Search Results for: "zoho creator"

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Guess the eBay Bid and You May Win the Very Last TechCrunch Party Ticket

Posted on August 16, 2006 ·

The TechCrunch party at August Capital will likely be the most lavish one – just look at the impressive list of party sponsors (see logos at the bottom).  There are 760 names on the attendance list, and yours truly holds the last position on the wiki – hey, I am a rock-solid Z-lister forever:-)

Mike Arrington put up the last two tickets for bidding on eBay, and he will donate all proceeds to the Entrepreneurs Foundation, a Bay Area non-profit organization.

And now the big news: there may potentially be one more ticket to win – right here. How high do you think bidding will go? Fill out the form below, and you can be the winner. (I’ve just realized that the script may not come through in a feed, so please click back to my post to access the form). The guess closest to winning bid amount will be awarded by:

  • A drink and photo with Mike Arrington if you are already on the attendee list (hey, there may be a kiss, too, but I can’t commit Mike to that )
  • The very last ticket, if you are not yet on the list.

Note: I will be closing the poll at 10am on the day of the party, The eBay bid will close at 4:15pm. Winner will be published and notified by email as soon as payment is verified. (i.e. the bid has to be real).   Update: The poll is now closed. The winner of the free

ticket is David Gobaud from Stanford, who guessed $537, and the winning

eBay bid was $501. Congrat’s and see you there!

Proof that this is for real:

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Lessons from the TechCrunch Wiki War

Posted on August 15, 2006 ·

Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch Parties have become “THE EVENTS TO ATTEND” in the Valley – in fact not just in the Valley: last time around I remember participants driving up all the way from San Diego, and this time people will fly in just to be there. The last party as well as the next one this Friday both sold out within hours after the announcement, and a lot of readers felt frustrated:

  • Some felt that first-come-first-served is not fair enough with such a short notice (an hour or so)
  • Some publicly asked for special consideration to get in
  • Some proposed to pay for “tickets”
  • Just about everyone complained for the lockups in the registration wiki.

I don’t envy Mike in this situation. It’s his party, his house (well, at least for the previous events), it would be perfectly OK for him to have an invitation-only party. Yet he obviously wants to see new faces, so he opens it up to anyone, but then of course he can’t please all… This time around, for the seventh TechCrunch Party hosted by August Capital there was more than the usual rush: the registration wiki has become constantly locked up and Mike was forced to move RSVPs to comments on his blog, closing the wiki.

Mike received ample feedback on why the wiki was not the right platform to handle hundreds of almost simultaneous registrations, and several entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to announce new offerings. Central Desktop announced a free public event wiki, and since it’s a hybrid not-just-a-wiki solution, Founder and CEO Isaac Garcia claims they do not have lockup issues (they use a form with a database in the background). Zoho Creator would have been another elegant solution.

However, what almost no-one talks about is that this was not simply a technical glitch. Having been lucky enough (?) to wake up 4am the day the wiki opened I managed to register myself at exactly position #100 in the wiki, then observe the wiki-war that soon ensued. The major “sins” I witnessed were:

  • Individual users registering entire blocks (dozen or more) names
  • The same users sitting on the wiki (blocking), probably while coordinating with their buddies who else to sign up
  • Previously registered names getting deleted

One can perhaps justify registering others, although I don’t know where the reasonable limit is ( I only signed up myself), but deleting others is the absolute cardinal sin. Apparently fair play is a strange concept to some.

This raises another issue though: are these people not aware that wikis provide a perfect audit trail and what they did can easily become public? Or do they simply not care? Is getting in on the TechCrunch party worth being displayed on a virtual “hall of shame”?

This particular incident aside, I think the major learning here is the overall lack of awareness of a typical wiki’s capabilities and how to “behave” while using it. I know many who’d like the collaborative capabilities but are afraid of “chaos” and the potential lack of civility… in short a major ‘wiki war’ if they open up editing to anyone. Most wiki platforms offer technical controls to limit chaos: even consumer /community focused WetPaint introduced several security schemes in their latest updates, and enterprise wikis like Socialtext and Atlassian’s Confluence have for long had elaborate security schemes – heck, that’s why they are “enterprise”.

Just as important as the permissioning is the role of social- behavioral norms, which clearly are more common and more forceful in a corporate environment, where all wiki “contributors” work for the same company. “Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism.” He also maintains a Best Practices wiki (hey, it’s the new skin!). Now, remember, it’s a wiki – you can contribute, not just read.

As for the TechCrunch Party, the guest list is currently at 738(!) and here’s a preview of who’s coming, courtesy of CustomCD.us. (who may have intended to keep this a surprise, but I found it anyway….)

Update (7/28/2007): Here’s another case of wiki “who done it”.

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Zoho Office Suite is Now Complete

Posted on June 22, 2006 ·

(Updated)
What a timing! When I wrote about Zoho yesterday, two products I mentioned, Zoho Show and Drive were still in the “pipeline”, unannounced, I simply guessed the URL’s. Today Zoho Show has been released as a “public beta”, and with this move we now have the first Ajax-based Office 2.0 Suite:

When I say complete, I simply mean that we now have a web-based service for the main applications that make up part of MS Office – completeness by far does not imply that Zoho is done for now. In fact, here’s a partial list of their additional offerings: Zoho Creator is a quick and easy application generator, Zoho Planner is an organizer, Zoho Drive is online storage (yet to be released).

The company also has business applications like “Virtual Office” and Zoho CRM, and a few other utilities to be found at the main Zoho page.

Instead of repeating myself, here’s a quick reference to my two previous posts on the significance of the Zoho Suite:

There’s also a good summary at ZDNet: Zoho releases Ajax presentation app – last piece of Web Office jigsaw?

Update (6/24): TechCrunch profiles Zoho Show.

Update (6/27): Office 2.0 evangelist Ismael Ghalimi agrees: Zoho is Complete.

Update (6/28): I was one of the first to complain how slow the PPT import to Zoho process was, so I’m really happy to announce that the Zoho team fixed it.  Now you can jumpstart your presentation by quickly uploading an existing Powerpoint deck.   I really love the responsiveness Zoho has shown repeatedly.

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Would You Rather Be First to Market or Better?

Posted on June 21, 2006 ·

(Updated)
Adam Kalsey thinks Michael Arrington is paid off:

“At Under The Radar a few months ago, Mike Arrington was one of the judges for a panel on web-based productivity apps. One of the companies that presented was Zoho, a company that’s building web office apps using OpenOffice.org as the backend. Arrington was particularly hostile toward Zoho and made it rather clear he didn’t like them. From my notes on the session…

Arrington: You’re perceived as second on everything. Features seem to be copies of everyone else. And PR efforts are too aggressive. Zoho: Not really. Arrington: You’ve gotten in fights on my blog comments with 37signals and Chillis. Zoho: they apologized. They’re copying us.

So imagine my surprise today when TechCrunch carried a blog entry thanking their current sponsors and making nice about all of them – including Zoho.

Zoho has quietly put together one of the best and one of the fastest Ajax office suites.

It seems that all it takes to go from “features seem to be copies of everyone else” to “best and fastest” is a little cash.”

Adam, I believe it’s the other way around. I know for a fact that Zoho (AdventNet) wanted to be a TechCrunch sponsor from the very beginning and Mike refused them. He did so in the spirit of what he stated, i.e. he would only accept sponsorship from companies that he actually truly believes in and as such writing positively about them would not become a conflict of interest.

So why did Mike change his mind? Well, I am not reading his thoughts, but I have a fairly good guess. Zoho has been diligently executing, coming out with more and more products (plus a few in the works), and it does not take a nuclear scientist to see their vision: to offer the most complete and eventually integrated suite of office / productivity tools over the web. It’s not only the individual products, but the full vision that differentiates Zoho, as I stated before. If Mike came around and realized this, I respect him for changing his view of the company.

Adam, I thank you for your post, as you pushed me to sit down and type up what I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while: If you’re not the first to market, does it mean you’re just a copycat? Can a startup “claim” a space that others should stay out of it?

The whole debate around Zoho products started on TechCrunch, when Mike posted a positive review of Zoho Writer:

“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).”

Than all of a sudden an entire lynch-mob arrived, led by Jason Fried of the 37Signals fame, who chastised Mike for covering “rip-offs” like Zoho’s products. (As brilliant as Jason is, I wonder why the Web2.0 camp should treat him as a cult-leader… but that’s worth another post some day). Clearly, some commenters thought “land-grab” should be the law of Web 2.0, new entrants have no right to compete, and TechCrunch should definitely not cover them.

A similar (but far more business-like) discussion ensued at the recent TiEcon conference, where Mike moderated a panel on “Web 2.0 – Why Now?” . Kevin Rose, Digg’s Founder was of the opinion that there’s no value in being a “me-too”, startups should always do new things. Yet on the same panel were Tony Conrad of Sphere and Emily Melton of DFJ, speaking for TagWorld. Both Sphere are TagWorld are addressing an existing market with mature “incumbents”, and Mike agreed with Tony and Emily that their approach is significantly different to give them a chance to be successful.

But forget panelist, let’s look at some of the truly big names in software. We would not have a Google today if Larry and Sergey simply had accepted the fact that Yahoo “owned” search. How about Microsoft? How many truly “new” products do they have? Office? Years before Word I used WordStar, and Excel was a “me-too” compared to Lotus 1-2-3. Access? Hm… perhaps Dbase II from Ashton Tate? The very existence of the Microsoft’s OS monopoly is due to IBM’s generously stupid license deal with them, and Bill Gates’s shrewd deal with the creator of QDOS.

The list could go on, but I think the point is clear: there is no land-grab in software. “First mover advantage” is significant in some areas – like Kevin’s Digg, since it depends on a network effect – but in others the second or third player to the market may just execute better. (Btw, second to the market does not mean copycat, since anyone will likely recognize that developing these products takes some time, so parallel efforts are going on at different companies – but timing is beyond the point here anyway). Update (7/22): Innovate or Imitate…Fame or Fortune? by Don Dodge list additional examples, and so does his new post on Zune.

At a previous post I went to great length explaining why I consider Zoho’s offering superior to others. Without repeating the entire post, here’s the summary: individual products may or may not be “better” than the competitors, but at least they are equal, and Zoho is the ONLY complete Web Office Suite (and more). They may not have been first to the market with the individual products, but they likely will be the first in achieving three major steps:

  • Complete Suite: Writer, Sheet, Show, Drive, Creator, Planner. Oh, and they happen to offer a complete “Virtual Office” as well as CRM. (Please note, Drive and Show are not yet announced, but it didn’t take a lot to guess the URLs. Update (6/22): Zoho Show has just been released. Au revoir, Powerpoint!)

  • Since they are the only ones with all the components, they will also be the first ones to integrate these products (remember when you could not move data between Excel and Word?)

  • The last step in the “master plan” has to do with this chart– but I’ll keep it for a separate post.

When you look at all the above, it’s hard not to see innovation. Is it Product or Business Innovation? As a user I really don’t care, I’ll be just happy to enjoy the benefits.

Update (6/21): The comment thread below is worth reading through: Zoho received anonymous criticism, which prompted CEO Sridhar Vembu to show up here and promise immediate investigation. Within half an hour he came back with the facts, and two hours later he reported the copyright issue fixed. I’m impressed by his responsiveness, which is consistent with my previous positive experience of help and support at various levels in the company. To complete the story, please read Sridhar’s post on his own blog.

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Is Evil More Readable than Good?

Posted on June 15, 2006 ·

Dennis Howlett recently ran a readability test on some blogs he follows. The Gunning Fog index is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content is.

This reminded me of another test I wrote about, the Gematriculator, which calculates the Evil / Good ratio of a website.

Now for the shocking result: I took a sample of blogs I read, and ran them through both test. Blogs with a higher Evil ratio appear to be more readable! Wow! But of course the sample was too small, to really see if there is strong correlation we’d need a larger sample. So, in the name of science (?) please fill in the form below, using the results from the Readability test and the Gematriculator:

If the form does not work in your feed, please click through to my blog to complete it. When I have a large enough sample, I will publish the statistics.

Thanks for your participation!

Update (6/15): The form I created is fairly basic, but there is a lot more you can do with Zoho Creator, as this animated tour demonstrates.

Filed Under: Blogging, Humor, Misc, Personal Productivity ·
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Zoho – the “Safer Office”

Posted on May 26, 2006 ·

(Updated)
It’s somewhat ironic that in the very days I’ve just written about Duet, the joint SAP-Microsoft product, I am seriously thinking of escaping from Microsoft-prison, and switching to the most promising WebOffice (Office 2.0) suite. Perhaps I am part of the trend that prompted Vinnie to consider Duet a “nice-to-have” only, but generally too little, too late. (I actually disagree with him, Microsoft’s lock on corporate users is far heavier than on individuals or small businesses.. but that’s another discussion). Update: I’ve had this post half-written for a while, and now we’re getting warned left and right: “use Word in safe mode“, “don’t open Word attachments from Outlook” – the fix from Microsoft is not expected until mid-June. WTF? That’s three weeks away! I am sick of it, just as much as I am sick of Outlook forgetting where the address book is again, freezing on me frequently, and I am especially sick of MS crippling my computer via the automatic Windows updates. While I can’t get rid of Windows (just yet), I can certainly get rid of buggy unsafe Office. Office 2.0, here I come!

But what’s Office 2.0? First of all, terminology: some call it Office 2.0, others Web Office: the point is to have web-based applications that are accessible via a browser, without any download, that will store the data files on the web, too (sorry AjaxWrite, you are out), thus making all my stuff accessible from any computer, any time (as long as I have Internet access).

I’ve been using Writely for a while, so when I first found Zoho Writer, it was a non-event: both editors are equally good, convenience wins, no need to switch. Are any of these Microsoft Word killers? Scoble would laugh it off, they would not stand a feature-by-feature comparison. So what? I am part of the 90% crowd that barely uses 10% of Word’s functionality anyway. Then I found Thumbstack, a web-based “mini-powerpoint”, that allows me to share and collaborate on presentations easily. It does not do a lot of fancy things, amongst them the animated transitions – great, so now I can focus on substance in my presentations, rather than disruptive entertainment. What about a spreadsheet? Zoho Sheet is easy to use, and is aesthetically pleasing – a point so often missed. Is it as poweful as Excel? Of course not. But my Excel knowledge is probably on the level of Lotus 1-2-3 anyway, so for me, Zoho is the Excel-killer. I also have Stikipad, Calcoolate, Box.net … and a few others – all in my Firefox “Office 2.0” bookmark.

The only problem is, when I am not on my own PC, sometimes I forget what’s where… and of course my data files reside with the various service providers, and I am not completely at ease with my digital life being so fragmented. See where I am heading? This move to the Web is liberating, but the plethora of different services causes a bit of chaos. There are two basic concepts to deal with the chaos:

  • Some of the Web storage companies, like Box.net, Omnipage, Openomny ..etc .. offer their open API’s to application providers, or make one-to-one tight integration and propose that we store all our data centrally, no matter which application accesses them. This is definitely a step forward, in terms of data management, but I am still dealing with point applications, without any integration between them..
  • The second concept obviously is one-stop-shopping: is there one service that offers ALL the MS Office capabilities (with the common simplification we just discussed)? The answer is increasingly yes: Zoho is releasing new applications at an impressive speed, and they come with 1G of storage. While I would not have left Writely for the sake of Zoho writer only, the abililty to have everyting under one hood is just too damn tempting. I can have Writer, Sheet, Presenter (due out in the very near feature) all from the same source, my data is stored at the same place, and although currently these applications require individual registrations, in the near future they will be available with a single sign-on.

The Zoho guys also promise integration between these applications, and I have reason to believe they will be able to pull it off – after all, they already have the Zoho Virtual Office, which incorporates several of these offices in an integrated fashion. AdvantNet, a 500-person company (of which about a 100 work on Zoho) runs entirely on Zoho Virtual Office. Currently Virtual Office is a downloadable server-side product accessible via the Web, but Zoho will offer a Web-hosted version in the future. Without integration an Office 2.0 is not really Office 2.0, just a collection of online applications. (For those who may not remember, it took Microsoft long years to achieve some level of integration in their Office; for several years and throughout several releases “integration” was copy/paste, and quite painful as such.)

Zoho leverages a good deal between the different product offerings: some parts of Virtual Office make it into the individual applications, and vice versa, some of the standalone products become part of Virtual Office. For example 1G storage is now an implicit part of using the applications, but Zoho Drive will soon be available as a standalone service, too. Ah, and let’s not forget about Zoho Creator, which is exactly what the name suggests: an easy web-application creator. They even go beyond traditional Office functionality, into the transactional world buy providing Zoho CRM, a web based, or downloadable full-featured CRM system. Fully featured means supporting the full sales-related workflow, including vendors and purchase orders all the way to sales orders and invoicing… definitely more then just a “glorified contact manager” as the other guy is often referred to.

Listening and responding to customers is an area a lot of companies fail nowadays – Zoho seems to excel here, too. As part of research for this post I looked at earlier reviews, and several features reported “missing” from Writer are already included in the current product. There is a direct feedback link from the applications, and the longest response time I experienced was a few hours – sometimes it’s just minutes. In comparison, a question I posted on the Writely forum over two weeks ago is still unanswered – I guess those guys are busy finding their place in Google.

Summing it up: Zoho pumps out new applications at an amazing rate (check the site for a few more I haven’t even mentioned). While one by one most of their applications are comparable to at least another web-based application, I am not aware of any other company offering such a complete suite, with that level of support and the realistic prospect of integrating the applications soon. For me the choice is obvious: Zoho is my Office 2.0 Suite.

I’d like to touch on another issue, namely the value of being first, “original” vs. doing something better the second time – but for the sake of readability I’ll break it out to another post – soon.

Update (5/27): Assaf, who made blog conversations really trackable by bringing us co.mment read my post and gave the Zoho Virtual Office a try. His overall impression is positvie, but he also includes some criticism – just as he should. One thing I learned is that Zoho listens and moves fast. Another obeservation (of mine) is that they seem to move in iterations:

  • The downloadable Zoho Virtual Office has been around for a while (they run a 500-person company on it)
  • Now they are focusing on individual “Office” components making them available on the Web
  • Finally they will relase their own hosted version of Virtual Office probably incorporating may improvements they’ve made in the standalone products.

Update (6/6 -yes, the famous 666!): Google Spreadsheet is out, the blogosphere is abuzz, and I won’t have the time to write today, but at least I wanted to point to Ismael’s article, since he arrives to the same conclusions I did…

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