Social Networking Archives - Page 9 of 18

JotSpot Google Deal – Who Wins, Why it’s Big:First Thoughts

Posted on October 31, 2006 ·

A few weeks ago the “wikirati” was having dinner with the Enterprise Irregulars in San Francisco, on occasion of the Office 2.0 Conference. Our gracious sponsor was Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes, and JotSpot’s Joe Kraus showed up, too. Missing from the photo is Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who was there for the first part, a briefing for Forrester‘s Charlene Li, but left before dinner. (Hm, did Joe eat Ross’s dinner? )

(photo credit: Dan Farber)

I heard a rumor that one of us in the group had likely gotten a few million dollars richer – and it wasn’t me … but Joe Kraus, having sold Jot$pot to Google. The source was credible but of course we had already heard about a Yahoo acquisition, then eBay .. so who knows, after all.

I found the timing ironic, just having come back from a Google briefing where they announced Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which left me largely unimpressed. This is what they were missing, I thought.

Today we know it’s a fact: JotSpot is part of Google. After the quick post, here are my first thoughts around who wins, and what it may mean from a user prospective.

Who Wins:

Joe, Graham and team for obviou$ rea$ons.
Google, for now they have all the pieces for a small business collaboration suite, if they are smart enough to get rid of the junk and integrate the good pieces together – something they have not done before. I’ll talk about this more a few paragraphs below.
Some paying JotSpot customers: Jot has had a funny pricing model, where you can start free, but if you exceed a page limit (10?) you have to upgrade. Most users probably don’t realize that because in Jot everything is a page (i.e. add an event to the Calendar, it’s a new page), 10 pages are essentially nothing, if you wanted to do anything but testing, you’d have to upgrade – until now, that is. From now on paying customers will enjoy their current level of service for free.
Competitors: JotSpot’s market direction has never been entirely clear; they focused on consumers and small businesses, but were present on the enterprise market, too. I think it’s fair to assume that they are out of the enterprise market at least for a while, leaving only Atlassian and Socialtext as the two serious players.

Who Loses:

Some JotSpot customers who’d rather pay but have their data at a company whose business model is charging for services than enjoy free service by Google whose primary business model is to know everything about you. Clearly there will be some migration from JotSpot to other wiki platforms. Update: the competition isn’t sleeping, see migration offers by Socialtext and Atlassian.
Me, for having half-written a post about the merits of pure wikis, Office suites and hybrids, which I can scrap now.

Who Needs to Move:

Some of the Office 2.0 Suites, including my friends at Zoho. This may be a surprising conclusion, but bear with me for a while, it will all be clear.

So far the balance is good, we have more winners than losers – now let’s look at what Google should do with JotSpot.

They have (almost) all the right pieces/features fragmented in different products, some of them overlapping though. They should kill off the weak ones and integrate the best – a gargantuan task for Google that so far hasn’t pulled off anything similar. Here’s just some of what I mean:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets:
One of the reasons I found the announcement underwhelming was that there really wasn’t a lot of innovation: two apps (Writely and Google Spreadsheets) put together in a uniform look and a file management system. It’s this very file management system that I found weak: how on earth can I work online and manage a jungle of thousands of documents in a flat, alphabetical list? JotSpot may just be the right solution.

Google Groups:
It’s rare for a mature product to go back to beta, but when Google recently did it, it was for good reason: the Groups which so far has been just a group email mechanism, became a mini community/collaborative platform, offering functionality found in collaborative editors like Writely, Zoho Writers, page cross-linking a’la wikis, file management..etc, combining all this with group email and the ability to share with a predefined group. I seriously considered it a major step forward, likely attracting previously “email-only” users to the native web-interface – and we all know why Google loves that.

JotSpot, the “hybrid” wiki:
This will be the somewhat controversial part. First of all, JotSpot is an attractive, easy-to-use wiki, and I believe that’s the value Google should keep.

Second, they’ve been playing around with the concept of being an application platform, which just never took off. The “applications” available in JotSpot are all in-house developed, despite their expectations the world has not come to develop apps on their platform. (Will this change in Google’s hands?). In JotSpot 2.0 they integrated some of the previously existing applications into user-friendly page types: Calendar, Spreadsheet, Photo ..etc, along with regular (text) wiki pages. This is what I considered Jot’s weak part. Just because a page looks like an application, it does not mean it really is:

Try to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Jot Spreadsheet page, you’ll get a warning that it does not import formulas. Well, I’m sorry, but what else is there in a spreadsheet but formulas? The previous name, Tracker was fair: it’s a table where you track lists, but not a spreadsheet.
Look at a Calendar page: it does not have any functionality. You cannot do group schedules, can’t even differentiate between personal and group events. It’s just a table that looks like a Calendar – reminding me the “electronic” calendars of corporate executives in the 90’s: the Word template that your secretary maintained for you and printed daily…

I guess it’s clear that I am unhappy with Jot’s “application” functionality, but I like it as a wiki. In this respect I tend to agree with Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, who believes in best-of-breed (whether that’s Socialtext is another question…). Best-of-breed of everything, be it a wiki or other productivity tools. I’ve also stated that my ‘dream setup’ for corporate collaboration: is a wiki with an integrated Office 2.0 Suite. Why?
Other than its collaborative features, a wiki is a map of our logical thinking process: the cross-linked pages provide structure and narrative to our documents, one could think of it as a textual / visual extension of a directory system, resolving the problem of the flat listing of online files that represent fragments of our knowledge. Of course I am not implying that a wiki is just a fancy directory system… au contraire, the wiki is the primary work and collaboration platform, from which users occasionally invoke point applications for number crunching, presentation..etc.

Now Google has it all: they should kill the crap, and combine the JotSpot wiki, their own Office apps ( a good opportunity to dump the lousy Docs & Spreadsheets name), Calendar, Gmail, the Group email from Google Groups and have the Rolls -Royce of small business collaboration.
(Update: Dan Farber over at ZDNet is pondering the same: Is JotSpot the new foundation for Google Office?)

By now it’s probably obvious what I meant by Zoho having to make their move soon: they either need to come up with their own wiki, or team up with a wiki company. Best-of-breed is a great concept and enterprise customers can pick and match their tools on their own. For the SMB market it makes sense to be able to offer a hosted,integrated Wiki/Office solution though. So far Zoho is ahead of Google in Office 2.0, if they want to maintain that leadership, they will need a wiki one way or another.

Of course I could be way off in my speculation and Google may just have bought the team.. either way, congratulations to Joe, Graham and the JotSpot team.

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Social Networking, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: atlassian, best-of-breed, Collaboration, confluence, Enterprise irregulars, Enterprise Software, Google, google Groups, Jotspot, office 2.0, smb, socialtext, wiki, wikirati, wikis, Writely, zoho

Google Groups Beta Brings Collaboration

Posted on October 6, 2006 ·

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.

Tags: google, google groups, google groups beta, perpetual beta, collaboration, google page creator, file storage, google drive, gdrive, freemium, wiki, wikis, central desktop, writely, zoho Writer

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Social Networking, Software, Technology ·

SVASE VC Breakfast Club in San Francisco

Posted on September 11, 2006 ·

I’ll be moderating another SVASE VC Breakfast Club meeting on Thursday, Sep 14th in San Francisco. As usual, it’s an informal round-table where up to 10 entrepreneurs get to deliver a pitch, then answer questions and get critiqued by a VC Partner. We’ve had VC’s from Draper Fisher, Hummer Winblad, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Mohr Davidow, Emergence Capital …etc.

Thursday’s featured VC is John Parsons, General Partner, The Halo Funds. The Zvents post has all the info and a map, and if you plan to attend, please register here.

These sessions are a valuable opportunity for Entrepreneurs, most of whom would probably have a hard time getting through the door to VC Partners. Since I’ve been through quite a few of these sessions, both as Entrepreneur and Moderator, let me share a few thoughts:

It’s a pressure-free environment, with no Powerpoint presentations, Business Plans…etc, just casual conversation, but it does not mean you should come unprepared!
Bring an Executive Summary, some VC’s like it, others don’t.
Follow a structure, don’t just talk freely about what you would like to do, or even worse, spend all your time describing the problem, without addressing what your solution is.
Don’t forget “small things” like the Team, Product, Market..etc.
It would not hurt to mention how much you are looking for, and how you would use the funds…
Write down and practice your pitch, and prepare to deliver a compelling story in 3 minutes. You will have about 5, but believe me, whatever your practice time was, when you are on the spot, you will likely take twice as long to deliver your story. The second half of your time-slot is Q&A with the VC.
Last, but not least, please be on time! I am not kidding… some of you know why I even have to bring this up.

Here’s a participating Entrepreneur’s feedback about a previous event.

See you in San Francisco!

Tags: Venture Capital, VC Breakfast, Funding, VC Funding, Startups, Entrepreneurship, SVASE

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Social Networking, Startups ·

Why the Wikipedia Enterprise 2.0 Debate is Irrelevant

Posted on August 30, 2006 ·

The ongoing almost finished debate about the deleted Enterprise 2.0 article in Wikipedia is quite educational, at least for someone like me, who uses Wikipedia a lot but don’t contribute myself. Not that we had that insight originally; the entry was first wiped out without a discussion and it took Ross Mayfield’s clout to resuscitate it for debate, albeit semi-sentenced for deletion.

The key learning for me is that Wikipedia is governed by far more rules than I would have expected. Like it or not, I can rationalize that any organization, organism, collective initiative..etc. of this magnitude will sooner or later develop self-defense mechanisms, and for Wikipedia these are the (sometimes rigid) rules and an army of Praetorians … I mean Deletionists.

The key arguments for deleting the Enterprise 2.0 article are that it’s not notable enough, is neologism , original research which is not verifiable by reading reliable sources. (links point to Wikipedia policies)

Notability is a rather dubious requirement – that is if we consider Wikipedia *The* encyclopedia, which is what I think it has become for millions of readers. The “Sum of Human Knowledge” (see ad on right) is constantly increasing, forcing paper-based encyclopedias to be selective/restrictive for obvious reasons. Wikipedia does not have such physical limits, and has an army of volunteer editors, so why be restrictive? “When in doubt – look it up” is still what I think encyclopedias are all about, and that approach is what propelled Wikipedia to the No. 1 spot leaving the Britannica in the dust.

“Neologism doesn’t belong in Wikipedia”: as several commenters pointed out, the term neologism itself is a neologism:-) But let’s get real: considering the body of knowledge already covered in Wikipedia, an increasing ratio of new articles will by definition be neologism. An overly exclusionary approach by Wikipedia administrators will relegate it from being *The* encyclopedia to being just one, in fact likely still #1 of many, giving way to the Refupedias so eloquently defined by my fellow Irregular (and I might add, subject matter expert on this debate) Niel Robertson.

While I question the principles behind the notability and no-neologism rule, I understand that the debate on deleting an actual submission is not the appropriate forum to discuss the validity of Wikipedia rules.

Yet I am surprised by the sharp contrast in the two side’s approach: defenders of the article, mostly domain experts in enterprise software but Wikipedia-newbies discuss the merits of the article itself, while the deletionist side avoids such conversation strictly focusing on adherence to policy only. In fact it’s this part of the discussion that convinced me we’re not seeing a constructive debate (side note: why isn’t there a Wikipedia entry on this?), instead the most active deletionists are pre-determined to kill the article, and are shutting down reasonable arguments / citations in a rather dogmatic manner.

The trio of no original research, verifiability and reliable sources should be more or less self-explanatory, and one would think references to “Enterprise 2.0” in respected publications like MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Business Week certainly meet these requirements. Not really. Our Praetorian Deletionist discards both:

“The problem is only readers that have access to this journal can verify the information. It must be available to anyone (by heading to the library, searching online, or stopping by a book store)”

“Journals that the general public can not easily access are not valid sources. Period. That is wikipedia policy.”

Wow. Not accessible… well, I don’t see any restrictions on these subscription pages:

Sloan Management Review: $89/ year
Harvard Business Review: $99/ year , so indeed, they are generally accessible.

In fact the individual article is available for $6.50, but (don’t tell anyone!) it can also be found as a free PDF file on the web. Now, I am not claiming these publications have as wide circulation as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek – all papers that our gatekeeper finds acceptable – but why should they? We’re not talking about architecture, medicine or gardening – for the cross-section of business and technology it’s hard to find more authoritative source than the SMR or HBR.

All other citations the “defending team” comes up with are refused, for formal reasons, without looking at content.

Business Week: “the article itself is not about the term “Enterprise 2.0”, but about “Web 2.0” “. In fact “Web 2.0 in the Enterprise” is what the entire article is about, and that is indeed Enterprise 2.0, but the Wikipedian here does not understand the content, he is just looking for a verbatim match.

ZDNet “Blogs” by Dan Farber or Dion Hinchcliffe are rejected for being blogs, and self-referencing, being about the deletion process, not the original term. Once again, this is a rigid, dogmatic argument: true, the deletion debate is referenced in the articles, but it was just the trigger, the authors (recognized subject matter experts) explicitly discuss the validity of Enterprise 2.0. Ross Mayfield then cites further articles, including one by Dion Hinchliffe, ZDNet specifically referencing Enterprise 2.0: “Fortunately, the title of McAfee’s piece says the important part” – and that title is: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration . Not accepted, after all it’s just a blog.

I can’t leave Wikipedia’s exclusion of blogs as reliable source without a comment. Tehcnorati is tracking over 50 million blogs, and we know it does not track everything, so who knows what the total number is: 70M? 100M? How can they all be lumped in one, “unreliable” category? As non-PC it may be, I have to side with Robert Scoble here, there is a slight difference between content-light (LiveJournal) diaries and professional blogs by industry experts. The ZDNet blogs mentioned above really shouldn’t be personal blogs, they are professional publications. And by whose standards should the HBS Faculty Blog, bearing the logo of Harvard Business School not be considered a reliable source, in fact an authority on matters of business and technology?

The concept of authority is not unknown to Wikipedia, just check the following excerpt from the guidelines on reliable sources:

“Advanced degrees give authority in the topic of the degree.”

“Use sources who have postgraduate degrees or demonstrable published expertise in the field they are discussing. The more reputable ones are affiliated with academic institutions.”

Guidelines or not, Mr. Deletionist has his own view about Harvard Prof. McAfee:

“While I respect your knowledge and status as an Associate Professor, I take a dim view of a person who coins a term also being the person that is the main editor and follower of that term’s wikipedia article.” (for the record Prof. McAfee did not edit the disputed Wikipedia article at all)

Oh, well… instead of talking about Wikipedia, let’s focus on why this whole debate is irrelevant. Because “Enterprise 2.0” is really just a label. Opponents call it “marketing buzzword”. So what? Labels, Marketing buzzwords can be quite helpful:

In the beginning of this post I spent 2 paragraphs detailing my point of view on Notability and Neologism, when I could ave simply referred to a “label”: I am an Inclusionalist. (I believe in editing rather than killing posts)
In the very early 90’s I was implementing SAP systems (yes, guilty of being a domain expert). The concept of an integrated cross-functional enterprise system was rather unusual, it took lot of “evangelism” to spread the idea. A few years later Erik Keller and team at Gartner coined the term ERP, and it is the industry definition ever since.
Here’s a fairly lengthy explanation of how a web application can look and feel like a desktop application. (alert: it’s a blog!). The post is from January 2005. A year later the term Ajax was coined, and now the author of this article could save half a page and just say: Ajax.

Perhaps the above examples make the point: in business and technology, marketing “labels” are typically coined to describe an already existing phenomenon. Enterprise 2.0 as a term my be relatively knew, but it’s not some theoretical concept a bored professor is trying to sell the world. It’s a disruptive change, a confluence of technological, social and business changes in how corporations conduct business using new IT tools. No Wikipedia gatekeepers can prevent this seismic shift. Let’s move on, do our work, and in less than 6 months Enterprise 2.0 will find its way back to Wikipedia.

Update (9/1): The debate is now closed, Enterprise 2.0 stays in wikipedia.

(Note: this is just a partial list, pros and cons from domain experts – all this representing zero value, per wikipedia policy, since they are blog posts.)

Tags: wikipedia, enterprise+2.0, web+2.0, wikipedia+deletion, gatekeepers, wikipedians, deletionist, inclusionost, wikipedia+policy, neologism, encyclopedia, encyclopedia+britannica, wiki, collaboration, social+software, erp, enterprise+software, harvard, harvard+business+school, hbs, sloan+management+review, mit, refupedia, marketing, marketing+buzzword

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Social Networking, Technology ·

Office 2.0 – Under the Radar Event at SAP Labs

Posted on August 18, 2006 ·

IBDNetwork’s Under the Radar event at SAP Labs was a lively evening with full house, good discussion and four exciting companies. Prior to the presentations moderator Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and the panel discussed pro’s and con’s of Office 2.0.

Part of the discussion was whether “Office 2.0” is just an attempt to replicate existing functions on the Web.

Peter Rip’s take was that such replication is pointless: the web-based apps cannot come close to the incumbent (MS Office) in functionality and they stand no chance to unseat it in the corporate world. The real promise of Office 2.0 in Peter’s view is creating processes-mashups, supporting business in entirely new ways.

Ismael Ghalimi’s response was that partial “replication” is OK, in reality the MS Office products are way too complex, 90% of users probably only use 10% of the functionality. The added value is the ease of collaboration, and also easier integration, as it would be demonstrated by Zoho in a few minutes. I tend to agree with Ismael, as I stated before.

The Panel: Peter Rip, Sam Schillace, Etay Gafni, and Ismael Ghalimi

(photo credit: Dan Farber, ZDNet)

After the initial discussion the four invited companies each had 5 minutes for a presentation/demo, followed by another 5 minutes of Q/A. Although the theme of the evening was Office 2.0, 2 out of 4 presenters were not strictly speaking “office” companies – the Web 2.0 moniker would better fit them: Wetpaint and Collectivex. They also have something in common: a strong focus on groups, communities – but they take rather different approaches with CollectiveX being rather structured, whereas Wetpaint is an open book that the users get to write.

Wetpaint was presented by Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO. Technically Wetpaint is a wiki, but the best part is that one really does not have to know wikis, just happily type away and create attractive pages without the usual learning curve. More than that: these pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive.

It’s an ad-supported free web-based service that combines the best of wikis, blogs, and forum software.

It’s like a wiki: you can create any number of pages, arrange them in a hierarchy, navigate through them top-down in a tree fashion, or via direct links between pages. Anyone can edit any page a’la wiki (optionally pages can be locked, too). There is version control, audit track of changes and previous releases can be restored at a single click.
It’s like a discussion forum: you can have threaded/nested comments attached to each page
It’s like a blog: editable area in the middle, sidebars on both sides with tags and other info. Personally I’d like to see more blog-like features, like pinging blog indices (Technorati and others), trackback support, etc. Ben confirmed some of these are on the way – when it happens, I believe Wetpaint will take off big time – after all, discoveribility is critical in building online communities.

All panelists were impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the UI, but someone (don’t remember if panel or audience) commented this is just one of many similar products available.
I beg to differ. Yes, in a room of 60-80 techies we can all use (?) any other wiki easily. Not so in “real life”. I’ve set up wikis for companies, ad-hoc workgroups and events for the general public – there’s a whole world of difference. In a company you have a common purpose, set objectives, can provide training – not so in the consumer/ community space. Take a look at the Wetpaint site we set up for the Techdirt Greenhouse (un)conference, or Road Trips USA (pic link above) on the fun side.
I challenge anyone to find another “wiki” with comparable features yet is so easy that anyone who can type and click (i.e. use a simple editor) will be able to contribute without any learning.

Update (8/18): Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head: it’s all about the Blink Test. Wetpaint passes it. Other wikis don’t.

Collectivex Founder and CEO Clarence Wooten described his service as LinkedIn meets Yahoo Groups. Mike Arrington’s definition (not as moderator, but earlier on TechCrunch): “CollectiveX is what LinkedIn should have been.” It’s social networking based on groups, rather than individuals, facilitating communication, providing file sharing, messaging, calendaring and exchange of leads/contacts. Revenue model: free base, subscription for a few premium features.

I admit I suffer from Social Network burnout. I do find some of them useful, especially LinkedIn, and I can think of a few groups I am a member of where we could use CollectiveX – I am simply tired of creating zillion version of my profile. I’d like a “Profile Central” where all these new services could pick up my data from. Am I dreaming? Wasn’t AlwaysOn/GoingOn supposed to somehow resolve the profile portability problem?

Of course this is just my ranting, although the audience questions pointed in the same direction, albeit indirectly: nice functionality, but isn’t incumbent LinkedIn too entrenched for new social networks to challenge its position?

Echosign Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin’s task was perhaps more difficult, perhaps easier: unlike the other three, his service could not be identified with a few words, he had to explain a new process flow. On the other hand he is addressing an ugly enough problem that he captured everyone’s attention: No matter how well computerized we are, when it comes to signing contracts, we’re back to the world of paper, faxes, lost documents. Echosign is a web-based service that takes care of the entire process flow( see slide below) : getting documents signed (electronically or hand-signature by fax), filed and distributed as pdf, routed, approved, managed, archived.

While technically this is SaaS, I guess Software Enabled Service is a better description than Software as a Service:-) EchoSign addresses a painful enough problem with a simple and elegant solution that it won the Panel’s Award. Congratulations to Jason and team!

Zoho Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu did not bring us just one product but an entire productivity Suite. How do you demo 4 products in 5 minutes? (Not that he only has four, at my last count the company has 10 Zoho-branded products). The solution: you don’t. Instead of focusing on individual products, you demonstrate the power and ease of integration between them.

Sridhar pulled up a sample spreadsheet of sales figures and a chart; he changed some numbers in Zoho Sheet and of course the chart changed, too. Next with a few clicks he dropped data in a window and voila! – a Zoho Creator application just got created. We then saw the data entry form show up on a slide – part of Zoho Show. The same form, or other data views can also be embedded in Zoho Writer documents, or even in an email. As Sridhar kept on switching screens, one could almost get lost, but he got his point through: whichever application he changed the data in, it would show up real-time in the other application. I don’t have his presentation, but can present a similar scenario I used on my blog earlier. First I collected votes in a blog post using a Zoho Polls entry form –here are the results. Useful chart, not as impressive as the spreadsheet’s charting capability though, so I dropped the results in Zoho Sheet, which generated the pie chart below:

The chart has it’s own URL, it’s easy to embed in a blog (this post), document or presentation, and so does the entire spreadsheet itself.

Clearly the format of the Zoho presentation was a compromise, focusing on integration, but I think it paid off, the audience clearly got the picture that instead of randomly selected applications Zoho has a complete office/productivity Suite to offer. The tradeoff of course was not seeing detailed functionality – which is probably why panelist Peter Rip commented that the creation of these documents did not appear to be a collaborative process. As I have played with the Zoho Suite before, I know it is indeed very collaborative and the Zoho folks might want to call Peter and offer him a more detailed demo. The audience was very interested, in fact after the official event Zoho set up a demo station outside where they continued answering questions for a good half an hour or so. Some of those inquiries were about the ability to buy and implement the Suite behind a corporate firewall – something that Zoho is not ready for at this stage, but the interest level certainly bodes well for a future corporate business model. The immediate reward to Zoho came in the form of votes: Zoho won the Audience’s Choice for Best Product Award.

Congratulations to Sridhar and his team!

Last, but not least, thanks to IBDNetwork for organizing another successful event.

This was just the beginning: Office 2.0 enthusiast, or just about anybody interested, come join as at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, October 12-13.