With recent movie releases like Tron and mega-tradeshows like CES, the Consumer Electronic Show, technological innovations appear to know no bounds. Tablets, 3D-TVs and über-networked gaming consoles are all the rage. The operative word in that tradeshow’s name, however, is “Consumer”. Consumer electronics generate those wow effects, prodding us all to buy new gadgets while wondering exactly for what purpose!

Technology innovations in the corporate world elicit less of a visceral response but can be equally as exciting and transformative. Often, the level of hype surrounding such potentially transformative technologies far outpaces an enterprise’s ability to integrate those advances into their business processes. Nevertheless, there are three technologies that appear to be living up to the hype — cloud, mobile and collaboration. This became even clearer to me when I recently attended Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Symposium 2010, with these three technologies taking center stage during the conference.

This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. Janine Hirt is the Head of Membership Development & Editor for the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce a vibrant organization headquartered in New York City.  The Chamber is dedicated to forging stronger trade and business ties between Brazil and the United States through seminars, major conferences, roundtables, publications and other member services.

With the upcoming 2014 World Cup, the 2016 Olympic Games, and its impressively quick recovery from the recent financial crisis, the world’s eyes are now on Brazil as a strong and stable economy brimming with investment and business opportunities.

I recently attended the Argyle Chief Legal Officer Leadership Forum, held in Chicago. The event brought together over 150 global chief legal officers to discuss the challenges and issues that general counsels face. There were a number of speakers, panel discussions and breakout sessions focused on topics ranging from reducing costs and mitigating risk to tracking the legal impact of technology and social media.

While there, we had the pleasure of introducing Charles Wunsch, the general counsel and corporate secretary of Sprint Nextel. His presentation — "Legal Issue Spotting in a Changing World" — was a thought-provoking look at how rapid technological change has created new issues for legal departments. Here are a few of his key points:

Outside of Brazil, there has only recently been talk of the rest of Latin America as a possible, let alone, desirable investment environment. The overwhelming share of analyst voice has been dedicated to the regional giant, Brazil, whose 2009 GDP of $1.574 trillion almost doubles the next contender which is Mexico coming in at $874 billion. In fact if you put all the remaining LatAm countries together, the combined total GDP of $1.526 trillion still does not beat Brazil’s GDP.

I recently attended the Argyle Chief Legal Officer Forum, a gathering of 200 global corporate counsels to discuss the challenges facing legal departments. IntraLinks was a key sponsor of the event that including a panel introduction, sales introductions to targeted CLOs and a presentation table. IntraLinks also previewed a new enterprise offering that integrates secure legal document repositories, project management workflows and internal/external collaboration. In addition, we were able to interview keynote speaker Tom Sabatino, former General Counsel of Schering Plough (now General Counsel of United Airlines).