Business Quests in the Information Age: Road warriors & online collaboration

November 2008

Entrepreneurs On Business Quests

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Nicolas Martignole
Nicolas is a passionate technologist and an explorer of new ways and usages of technology. I like his no-nonsense way of approaching topics and definitely enjoyed learning and working with him at a scrum training.
sandrine Plasseraud
Great new marketing evangelist in the UK.
Hans Rosling
Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. I "discovered" him at a conference in Paris and found his quest for a fact-based understanding and analysis of the world most appealing.
Sylvain Zimmer
A young talented wiz kid who has been on a couple of business quests in the past five years... and he's in his early twenties!
Laurent Kratz
A serial entrepreneur currently very focused on the music industry.
Emmanuel Vivier
One of the top evangelists of new marketing methods in Europe: buzz, wom, viral & more.
Pascal Leurquin
Chef d'entreprise belge de 44 ans, marié, 3 enfants.

As the network is increasingly becoming a collaborative computing space and a new wave of cool web innovations is about to refresh our ways of doing once again, knowledge workers may well eventually become road warriors. I have been trying out tools for mobile knowledge workers since 2000 and current initiatives hold great promise in my view.

I have been researching and reviewing some pretty interesting things hitting the market as infotech claims the business world's attention once again. As I said a few weeks ago, many of the good ideas that floated around back in 2000 will eventually take shape and become pervasive. One of them is the idea that the network is a sort of collaborative computing space making it possible for people to interact from various locations. Back in 2000 I was impressed with the concept of the "road warrior", the knowledge worker able to perform work from anyplace so long as she was connected to the Internet. I almost immediately configured myself a WiFi enabled laptop (unfortunately hotspots were rare back in 2001, so my roaming around was quite limited) and started adopting online tools for work like Yahoo! Groups, an online file storage space (I don't remember the name), Intranets, Guru, Salesforce and a few others.

Now, there were important lessons to draw from this first wave of online tools (for example the way one could configure a database on Intranets was quite cumbersome) and it seems some players have done just that, bringing us some excellent features like tagging, syndicating content, sharing thoughts (in blogs for example), publishing sound (music, podcasts). I will probably post some pieces on those in the future. One of my recent areas of interest is the online office space and how I can interact with partners and employees for professional projects. Today I came across an intersting article about web office suites. Here is a link to it. I personally tried calendar hub and writely; they still have some work to do but the foundations are quite good. Enjoy.

Web Office Suite: best of breed products by ZDNet's Richard MacManus -- There's been lots of talk recently about the Web Office - and who is building it. Microsoft released Office Live in beta last week, but it was never going to be a fully functional Office suite like MS Office is. Google has been on peoples minds [...]