There are days when things seem to work out on their own. Call it timing, karma, or sheer luck, yesterday was one of these days. We launched the website for the Office 2.0 Conference, and all the work that had been done on this blog for the past nine months started to pay off. In a single day, we essentially doubled the number of speakers and panelists, and secured a couple of significant sponsorships, one highly impactful, the other very dear to my heart. So without further ado, I just wanted to say “thank you”.

While I had been toying with the idea of organizing some kind of event around the concept for Office 2.0 back in March, the idea for a full fledge conference came up in May from Raju Vegesna, who is one of the architects behind the amazing Zoho Office 2.0 productivity suite. When he suggested the idea for such an event, I was scared at first, for I felt it might be premature. But while witnessing the growth of the Office 2.0 Database, I realized that our timing might actually be quite right. It clearly was. Thank you Raju!

Yesterday, CNET confirmed that they will be the exclusive media sponsor for the event. This made me pretty happy, because some of the best articles covering Office 2.0 are written by CNET/ZDNet folks, among them David Berlin, Dan Farber, Dion Hinchcliffe, Martin LaMonica, Richard McManus, Rafe Needleman, Marc Orchant, Phil Wainewright, and others. So I would like to thank Rafe Needleman for having offered us this sponsorship opportunity, and Renee Jones for her help in getting it done, right on time! Thank you guys!

After several weeks of active lobbying, we also secured Dabble DB as a sponsor. Smallthought Systems, the company behind this awesome online database, recently secured VC funding, but it does not seem that it made them any less careful when it comes to spending their money, which is good for their investors, but less so for a conference organizer, so I’m really glad that Andrew and Avi went for it eventually. Dabble DB is the engine powering the Office 2.0 Database, as well as a fair chunk of the tricks pulled on this blog, so I could not be more happy today. Thank you guys!

On the speaker and panelist side, things have gone wild. In alphabetical order: Jnan Dash, CTO at Foldera, Scott Dietzen, President and CTO at Zimbra, Konstantin Guericke, Vice President of Marketing at LinkedIn, Eric Hoffert, CEO at ShareMethods, Jason Lemkin, CEO at EchoSign, John Newton, Chairman and CTO at Alfresco, Jason Robert, CEO at Preezo, Narendra Rocherolle, CEO at 83 Degrees, Bob Sutor, Vice President, Standards and Open Source at IBM, Duncan Werner, CEO at Thumstacks, Charlie Wood, CEO at Spanning Partners, Jason Wood, Principal at Rothschild Capital Partners, and Ray Wu, Director, Venture Management at HP. Not bad for a single day. Well… Thank you guys!

Now, what makes me really happy is that some people living in remote parts of the world like, say… the United Kingdom… and had to decline my original invitation, finally decided to come, like my friend Dennis Howlett. In a similar vein, our fellow blogger Tomoaki Sawada should have one of his team members come from Japan. Now, I just need to find a way to get Craig Cmehil to join us as well. And I promise you, I’ll for sure make it to San Francisco, all the way up from Palo Alto. Again, thank you all! This is going to be a very fun event.