Yesterday, I attended GigaOM's Net:Work Conference with the Mavenlink team and Taylor Miles. Starting at 7am, everybody was a bit slow, but the event went very smoothly. After helping at the booth and meeting some great tech folks like Sameer Patel at Pretzel Logic and Patty Baragar at Trada, it was time to check out some of the speakers.

I made it to the "Self Serve, Simple and Social Inside" talk, which featured a rather humorous Aaron Levie of Box.net and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle, along with Chuck Dietrich of SlideRocket and Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop. As they are all in the same Project Collaboration space as Mavenlink, I was really glad to listen in. They all seem to be going after the enterprises, especially Box.net, but offered good insight. I know I am being vague, but you can equate that to laziness.

The last speaker of the day was Ray Grainger, the CEO of Mavenlink. Aside from him being the reason I was there, I was really looking forward to sitting in as I had been hearing bits and pieces of his speech starting the week prior. He really wanted to put a stress on trusted networks and did an awesome job explaining "the contingent workforce" and how "the new frontier is in trust and referrals." Unless you are dealing with one-off projects, you really want to feel comfortable with who you hire. Mavenlink provides the ideal project management suite to work and get paid, and is in the process of putting together a cloud network to really find people you would trust to work with. I look forward to seeing this unfold and being part of it.

The conference finished up with The Future Ideas Launchpad, which I stuck around only to support my friend Lauren Brockie's company Tokbox and their CEO Ian Small. He did a great job presenting OpenTok, a free open API video chat application, which got them second in the Audience Vote, but no win. Whatever. Some publicity was accomplished.

Thanks Om for putting this on and I look forward to coming back next year...