We’re keeping it compact at about four hours and we’ve been able to pack a ton of great content in. The agenda is here, but there’s a talk with Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, a panel of local Venture Capitalists, and a panel of local CEOs. In addition, we’ll be hosting a social event where you’ll get a chance to meet some of the top thought leaders in this new wave of innovation. It’s a great group of tech leaders and, even better, it’s free!

We’re hosting this and covering the costs because I believe that the best way to make great decisions is to put yourself in the middle of the discussion with smart people. So, what better way than to host the conversation? It’s a truly important topic at a time when there is massive innovation in hosted platforms. I’m incredibly proud of our platform for software developers, the Intuit Partner Platform, as well as impressed with what Amazon, Google, and others have done with their new platforms.

Our goal with the Intuit Partner Platform is to create a way for Small Businesses to get much better solutions that can help them run their businesses. What that means is that our focus isn’t just technology like Amazon. We believe that we must enable developers to build successful businesses. That means helping them with marketing, reaching small businesses, billing for their services and more. So, you can see why the discussion we want to host is on entrepreneurship and business building. There are plenty of talks about technology, but technology has no value until it gets used by real people with real problems to solve.

These new platforms enable so many exciting things. I hope you’ll join us for a talk about how we take advantage of these advances to get exciting new solutions in the hands of users and build real businesses along the way.

Find out more here.

And register here.

As part of the launch of this blog we just hosted a webinar on the Future of Work with Josh Holbrook from Yankee Group, Jim Ware co-founder of Future of Work, and Steve King from Emergent Research and the Institute for the Future. The experience and perspectives they brought to the table made this a great conversation. Here’s the Future of Work broadcast and I encourage you to listen.

There was a lot discussed including a great section on the need for applications to adapt to the way people work – exactly what QuickBase is great at. The one topic I do want to comment on here is IT.

Josh quoted a Yankee Group survey of employees where they were asked if IT increased their productivity. 40% stated that IT neither increased nor decreased their productivity. How horrible! One interpretation is that IT just doesn’t matter in these organizations. Further, there was a recommendation to be productive even if it means going around IT and bringing tools into the Enterprise without IT’s permission or involvement.

My take on this is that the rapid change in technology that’s going on right now is an opportunity for IT to lead their organizations to greater than ever productivity. As Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0? blog post, Enterprise 2.0 tools are finding success inside corporations and at QuickBase we see two kinds of IT teams:

• IT teams who are reacting by trying to stop the employees from adopting these tools
• Visionary IT leaders getting ahead of it and leading their companies to competitive advantage. Will Weider, CIO of Affinity Healthcare is a great example. He talks about ways they are using these tools in his Web 2.0 Favorites blog post. This is an opportunity and I hope IT will look at it this way.

With QuickBase we recognized that IT has a responsibility to the company to protect intellectual property and keep costs reasonable and therefore they still need some amount of visibility and control. Because of that, we launched our Enterprise Edition. Our goal with the Enterprise Edition is to continue letting business users implement solutions that are “right for them” while allowing IT the security controls and visibility to make sure they are doing their job. We’ve had great success with this balance between enabling innovation and creativity in business users and partnering with IT to provide an Enterprise-wide Team Collaboration tool.

I hope this blog will provide real-world value to you and that you’ll take away insights that will make you better at your job. It’s a topic we’re passionate about at Intuit/QuickBase so I hope you read, enjoy, and comment often – and listen to the podcast!

-Bill