Apple’s iPhone among new capabilities the cloud brings

At the Office 2.0 conference today, held in San Francisco, Google executive Matthew Glotzbach said during his keynote speech that iPhone access to applications on the the cloud has transformed the mobile landscape. “I live almost exclusively in the cloud, and can access all my documents, flip through this presentation I’m making, plan for meetings, all from my iPhone,” he told the audience.

Glotzbach’s speech, titled “Ten things I can do in the cloud today that I couldn’t a year ago,” highlighted the power of the cloud. True, he’s biased; after all, Google is a major player in the cloud space. But, as consumers and businesses both have found, the cloud is highly empowering, not least of all because it’s either free or really, really inexpensive for what it offers.

Among the other things the cloud offers is instant translation capabilities through Google Translate, but that was a bit of a bust, with someone from the audience saying there was a big mistake in the English to Spanish translation Glotzbach demonstrated. He recovered well, though, saying translation is not perfect yet. Mind you, there are other online sites offering free translation, one of them being SmartLink’s translation2paralink.com.

Online collaboration, the collaborative capabilities of Google Forms, the availability of online templates, and the ability to build scalable business applications on the cloud are among the other capabilities Glotzbach talked about.

Will newer and more innovative cloud applications and technologies to leverage them emerge? No doubt. Perhaps Glotzbach should begin taking notes for a speech along the same lines next year, just to see what will change and how.