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Windows Live Photo Gallery: Poor Design or Shrewd Business Move?

Posted on September 10, 2007 ·

I had Windows Live Photo Gallery installed on my computer – for about 15 minutes. Although I despise the aggressive, sneaky nature of Live Installer, which pollutes my PC with Windows Desktop Search without authorization, I still wanted to give it a try, primarily because my favorite Picasa is hopelessly single PC-minded. Surprisingly for Google, the champion of Web-based computing, Picasa is a major pain to use on multiple computers – so I thought I’d give the Microsoft product a try.

I am surprised at the mostly positive initial feedback about this feature-less product. Yes, it’s fast, yes, tagging is easy – but has anyone given any thought to why we’re tagging in the first place? Other than becoming data-input clerks, what can you do with Photo Gallery?

Picasa treats tags/labels as albums, and as any decent photo album would do, allows re-arranging the display order of individual photos by simple drag & drop. It also allows playing slideshows along with music, creating movies and a myriad of other options. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to play a slideshow in the pre-determined order – that’s all.

Well, almost. If you publish your photos to Live Spaces, you can create a basic slideshow rearranging the display order of your pictures. (I could not find this option, but let’s believe the Help text.) Now I’m really confused: as much as I am a Web-computing fan, photos (and video) are the one area I still prefer to use a local machine for, after all we’re manipulating fairly large files. So why would Microsoft create desktop photo manipulation software that allows extensive data input yet requires users to go online to enjoy their pictures?

Is this another case of thoughtless, poor design? Frankly, I doubt it. Perhaps Microsoft just showed their hands regarding the future Live business model. Charging for extra storage is nothing new, but I suspect we’ll see bandwidth-based pricing sooner or later. The PC-components of Live are just the hook to get us online, and pay for accessing our own data – and believe me, the bandwidth usage of a 20-minute slideshow will be quite significant. Surprised

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Office 2.0: Zoho Announces Business Edition

Posted on September 6, 2007 ·

When Zoho introduced their first Web application a year and a half ago, they were little known, and nobody cared about their business model. But then something unusual happened: they kept on pumping out new applications every few weeks or so, and soon became the #2 (or by some count #1) force in the Web application space. While some of their competitors went out of business, others got acquired, others charge for their offering, Zoho continues to offer their services for free. Needless to say the business model comes up a lot more often nowadays.

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu made it clear he is in for a Marathon, not a sprint, and he knows what he’s talking about: in the past decade he has already built a solid, profitable company, Adventnet, whose financial stability allows him to play in the SaaS market. He pledged to always offer most of his products free to individuals, yet he hinted there would be a revenue-generating business version of Zoho Services some day. But his priority was to build a solid set of services first, without having to rush to revenue. Until recently the emphasis was on perfecting the individual products (15 of them), and in the past few months Zoho started to focus on integrating them. Zoho Notebook, although in “individual” product, was a major milestone as it tightly integrated several other offerings: document editing, presentations, spreadsheets, communication, collaboration. The recently announced Zoho Start page was the first step in pulling several existing products together in a home base.

As a next logical step, this morning at the Office 2.0 Conference Zoho Business Edition will be introduced. The next two slides will help understand the segmentation between Zoho Personal and Business editions.

Personal is essentially the already existing set of services, with a few (those with gray background) additional ones still in private beta: Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts. It’s interesting to note that these “new” services have already been on the Zoho palette for quite a while, but they were offered as part of Zoho Virtual Office, a downloadable Outlook-like product – they are now being rearchitected as a Web service. All of these services are, and continue to be offered free. The services in the right box, Meeting, Projects, Creator and CRM also have a free level, but they will have a premium, for-free version as well.

The next slide shows Zoho Business, essentially the same as Personal, with an added infrastructure layer added to manage ones domains, locations, users, groups, and also offering multiple levels of security, backup and enhanced support. Zoho Business is currently in private beta.

Despite recent speculation, this is not Zoho’s entrance to the Enterprise market.

Zoho Business is primarily meant for the SMB / SME segment (small businesses). That is not to say that the core Zoho applications would not be “enterprise ready” (they have large corporate accounts in Japan), but it’s not what they focus on for now. Anyone who follows Zoho will know that they are obsessed with cutting out fat: it’s a lean, efficient operation. The last thing Sridhar wants is to hire an expensive sales force, which is still the way to enter the Enterprise. Case in point: mighty Google themselves- I’ve shared my impressions of a Google Enterprise presentation, where I felt I was teleported to an Oracle or IBM Sales Show from the 90’s. Let them be the evangelists, and wait for the currently SMB services emerge in the Enterprise.

(Disclosure: I am an Advisor to Zoho)

Related posts: Between the Lines, /Message, Web Strategy, Centernetworks, Mashable, Read/WriteWeb, Zoho Blogs, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Webware.com,

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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How Apple Sc****d their Most Loyal Customer

Posted on September 5, 2007 ·

Today was supposed to be Office 2.0 day, with the conference starting tomorrow, pre-conference reception tonight, and the Unconference today. Yet Apple decided to steal the day, and with the flurry of announcement it’s hard to find anything but Apple news on TechMeme. But that’s not the worst.

This years Office 2.0 conference will be an Apple Lovers’s geek-feast. I guess the official version is focusing on mobility, proving that the iPhone is business-ready. Either way, this year all conference attendees receive an iPhone which will be actively used throughout the 2-day event. It’s hardly a gift, considering that the individual registration fee tripled from last year, but it doesn’t change the fact: we’re talking about 500 iPhones.

Conference-organizer Ismael Ghalimi did not receive a special deal from Apple, in fact he was not even allowed to buy the gadgets in batch, he had to do it one-by-one, which created its own logistical nightmare. The ‘default’ was the 4G model, which is now being discontinued, but attendees could pay an extra $100 to receive the 8G model – which today just saw its price dropped from $599 to $399. Of course this is great news for consumers, but I wonder what attendees will think. Will they ask for refunds?

Oh, before I forget, Ismael also purchased 60 iMacs (!) as demo units for the conference. It’s hard to find a more loyal fan/customer – yet today he may feel somewhat inconvenienced (if he even had time to follow the news) by Apple.

Some of the (many) post on the subject: Techdirt, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Apple, Computerworld, dslreports.com, Epicenter, Ars Technica, WebProNews, Digital Noise, IP Democracy, Between the Lines, Guardian Unlimited, Macworld, bub.blicio.us, Digital Daily, Live Coverage …, MacRumors, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, The Utility Belt, BloggingStocks, jkOnTheRun, Techomical, Channel 9, and of course Fake Steve himself.

Update (9/7): Ismael strikes back. On the phone

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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JotSpot…Gspot … Google Wiki

Posted on September 3, 2007 ·

So they figured Gspot would be too risky a name for Google’s JotSpotTongue out, it’s now (almost) official: the new name will be Google Wiki.

JotSpot was (I assume still is) a good, user-friendly wiki, and if it comes back now, it took Google almost an entire year to release it after the acquisition. I hope that means they rethought everything and integrated JotSpot well into a number of offerings.

  • It could provide for much better document management than the current Docs &­ Spreadsheets UI.
  • It overlaps with Page Creator, also with the simplified version found in Google Groups – in fact Groups which is no longer just email lists but a rudimentary collaboration platform and JotSpot could very well be merged / integrated.
  • Finally JotSpot tried to provide primitive applications (spreadsheet, calendar..etc) all of which have a better Google counterpart, so one would hope they will be replaced, too.

In fact there are so many opportunities to waive the wiki into Google’s current offerings, I can’t even imagine what it would look like… or, perhaps, are we going to see a standalone wiki? Thinking

Related posts: Google Operating System, Google Blogoscoped, Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, Download Squad , Mashable!, Insider Chatter, Ben Barren, Squash, Parislemon.

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Zoho Start Integrates Several Applications Under the Same Hood

Posted on August 29, 2007 ·

It’s Web Office Week at Read/WriteWeb, and Richard opens with a historical overview of Web Office developments starting from 2005. Like him, I was an early user of Writely, which later became Google Docs – but soon after Writely there were several other point applications, and by March 2006 I felt I was “losing the race” – too many apps, hard to keep track, my data fragmented in million places. The solution came a few months later:

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.

Fast-forward a good year, and today we’re seeing the launch of Zoho Start, which brings several Zoho Apps under a single page. (You’d think with the Office 2.0 Conference just a week away they’d reserve announcements for the conference – I suppose this means there is still enough ammunition for next weekWink).

For now Zoho Start includes your text documents (Writer), spreadsheets (Sheet) and presentations (Show). You can organize your information across document types into folders and tag them (mouse over any item and a pull-down arrow appears, with action items including tagging). Of course you can filter to only view spreadsheets or presentations, text documents, or All. Search finds documents independent of type, too, and this will be particularly important as Zoho continues to integrate more applications into the Start page, eventually including Mail, too. The Zoho Apps icon in the upper right corner provides access to other applications, including those not (yet) integrated into Start.

You can switch between list view (above) to box view, which segments your documents into separate boxes based on the application that created them. For appearance I prefer this view, and it works well with relatively few applications and documents.

I do believe that as one’s online document depository grows, lists, boxes, browsing titles become less and less helpful. We’ll create and store information online, and the document format, the application used to record our thoughts becomes less relevant. It’s just digital information findable by using search, clicking on tags, or organizing them into logical folders. I could also see the flow of textual information organized into a wiki, extended by spreadsheet and presentation capabilities.

Zoho Start will continue to be improved. Eventually I envision Mail, Calendar, Task abilities added, and at that point a more dynamic, time and task-focused view might be appropriate, with information “buried” in docs, sheets, presentations..etc “hiding” under the cover yet easy to pull up by search.

(Disclosure: I’m an Advisor to Zoho)

Related posts: Read/WriteWeb, Mashable, CenterNetworks, Wired, Blognation, Between the Lines, Webware, CyberNet News, Zooomr, Insider Chatter, Lifehacker.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , ,
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Google & Zoho: Friend or Foe?

Posted on August 23, 2007 ·

When Zoho introduced the offline version of their word processor, Zoho Writer, no commentators (including yours truly) missed the chance to point out the irony that the solution is based on Google Gears, while Google’s own competing Docs do not have this capability yet.

Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic. (TechCrunch)

it’s very ironic that Zoho Writer has incorporated off-line features before its competitor, Google Docs, did. And by using Google Gears software developed by Google itself! (Proud Geek)

Donna Bogatin @ Insider Chatter went further:

What IS up with the would be Microsoft Office killer, Google Apps? Chief Googler Eric Schmidt proclaims “Search, Ads and Apps” is the new Google worldwide domination motto, but he is helping competitors Sun StarOffice AND Zoho attempt to steal Microsoft’s thunder, while Google Office remains Microsoft Office killer MIA.

First, Google subsidizes free downloads of Sun’s supposed Microsoft Office replacement via its Google Pack.

Now, Google Gears powers direct Google Apps competitor Zoho in an offline initiative, while Google Apps itself remains firmly in the cloud!

Google is either planning something VERY big for Google Apps, or it is retrenching.

While I have no idea what the plans for Google Apps are – after the StarOffice announcement there was speculation whether the future is syncing to StarOffice or Gears-based offline – they are definitely not retrenching. This is not a matter of “who gets there first”. In fact it’s not even cut-throat competition. Of all the reports, I believe Techdirt got it right:

As we noted when Gears was first announced, Google was clearly interested in advancing the whole area of web-based software, not just in pushing its own apps. Just as Microsoft seems hesitant to give even the slightest endorsement of this model, Google recognizes that it will benefit, regardless of which offerings users choose in the short term.

Exactly. Any time you, me, any user makes a choice between Google Docs or Zoho Writer, Google Spreadsheet or Zoho Sheet, it’s clearly a competitive situation. But in other ways, Google’s and Zoho’s interests are well aligned. I’ve said a number of times before, it’s not about slicing the pie yet, it’s about making sure the pie will be huge . Both Google and Zoho have vested interest in promoting the paradigm shift from PC-based to Web-based computing. Competitors can be friends – it’s not unheard of, just think of arch-rivals Oracle and SAP: cut-throat competitors in the enterprise application market – yet as a database vendor, Oracle is an important SAP partner.

But let’s be clear, I’m not trying to give the impression the Gears-based Zoho development was the result of some grand Google-Zoho master plan. Nothing would be further from the truth. Google Gears is an Open Source project (check out Donna Bogatin’s post for details) , a significant one, and “Mother Google” is not trying to control who uses it for what. Let’s go to the source though: Dion Almaer of the Google Gears team said:

Of course, Google could have held Gears back and released it at the same time as a bunch of offline Google applications, but that isn’t the point. Gears is about making the Web a better place through offline, and we want the Web to be able to benefit.

That is why I am excited to see (Zoho) Writer join the list of developers that use Gears.

In fact Dion called to congratulate the Zoho team, and visited their Pleasanton office to interview Sridhar Vembu, CEO, and Raju Vegesna, Evangelist. Here’s the video:

And if that was not enough media, Raju is going live on the Computer America radio show at 7pm PST tonight. (I hope he won’t sing smile_wink)

(Disclaimer: I’m an Advisor to Zoho, however, the article above is a reflection of my own thinking, not a statement from Zoho.)

Further reading: Zoho Blogs, Insider Chatter

Filed Under: Collaboration, Open Source, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Now You Can Zoho Offline

Posted on August 21, 2007 ·

As much as I moved online I’m not naive enough to believe I’ll always have 100% broadband availability. Crazy shooters, limited conference availability, or just traveling to less covered areas (and I don’t mean here) – there will be times when we need our documents offline.

Seamless online/offline access has just become easier today, with Zoho introducing offline support for your Writer documents. Ironically, this has been implemented using Google Gears, not yet offered in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. (In all fairness, we don’t really know if a Gears-based offline mode in in the plans for Google docs, there was some speculation that StarOffice becomes an alternative).

In Zoho Writer you just click “Go Offline”, and if you don’t have it yet, first this will trigger the Google Gears download/install process, than, and any time after this it will simply download your Zoho documents to your local PC. Your documents are available at http://writer.zoho.com/offline. See more details on this video:

For now, offline access is read-only, but Zoho is working on providing active editing capabilities in the next few weeks. It’s worth mentioning that Zoho has long offered an alternative, the Zoho MS Office plugin (previous coverage here) .

Commenting is another important feature added in today’s update. Now that there are three recognized leaders – Google, Zoho, ThinkFree – on the online office market, niche players (e.g. Coventi) pop up here and there focusing on a particular area not supported by the “Big Three”. The problem with being a feature-based niche player is that you can never know when the “majors” add your feature-set. Zoho has just done it.

You can easily add a comment, and of course all users the document is shared to can do the same, making up a conversation-thread, indicated by a comment icon ( picture-1.png ) in the text. Clicking on it pulls up the actual comments (see below), or you can see all comments inside the document by clicking on the comments icon ( picture-4.png ) on the status bar.

Talk about conversation let’s not forget that Zoho Chat is integrated right into Writer, so you can have real-time conversation with your collaborators or leave comments. As usual, Zoho will continue enhancing the comments functionality.

(Disclosure: I’m an Advisor to Zoho)

For additional coverage, read: TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Mashable, Proud Geek, Open Source Guy, Techchee, Collaborative Thinking, TechBizMedia, Insider Chatter, Download Squad, jkOnTheRun, Office Evolution, CNET News.com, mathewingram.com/work, Ajaxian, CyberNet Technology News, Profy.Com, The Universal Desktop, PC World, Techdirt.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Everything on this Vista PC is an Afterthought

Posted on August 20, 2007 ·

OK, so I bit the bullet: after being so critical of Vista, I ended up buying a PC blessed cursed with this Operating System. Not that I changed my mind: I simply wanted an ergonomic desktop, for the times I’m stuck at the desk anyway. Costco had a fairly good promotional offer on a loaded super-duper-multimedia HP with this beauty of a display.

Well, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but this 22″ baby has beautiful colors, is fast and the most versatile I’ve seen – it can even pivot to portrait position – except I don’t know why I would want to do that, considering the software does not work, not even after the update.

But first things first: unpacking. This thing has a wireless keyboard and mouse, which is nice – but why on earth do I need to plug in a USB transmitter for them to work? This isn’t an after-market add-on, this configuration only comes with wireless. Talk about wireless, this being a desktop, my primary desktop connection will be via the LAN cable, but why does HP bundle another plug-in, a wireless antenna with this unit? (which, incidentally was missing from my package). Why not just build it in. OK, let’s move on: this whole multimedia center thingie (TV, DVR, remote) does not excite me a lot, but since it there, I will eventually figure out how to work it. But wait: for the remote to work, I have to … yes, you guessed it right, I have to plug-in yet another component, a wireless receiver.

I am not trying to expand the system: out-of-the-box, just to use the basic capabilities I have to plug-in three “extensions” that could very well have been built in. Are these features all afterthoughts? (And I haven’t even mentioned the jungle of cables into the monitor, including a USB connector to enable the two other USB ports on the side of the display).

The next two days were spent with installation, which primarily consisted of removing some of the junk software loaded by HP (I still could not get rid of the Yahoo Search-bar at the bottom!) and setting up my own stuff. I killed the 60-day Norton trial, not that McAfee is better, but it’s free with my Comcast subscription. Too bad it wouldn’t install. This turned out to be a case study on the worth of Customer Support:

  • Costco Concierge on the phone: after 4-5 minutes she is still stuck trying to spell my name – who has time for this? No way she can help me.
  • HP Online Support: quickly says the disclaimer that it’s not a HP product, so I should really go to the other vendor, but he will try to help anyway. Well, 8-10 minutes later he concludes I should go to Windows Safe mode for this install. Oh, boy. If I have to start safe-moding on a vanilla, out-of-the box machine, what else am I in for during the lifetime of this thing? I tell him I won’t do this exercise, will likely return the machine next day
  • McAfee Online Support: he is quite clueless, too, but has an interesting prospective: perhaps, despite the aborted installation (which I repeated 4 times, Control Panel-uninstall-reboot-install included) McAfee might actually be working properly on my machine. Although he didn’t seem to get the concept of corrupted (or missing files) and had no way to verify his idea, he still planted the bug in me, so later, on my own I found a McAfee diagnostic tool that verified that I have the correct setup on my system. So, perhaps I am protected. I guess that’s the definition of hopeware.

I will spare you the details of my two-day struggle with Vista, the fight with the idiotic permission-scheme, (can’t delete my own stuff), the incompatibilities, the fact that there’s less and less information to be found, other than from users – hey, even the User Manuals link points to nowhere… enough said already. After two days, I can use the system (the screen is beautiful) but I’m far from done.

I’m starting to see how this supposedly good deal will turn out to be more expensive then a matching Mac. The funny sad thing is, I myself talked about this, describing the $1,500 iPhone: it’s the cost of my own time.smile_sad . This whole Vista-Microsoft-HP-Dell-you-name-it enchilada is anything but user friendly, a pain to work with. In fact, “work” is the operational word here: I don’t want to work setting up this thing, I just want to use it. Perhaps Steve Jobs and co. are turning a disadvantage into an advantage: they are not the darlings of the corporate market.. so they have to focus on individual users, who don’t have an IT department to support them. That means they are just turning out usable, friendly boxes.

Oh, talk about boxes, Joel Spolsky has a hilarious post today: Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve, discussing Office 2007’s fancy box (which is the same design Vista comes in):

…I simply could not figure out how to open the bizarre new packaging.
…It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an utter F in the school of Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.
…It seems like even rudimentary usability testing would have revealed the problem. A box that many people can’t figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design.

Chris Pirillo responds: Windows Vista Isn’t for Developers?

Hm, now I really don’t know what to think. All this while I’ve been making the point that Vista is not for earthly users; now Chris makes the point it’s not for developers, either. So, who exactly is Vista meant to be for?

Update: How timely… read Raju, a Mac Convert’s testimony: Windows (Dell) to Mac: Thats a smooth ride. Damn. I have 90 days (Costco’s return policy) to make up my mind. But even if I take the smooth ride, no-one is paying for my wasted time….

Update #2: I’m speechless… but Vista has just given me another proof that’s it’s not meant for *users*. Here’s am error window:

Windows decided to mess with Firefox, without telling me, the owner of the computer what it did. OK, let’s click on the link, perhaps it tells us what happened:

What changes does it make?

It depends on the problem, but any changes made are related to how Windows runs the program.

blahblahblah … but it gets better:

How do I turn it off or turn it back on?

Adjustments to the Program Compatibility Wizard can be made by using Group Policy. For more information on how to use Group Policy, go to the Microsoft website for IT professionals.

So let’s get this straight: Vista makes changes to my system, to the most important program I use, Firefox, without asking me, without telling me what those changes were, how to undo them. And if I want to prevent such aggression in the future, I should go to the “IT Professionals” site.

Well, I won’t. A computer sold at Costco, BestBuy, Fry’s ..etc is a Consumer Device. I am a Consumer. This Operating System is NOT for consumers. Microsoft (via HP) sold me garbage.

I can’t wait for the Vista related Class Action cases.

Update: I think I’ll try this tweaky-thingy recommended at WebWorkerDaily.

Update (8/23): Dell must share my views of Vista, or in fact Windows in general, having shipped this laptop without any OS at all 😉

Update (8/23): Even a 6-year-old knows better… he is right, my next PC will be an Apple. And since I’m already doing most of my work on the Web, the transition won’t be a big deal.

OK, this is too much of a coincidence (or not?): when I described Microsoft Money as a showcase for what’s wrong with Microsoft’s Software + Service concept, Omar Shahine, a Microsoft employee responded – he experienced very similar problems. And what am I reading today on Omar’s blog? It’s been a bad month for Vista.

Filed Under: Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Romulan Attack Because of Microsoft Office

Posted on August 16, 2007 ·

The Romulans attack the Federation for they can’t read the Peace Treaty sent to them in Word 2307 format… they only have Word 2303. A hilarious cartoon by Geek and Poke. Joke? Perhaps … or not.

Yesterday I attended a (so-called) Enterprise 3.0 event hosted by the MIT Club of Northern California. So-called, as nobody really used the term, other than the moderator, Sramana Mitra. The panelists politely put the title on their slides, and then distanced themselves from the concept, Google’s Jonathan Rochelle being most outspoken: “we did not even get to Enterprise 2.0, why 3.0 now?” (Update: read JR’s follow-up post).

That said, it was an interesting event, clearly focused on Software as a Service (SaaS). 3 of the 4 presenters came with PowerPoint decks – kudos to Microsoft’s Cliff Reeves who only had 1 slide. In the spirit of eating one’s own dogfood JR’s “presentation” was a public Google Spreadsheet.

Next came Captain Picard Sramana: her slides suffered the same faith the Federation’s Peace Treaty did: they were created in a different version, and could not be opened on the presenters’s laptop. Host Nicolas Saint-Arnaud made a heroic effort trying to download a converter, but failed, so Sramana could not show her presentation. This happened in a room discussing SaaS where at least two (well, one and a half) online presentation tools were represented: Google’s future presentation app by Jonathan, and the existing Zoho Show by Sridhar. With a Web 2.0 tool, there s no dependency on having the correct software version on your machine, there are no updates, patches (in fact there are, managed behind-the-scenes by the service provider) – your slides (data) are instantly available anywhere, anytime.

I somewhat wonder if this was an intentional ploy on Sramana’s behalf: after all we can talk all we want about the benefits of working on the Web, nothing delivers a punchline as forcefully as a publicly failed download/patch… or the Romulan nukes, for that matter. (Will they still use nukes in the 24th Century?)

(Side-note to anyone delivering presentations: don’t ever try to download and apply an upgrade publicly, on a projection screen. Murphy’s Law will apply)

Update: See Sramana’s Nuggets from the event, including the slides. She says it was not a ploy… (but I may just have given her an idea 😉 )

Filed Under: Collaboration, Humor, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Entrepreneur Assist Launched – Powered by Zoho

Posted on August 15, 2007 ·

TechMeme’s algorithm is either buggy or smarter than I thought. This morning it linked two seemingly unrelated posts that both tackle the same underlying concept: measuring web site use.

Read/WriteWeb reported that Web Office suite provider ThinkFree hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February. Their 335,000 users (up from 250,000 in February) upload between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month. Impressive numbers. Of course, numbers can get tricky, revealing more than intended: comparing users and documents, it appears the average ThinkFree user creates 1 document every 4-5 months. Of course there is no “average user”, I suspect the real situation is that a lot of users just signed up and never came back (the famous 53,651), so in reality ThinkFree probably has a lot less but more active users.

Competitor Zoho does not track the number of documents created, but the current user number is 310,000 up about 110,000 on the last few months, showing a faster growth rate than ThinkFree. Today’s announcement of Entrepreneur Assist, a personal homepage by Entrepreneur.com, powered by Zoho applications will certainly accelerate that growth.

Entrepreneur.com is one of the largest small business sites, with millions of unique visitors per month… but why am I talking, let’s see some numbers:

Like I said, numbers are tricky, there are so many ways to look at them. Clearly a visit to search engine Google is a lot shorter than one to a content site, or one where users actually work, create a document, collaborate. For this reason the time users spend on a website is emerging as a an important metric. In fact if we look at time spent at the very same sites, we get a different picture:

As expected, users spend less time per visit on “read-only” sites, vs. the ones where they actually create something – and clearly teh Zoho apps will further improve this metric for entrepreneur.com. This is partly the reason behind the deal, but watch the video yourself.

The next video talks about what you can actually do on Entrepreneur Assist:

Related posts: CenterNetworks, Mind Petals, Web Worker Daily, Zoho Blog.

Somewhat related: American Bar Association launches free legal advice site for small online businesses.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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