Zoho, makers of an awesome web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has given its online word processing tool Writer a fresh look along with a couple of new features worth checking out. The Chennai, India-based startup says Zoho Writer 2.0 comes with hundreds of improvements, for the most part on the user interface.
But the makeover isn’t the whole… → Read More
Google says the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free advertising supported version. To make the free option less attractive they’ve been quietly lowering the number of user accounts that can be associated with a free account. Now as businesses grow, they’ll be forced to move to the paid version much more quickly than before.
Google Apps is a suite of… → Read More
In preparation for the Crunchies this Friday, January 9, I’ve been asked to write 5 short summaries to cover the nominees for Best Enterprise. There are 3 cloud computing entrants – Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and Force.com – and 2 from the worlds of Twitter clone (Yammer) and Office is Dead (Zoho.) My personal cloud favorite, Live Mesh, did not make the cut, but… → Read More
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine.
This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc)… → Read More
You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.
By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions… → Read More
Zoho continues to carve a niche for itself among the giants in the software-as-a-service market. The three-year old online application suite, which started off as a basic online version of Word, has grown to 1.2 million registered users and 500,000 unique monthly logins.
The competes head on with Google in the office productivity space, with 18 applications and 4 “utilities” (Zoho Polls, Zoho… → Read More
Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.
Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place. → Read More
Zoho is pulling together its three main Webtop productivity products (Zoho Write, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show) into a central destination: Zoho Share. Just as Microsoft bundles its corresponding desktop products into its Office suite, bundling makes sense on the Web as well. Zoho already does this with Zoho Apps, as does Google which has long bundled its Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and… → Read More
Office productivity suite Zoho removed the need to create an account to use their services today – you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. Sign in is completed via Yahoo’s and Google’s authentication APIs. I asked Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna why they don’t just adopt OpenID to handle authentications instead. He says they will, soon, but… → Read More
Zoho keeps pushing the limits of what online productivity apps can do, It was the first to use Google Gears to create an offline version of Zoho Writer last year, for instance. And now it is adding macros and pivot tables to its online spreadsheet, Zoho Sheet. (Once again, it is way ahead of Google, which indicated last December it would not add those advanced features any time this year). The… → Read More
This is an obvious move for Zoho, which has created a suite of online office applications: Chinese versions of their products. The Office piracy rate in China is 90+% according to Microsoft, and that market will be even more willing to use online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. than the U.S. and European markets have been. The applications are being delivered via a partnership with… → Read More
There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well. Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that… → Read More
Google’s Web-based word processor, Google Docs, can now be used offline to view and edit documents in your browser. That means you no longer need to be connected to the Internet to write a letter or draft an agreement. When you connect again, all your changes are updated. Google Docs now joins Google Reader as a Web app that can work offline. Spreadsheets and Presentations are coming up… → Read More
Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less expensive than competitors. Other applications include web… → Read More
Bungee Labs has raised $8 million Series C in a round that included Wasatch Venture Fund and existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the… → Read More
If you’ve heard of Zoho, you probably think of Zoho Office, its suite of Web-based productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation). But Zoho Office is primarily as a marketing exercise. Zoho’s real business is in offering a series of Web-based enterprise apps that it started introducing last September—CRM, Project Management, Web conferencing, an online database. → Read More
Google is bringing offline apps to mobile phones – and this has nothing to do with Android. Google Gears, which allows developers to create apps that run on Firefox and Internet Explorer when offline, is supposed to launch later today under the name Google Gears for mobile. (Information for developers is already available here). It will support only Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile… → Read More
Web-based word processors keep closing the gap with Microsoft Office. Since its launch, Zoho now has 650,000 users, a 30 percent increase from just last November, the company tells us. It is doing 2 million user sessions per month. And its users have created more than one million documents on Zoho Writer (1.6 million, if you include its online presentation and spreadsheet products, Zoho Show and… → Read More
Yeah, we’ve seen a ton of online application builders before – DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. And Salesforce weighed in with their own Force.com in late 2007. Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than… → Read More
CRM and SaaS provider Salesforce.com have announced that there Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture (our review here) is to now offer Development-as-a-Service (DaaS), a new pricing structure and a developer competition. The DaaS service consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing. The tools offer full access to the database… → Read More
This will be the third annual post on “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without.” The first post, for 2006, is here. The 2007 post, written a year ago, is here. This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (WordPress, Delicious, Google Docs, etc.), some are for fun (Amazon Music, Amie Street, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube… → Read More
A new survey by NPD has found that the 73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs and other online office applications, but perhaps worst still only 0.5% of respondents have abandoned desktop office applications for an online alternative. 94% of Americans have never tried a web based productivity suite. To be fair though, the survey was of “600 PC users” so it (possibly)… → Read More
Over the past two years Zoho has launched 12 applications along with 4 utilities, nearly all with APIs. The team has shown a strong commitment to steadily improving their products, making them a compelling alternative to the incumbent, Google. This morning they’ve released a new version of Zoho Show that cleans up the program’s interface and adds a greater array of features than… → Read More
Every company in Silicon Valley wants to become a platform for other companies to build cool stuff on top of. It is the easiest way to attract customers. Coghead—the DIY, Web-based, business-app builder—is no different. Today it is publicly launching its charter affiliates program, whereby software developers can create their own enterprise apps using Coghead and then resell them to their… → Read More
Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago. → Read More
While some startups issue boastful press releases promising the world, India and Silicon Valley based Zoho is actually doing the software thing. This morning they launched full offline access for Zoho writer, based on the Google Gears open source platform. In August the company launched partial offline functionality that let users read documents. Documents can now be edited offline as well after… → Read More
New product press releases unencumbered by the complexities of releasing actual software set off alarm bells. And when those press releases are so boastful as to suggest that the (unlaunched) product can hurt a competitor’s $20 billion revenue stream, the alarm bells get much louder. So with alarm bells screaming, Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia announces he’s going to war with… → Read More
Conference calls can be a pain, and getting charged by the minute doesn’t help. But these days, there’s really no reason to pay for them. There’s FreeConfereceCall.com, FreeConference.com, Lypp, and a bunch of other small startups giving away the service. But while there’s no difference in the cost, Rondee’s Evite-like web interface makes it the simplest conference… → Read More
I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of a product coming out in early 2008 called Blist (pronounced like “bliss” with a “t” at the end) that will take on DabbleDB and Trackvia by giving users the tools to easily create and manage databases online. Blist’s initial target demographic will be Excel users who need more functionality and are trying to make their… → Read More
Zoho is adding another weapon to its arsenal today – Zoho DB – raising its total number of online office applications to 13 (not including four additional “utilities”, or lightweight apps). Zoho DB is meant to provide developers and database administrators with better ways to manage and digest their data. In a way, it’s like Microsoft Office Access but online and… → Read More
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