Service: Zoho Writer
Parent Company: AdventNet
Launched: September 15, 2005
Location: Pleasanton, CA & India

We’ve been looking at a lot of Ajax Office applications (see Peter Rip and Richard MacManus on this as well) and other collaboration tools lately.

Quite frankly, it’s many people’s opinion (ours included) that Writely, Jotspot Live, Writeboard, Chalk and others are ultimately addressing the same customer pool – those who want to create, share, and group-edit documents online.

Zoho Writer is the newest entrant and is as good as the rest. Think Word + Group Editing + Ajax. It’s a rich ajax application that allows sharing and group editing, and, like Writely, has a great wysiwyg editing interface and excellent image import and manipulation features.

In fact, it’s pretty much exactly like Writely, except they do not yet support Word format import/export or tagging (coming soon).

Check out Zoho’s BackPack-like product Zoho Planner too.

Can’t wait to see Google’s (rumored) full Ajax suite that is (rumored to be) coming out this year.