and calendar. It’s sad really. This week I switched to a Mac and decided to leave the comforts of Microsoft and use Mail.app. It was a fight, but I won by customizing Mail pretty in-depth.  Why was it so important? Because I get hundreds of emails a day from multiple email accounts. It’s ridiculous at times. And I’m not the only one. According to a Radicati Group white paper, the number of email users world wide is approaching two billion. In 2006, the average corporate email user received 126 email messages per day – up 55% from 2003! The Radicati Group estimates that if email traffic continues this trend, the average user will spend 41% of their time managing email by 2009.  That is, in my opinion, a lot of wasted time.

So how do we cope with this? The NPR series brought up two interesting theories: Email Free Days, and Seriosity Attent.

Email Free Fridays have been implemented in several large organizations (US Cellular was spotlighted in the article). Imagine a day at work that is free from internal email. If you want to discuss an idea, set up a meeting, or get an answer, you need to either pick up the phone or go find your co-worker. I rather like this idea. But it doesn’t eliminate email entirely for the day. For instance, if my husband’s advertising agency implemented this, it wouldn’t help him too much – he’d still be deluged by  emails from his clients. Just because company A has email free Fridays doesn’t mean it applies to companies B-Z. But it’s a nice thought and would serve, I would think, to foster communication internally and at least slightly cut down on email for a day.

Attent is a new email productivity tool by Seriosity.  This is a really interesting tool. Attent turns email into its own economy using Serios (think dollars). Each week you are given a set number of Serios. For this example, we’ll use 300. For each email you send, you must attach at least 1 Serio. If it’s a really important email, you might attach 50 Serios; for a less important email, you might attach 5 Serios. In this way, you are taking the time to consider each email you compose and deciding if it’s worth the email or might be just as easily expressed in a phone call or Face to Face communication. Similarly, the person receiving the email can instantly judge whether it is important and should be acted on right away (50 Serios) or if it is something that can wait until later (5 Serios). Like Email Free Fridays, this only will work internally or with other folks who are using Attent.

Attent hosts all of the Serio Accounting information (your Serio Bank Account) on their servers, and all that is required is a plug-in for the email king of them all – Outlook. It’s an interesting experiment. I like that it forces you to consider – is this really worth an email? Watch a Flash demo of Seriosity Attent.

In order to manage my chaotic email, I’ve installed MailTags, MsgFiler, YAI, and more. It doesn’t control the sheer number of incoming messages, but at least it helps me organize them and stay semi-productive. How do you control and organize your emails? Would your company be perfect for something like Email Free days or Seriosity Attent?

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.