Over the past few months, Quickoffice attended several key industry conferences: GigaOm Roadmap and GigaOm Net:Work. GigaOm Roadmap highlighted emerging ideas and market opportunities in today’s connected world. We met influential technology leaders and learned about the future of connectivity and its impact on consumers. Drew Houston from Dropbox and John Markoff from The New York Times both spoke at the event on the advancements in the cloud, mobile and home markets. Dropbox has already hit 45 million users and it continues to grow, as more consumers become comfortable with storing and accessing their digital content in the cloud. John Markoff had an interesting discussion with Tony Fadell, the founder and CEO at Nest Labs, who also conceived the iPod. If you missed the numerous stories this year on Nest Labs, Tony has revolutionized the energy industry with a new connected, intelligent thermostat. It never ceases to amaze me how much technology now permeates into every part of our society. Before, one may have never been able to make a connection between the digital music industry and home energy market, but technology has changed the rules.

As a sponsor at the inaugural year of Roadmap, we felt the conference was a success, as GigaOm continues to expand their event calendar, capturing emerging trends in the technology space. We are truly more connected than ever before. At Quickoffice, we are capitalizing on the opportunities this offers us to continue expanding our feature set.

On the same token, at GigaOm Net:Work, we learned more about how work is being transformed, via connectivity and the web. At this event, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel, alongside Soonr, YouSendIt and Mavenlink CEOs. Our GigaOm Pro analyst and moderator Stowe Boyd posted an interesting article prior to our roundtable that looked at the deluge of streamed, unstructured data. He coins the term ‘work media’ to describe the new generation of business tools that are social and enable greater collaboration, but are oriented toward getting work done. Work media is very fluid, much like social media, and presents new opportunities and challenges to the market.

As a result, Stowe foresees a new era in business software, with new players developing solutions to help stream information, but also integrate and interact across these new tools. He noted that vendors in this space are focusing on specific market needs, but believes standards will need to be developed at some point. On the panel, we discussed the growing number of information silos and how one can begin to grapple and address this issue with new tools and strategies. While there is still more development to be made in this arena, I do foresee the cloud and mobile playing vital roles, helping to gather and bring information to people anywhere and anytime they want it. This idea is one of the driving factors behind our ongoing integration of cloud capabilities within our mobile Office suite. Lastly, we also had the opportunity to join our friend Todd Barr, CMO at Alfresco, in a workshop that focused on how to best synchronize your tablets, content and workforce in the enterprise. 

Both of these events provided us the opportunity to network alongside relevant technology reporters, analysts and corporate leaders, in addition to learn from other influential players in the industry. While I hope my speakership was educational for attendees, I can also verify that I learned a great deal in regard to the connected workplace from those around me. At Quickoffice, we’ll take what we heard at these events and apply it to our own strategic app development approach to improve the connectivity of our employees and mobile office applications.

What are your thoughts around the connected workplace?