Cool Applications at the Office 2.0 Conference

The Office 2.0 Conference is a fun event to attend with many interesting web-based apps to explore. Ismael Ghalimi is a very passionate conference host, who boasts 100% use of web/SaaS-based applications to run the event. Ismael has also taken a firm stand on the use of paper and signage at his conference with nary a pulp-based product in sight. I got quite a few demos while attending the conference today, but a few of them stood out for me.Topping my list is Yuuguu, a mostly web-based, real-time collaboration tool. What makes Yuuguu cool is the way it trivializes web-based desktop sharing. The application supports up to 30 users sharing desktops with the simple click of a button.I was also impressed with a storage application from Egnyte. The designers of Egnyte built a web-based file server, back-up and collaboration application with a key distinction - it looks a lot like a Windows Explorer interface. Their application is simple but elegant.The big buzzword at the conference this year was "the cloud." There's been a lot of news lately fueling the frenzy around cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service. Many of the exhibitors at Office 2.0 were eager to share their vision for everything the cloud has to offer. One such company was Appirio. Appirio offers enterprise-grade business solutions based on the Salesforce.com and Google Apps platforms. Calendar and contact sync, document search and CRM dashboards are some of the products Appirio offers.I was also impressed with the demo from 3tera. 3tera provides data center infrastructure on-demand. What impressed me with the 3tera product is the drag and drop provisioning of services. Adding servers, load balancers, firewalls with a simple, web-based interface- changes that would take days and weeks to address in a physical data center.