Changing the Game, Inside and Outside of the Box (and The Final Frontier) | CloudAve.

Exciting times at box.net headquarters. Yesterday I had a briefing withAaron Levie, Co-founder and CEO, Michael Smith, Product Manager, Mobile and Sean Lindo, Marketing Communications Manager. That’s a lot of heavyweights for a simple briefing and especially something so apparently subtle as a new mobile app.

Yes, box.net were demoing their newiPad application and it’s no overstatement to say that it’s an example of the long promised benefit of the combination of both the cloud and mobile computing finally being realized. The application itself does pretty much what one would expect of it – allowing users to access, share and interact with business content stored onBox.net. But at last it does so in a form factor that is really viable – one which realistically works with the use case that Smith gave me, that of an office worker commuting by train and working on collaborative files en route.

The Box.net crew were quick to acknowledge the visual cues they’d taken fromApple in the design of the iPad application UI, namely the left hand navigation – I’m not so sure about that – kind of reminds me of Windows Explorer to be honest – but either way you can see a nice flow between a view of all of your files and honing in on specific detail within a particular file.

The next version of that app (due soon) will even further expand on this cloud/local combination by including the ability to download files from box.net to the iPad and edit them within a third party application. The reverse will also be possible – allowing users to launch the box.net app from within a third party application and then have file uploaded back to the box.net account in the clouds.

Continues @ http://www.cloudave.com