Web 2.0: Please Print?

Friday late afternoon - I was just going through my e-mails and getting ready for next week's Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. And I came across an odd e-mail from the organizers:

Please print this email and bring it with you to Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco.

Print? In an era when you can even get into a plane by showing a picture of your boarding pass on your phone - why do we need to print a piece of paper to get into a conference? Isn't the whole point of the "cloud" to make all information available anytime anywhere (among other things, of course)... why print an e-mail? And that's not very 'green' either (and I'm not a 'tree hugger' by any stretch of imagination).

I'm sure the organizers have some good reasons and the best intentions for this (like reduce the amount of time people spend in line). But you'll agree with me that you'd expect to see lots of paperwork in a Lawyers, Doctors or Insurance conference... but seeing that in a Web 2.0 conference seems a bit odd! Now... please please tell me those registration computers are NOT running on some fat-client program coded in Turbo Pascal :)

Ok, maybe just a small thing - but it made me think how much the needs of office workers have changed in the last few years. For example, remember when you had to battle with Excel to make it paginate well? But that is a thing of the past, it seems like ages ago to me. When was the last time you had to print a spreadsheet? I haven't printed a single spreadsheet for the longest time - now I just share my Zoho Sheet.

Zoho will be at the Web 2.0 floor. See you there!

Rodrigo