Connecting the dots ...
It’s really simple. The Blogging Times asked bloggers to display their badge and promised a reciprocal link. Now I’m not a link-hunter, but I kind of liked their writing, and thought why not … so up went the badge, but they never bothered to link back.
This is unfair. I’ve taken the link off, but keep the badge, pointing to this post 
OK, unlike the real Awards, these are not “official” and in the lighter category. The “Awards” go to… (drumroll):
What do the following have in common?
OK, to avoid any unnecessary excitement, here’s the answer: they all got far too many votes.
Socialtext’s Julia French and Stirr’s Joey Wan were the two finalists in ValleyWag’s Ms. Web 2.Ooh! contest when a Julia-fan (or not?) created a script and bombed the poll with 8000 or so votes. Julia really didn’t need this “support” – hey, I voted fo her 
– and certainly did not need the disqualification as a result of spam by someone else.
The Hungarian government announced an Internet poll to come up with the most popular name for a bridge to be built in Budapest, over the river Danube. Little did they know the Internet does not know geographical boundaries: Stephen Colbert publicly called his loyal viewers to vote on him, and he ended up winning with 17 million votes. Not bad, except for the fact that the entire population of Hungary is 10 million, and Budapest has about 2 million residents.
EchoSign is an interesting company that simplifies the process of getting contracts/documents signed, distributed, archived. ( I wrote about them here). They received the “Best Of Show” award at the Office 2.0 Conference yesterday. See a partial snapshot of the poll here.
Overwhelming win. A little too overwhelming. The Office 2.0 Conference was a success, instead of the originally expected 200 participants the organizers managed to squeeze in 350 – but where is the other 4,300 coming from?
Echosign did not need this, just like Julia did not need it. The Office 2.0 Conference did not need it. The real participants who voted for their favorites deserve better.
Live from the Office 2.0 Conference, where the winners of the audience votes are just being announced:
Best Ofice 2.0 Suite: Joyent
Best of Show: EchoSign
Best Demo:
Congratulations to the winners – and all other presenters!
Update (10/13) Unfortunately there was some trouble with the voting. 
I’m sitting at the Office 2.0 conference watching a barrage of 5-minute product demos. FreshBooks‘s CEO just dropped a bomb at the last 20 seconds in his presentation: being software as as service, they can aggregate customers’ data, categorize it by industry, size ..etc, and once they do that, why not turn it into a product?
Customers can receive generalized metrics as well as benchmark themselves against their peers.
Stop here. Think about it. This is big. It’s not about FreshBooks. It’s *the* hidden business model enabled by SaaS. It is so logical, we all had to know it would be coming – but carefully avoids talking about it. No wonder… SaaS adoption is growing but still at an early stage, and security, trust concerns are huge. The last thing software vendors want is to feed those concerns, i.e get their customers worried about the competition accessing their data.
The benefits are obvious: all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with all systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. SaaS providers will have access to the most authentic data ever, aggregation if which leads to the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking. Yet it raises a number of serious questions: How far can they go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate?
The business of metrics, benchmarking is potentially huge, but it can’t take off until the industry, along with customers, can answer these questions – and more.
Update (10/16): I’ve just checked who else talks about this Unheralded SaaS benefit, and voila! Two posts from fellow Enterprise Irregulars, ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani and Yankee Group’s Jason Costello.
Update (10/30): Read Dennis on Valuing Data and on Freshbooks.
With the Office 2.0 Conference underway, we can expect a flurry of announcements, product launches in the next two days – no wonder that two companies, Zoho and Google jumped ahead and “preannounced”.
Zoho is releasing new products at a breakneck speed (see my recent posts From Office Suite to Business Suite and One is More than Six: Zoho Suite Single Sign-on): today’s announcement (well, strictly speaking, tomorrow’s but TechCrunch already reported it) is the availability of ZohoX, the online version of Zoho Virtual Office, a communication / collaboration product. The TechCrunch review is extensive; so instead of writing a “me-too” review, let me ponder about what it means.
I already declared the Zoho Suite complete when they added Show (think PowerPoint) to the previously existing Sheet (can you say Excel?) and Writer (you know this one…). As we will most likely witness at the Office 2.0 Conference starting tomorrow, the number of contenders in the online Office space is mushrooming. Most are one-product wonders though. Of course one can pick the “best-of-breed” (or favorite?) individual applications, deal with different sites, different UI, and different sign-on information, and still not enjoy the seamless flow and real-time data updates that Zoho demonstrated between the spreadsheet, database, document and presentation. But then we haven’t talked about email / communication / virtual desktop yet: with ZohoX, to the best of my knowledge Zoho is the only on to be able to offer a full combo. That’s still not the end of story; Zoho has products in the world of transactional, “enterprise” software: Zoho CRM actually encompasses CRM + ERP functions, essentially covering all business functions except accounting.
All these are free now, and CEO Sridhar Vembu maintains there will always be a free version for individuals. So how will Zoho make money? They will have multiple options: enterprise software guru Vinnie Mirchandani considers the Office Suite a good candidate to be used even by large enterprises, and if they so chose, they will also be able to become a unique provider of full business solutions (Office, Communication, ERP+CRM) to small businesses.
Google’s announcement isn’t really a new product, more the merger / integration of their in-house developed spreadsheet and Writely, a capable online editor acquired in the spring. I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be invited to a pre-announcement briefing in the company of Mike Arrington, Steve Gilmor, Rafe Needleman and a few other bloggers. This turned out to be a good lesson: if you accept the invitation and play the game, you get to be the last one to write about the news: by the time we sat down, the embargoed release was leaked. The announcement itself is quite underwhelming, the most significant part is the fact that it’s coming from Google: Writely and Google Spreadsheet is now one product, under the fantastic (?) name of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. As (if) Google adds new products, I wonder if the name will evolve to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations, then to Google Docs&Spreadsheets&Presentations&Databases.. etc.
About the only improvement is the ability to list, search, sort, tag ..etc all files, be it text or spreadsheet together is certainly nice, but that’s where integration ends at this point. The Googlers mentioned users with up to a thousand documents – there has to be a more intuitive way to list them than a simple alphabetical list – for example grouping by tags (labels in gmail terminology).
I regret losing Writely’s “face” – the new appearance is corporate blue uniform that could have been done by IBM, and as for the name, it would make Microsoft’s naming guys proud ….
All in all, I can’t get excited by this – the recent Google Groups announcement was far more positive, IMHO, although it largely went unnoticed.
Update (9/12): Watch this ScobleVid…
Tags: zoho, zoho suite, zohox, zhoho virtual office, google, google docs & spreadsheets, writely, google groups, office 2.0, office20con
Zoho is definitely getting an increasing share of attention. No wonder – they are releasing product updates at a rate others do press releases. The introduction of a single sign-on to six of their Office 2.0 applications generated quite some buzz on a normally silent weekend. TechCrunch, ZDNet, Read/Write Web, AccMan Pro, yours truly – the usual suspects, one might say, but when “good-old-fashioned” ex-Gartner Vinnie Mirchandani pays attention, you know something is brewing here.
Richard MacManus claims Zoho Moving Towards A Full Web Office Suite. Previously both myself and IT|Redux claimed the Zoho Suite complete. So are we there yet? Well, MS Office was called a suite long before Word, Excel or Powerpoint could really talk to each other. It was ugly, messy, lossy copy/paste for years – Zoho demonstrated a far better, seamless flow and real-time data updates between a spreadsheet, database, document and presentation at the recent IBDNetwork event, and I’m sure we’re in for some surprise at the the Office 2.0 Conference this week.
But let’s look a bit further, and we’ll find that Zoho has a few more tricks in their hat. Near-term we can expect a web-based version of Virtual Office, a communication/collaboration solution (think Outlook), which really makes the Office / Productivity suite full-rounded.
How about transactional business systems? Zoho has a CRM solution – big deal, one might say, the market is saturated with CRM solutions. However, what Zoho has here goes way beyond the scope of traditional CRM: they support Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing – to this ex-ERP guy it appears Zoho has the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label.
Think about it. All they need is the addition Accounting, and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted for SMB’s.
(Disclaimer: although I have an advisory relationship with Zoho, the above is purely my own speculation)
A few months ago I declared the Zoho Suite complete with the addition of Zoho Show to the already existing Zoho Write and Zoho Sheet. The Zoho team did not slow down, they kept on pumping out new products at an amazing speed – at this point there are 11 Zoho branded products accessible from their main portal, and I know of a few more in the pipeline.
The company’s strategy has been for most of this year to focus on developing the individual products, and the next step will be to tighten the integration between them. That said, the individual products work together pretty well, as they demonstrated at the Office 2.0 Under the Radar event, presenting a seamless flow and real-time data updates between a spreadsheet, database, document and presentation.
A hot item on users wish-list was the creation of a single sign-on: if it’s really a Suite, why do I have to log into the individual products separately? In fact some of these products required a username, others the full email address to log in. Not anymore: as of today, users of Zoho’s Writer, Sheet, Show, Planner, Creator & Chat will only have to sign in once, and can seamlessly surf between all these products. If so far you’ve been using the same email address to sign in, you’re just fine, otherwise you may want to read the consolidation details here.
As for integration, I believe we’ll see more next week at the Office 2.0 Conference, where Zoho presents at the One Day in the Life of an Office 2.0 Worker session. Will you be there?
Here’s the Customer Survey I’ve received from JetBlue:
“Please take a moment to let us know about your recent experience with our baggage handling service at Boston Logan airport. Your feedback will help us make adjustments to our baggage processes that will ensure higher levels of satisfaction for our customers.
Thanks in advance for your time.”
Hm… why have I received this when I did not have any luggage on my recent trip? Let’s find out – clicking through the first question is:
“Have you checked in luggage in Boston?”
I duly select “NO”… next screen:
“Thank you for your participation in the survey”
Well, dear JetBlue, in case you haven’t yet figured this out:
Candidate for Business Process Angioplasty?
Google Groups has a new version: no, it’s not 2.0, it’s called – what a surprise – Google Groups Beta.
There are aesthetic as well as functional improvements. The appearance of individual Groups can be customized, one can pick from a dozen or so standard themes, upload a logo and change colors/fonts ..etc.
Most important are the functional improvements, first of all the Pages feature, which allows for easy collaboration, e.g. the editing of an article by group members using an easy, WYSIWYG-style editor. From the pages you can link to other pages or external sites. When you save your page, you can optionally notify group members, who can, depending on what access rules you set up (per page) read or edit it.
There is a new Files area, not too generous though, with a limit of 100MB – are we seeing signs of Freemium? Paying for storage wouldn’t be consistent with Google’s strategy, or at least what we’ve seen so far. Document versioning would be nice in the Files area (something I’ve ranted about recently).
The Members area allows the creation of fairly detailed profiles, with a photo and link to your own site/blog. It also provides statistics of your group activity.
None of the individual features are radically new; what’s nice is how they are wrapped together. To continue with my example of collaboratively editing an article, so far we could do it using a number of tools, like Google’s own Writely, or Zoho Writer, or a wiki, but the issue is how to share: specifically, who to share with. Most of these platforms would allow either public sharing, or inviting users individually, but there is no way to share such a document with a predefined set of users, i.e. members of my email group. Of course you could always opt for a complete solution, like Central Desktop, which has collaborative editing, groups, calendar, wiki, project management, tasks ..etc – but your have to pay for it.
Wrapping it up, in a major step forward, Google Groups which so far has been just a group email mechanism, becomes a mini community/collaborative platform, likely attracting previously “email-only” users to the native web-interface – and we all know why Google loves that.
Update (9/6): The revamped Google Groups fits very well Google’s new “Features, not products” initiative.
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