Archive for September, 2008

This week it became public that General Electric have decided to roll out Zoho Docs for it’s employees. There are circa 400,000 user desktops so its a pretty substantial  development in the world of online collaboration.

Apparently they got rid of Google Docs because of the intrusiveness of Google. Understandable really. Apparently this is a quote from an unnamed source in GE

A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down. The spokesperson said the Google application was intrusive and the ads started to become a nuisance.

Interestingly Zoho have agreed to help GE setup their own instance of Zoho Docs on their internal servers. I really wonder what the implication is for future large rollouts. Will they all be hosted on the organisations servers or is this a once off?

otherInbox is one of those simple ideas that you say aha! as soon as you hear it. Founded by Joshua Baer OtherInbox automatically organizes commercial email so that its easy to find the messages you care about most and ignore the ones you don’t have time for.

From the demonstration at TechCrunch50 it seems really easy to identify who is sending you mail and allows you to go through content you are interested in when you feel like it rather than the current system where most people have email from subscriptions coming directly into their inbox. Basically for any time you are not giving your email to a real person use OtherInbox.

The user gets unlimited email addresses after signing up and use a different email address for each service they sign up for. For example:
amazon@enda.otherinbox.com
facebook@enda.otherinbox.com,
etc

OtherInbox now sorts these emails into folders. The user can get the information whatever way they want, e.g. aggregated into an email client or via RSS.

Here is the Tech Crunch demo from yesterday.

Just after watching OpenTrace.org demo at TechCrunch 50. They done a great job. The panel was very interesting. Marc Benioff linked it to Food Traceability mentioning a possible connection between it and something like FairTrade.

They’re also a good lesson on how much a pitch or presentation can be improved with practice. The difference in their presentation and English at TechCrunch50 was massive.

The site should be back up after the storm of traffic thats inevitable swamping it at the moment.

I’m sure there will be more polished demos very soon but here is the original “Garage” demo.

OpenTrace Demo Part 1

 

OpenTrace Demo Part 2

Sridhar Vembu the CEO of AdventNet who are the creators of Zoho is profiled in this weeks (Sep 4th) Economist magazine.

The main thrust of the article on the disruption Zoho is causing to the IT market. “..his firm accounts for a drop in the $3.4 trillion ocean that Gartner, a consultancy, thinks companies will spend on IT this year”

The article gives a background to the history of how Zoho was built, the organisations lack of spend of marketing and focus on efficiency in their operations.

From today SaaSTek are officially country resellers of Zoho CRM and Zoho Creator products for Ireland.

This is a very exciting development for our company as we continue helping companies cut their technology costs and improve their business competitiveness. 

Many thanks to Ian Wenig (below), looking forward to working with ye guys.

Zoho from Daniel Brusilovsky on Vimeo
 

On Monday I was shown a demo by Harsh Avardhan of the new Zoho Creator 3.0.

Funnily enough Zoho have created their own cartoon to explain Zoho Creator which is very similar to what Google did for Chrome. Seemingly I was the first person to see it :) 

I’m only surprised that there are no posts about the announcement on the Zoho Blog yet.

For those of you unfamiliar with Zoho Creator it allows you to create Database Driven applications easily and cost-effectively without the need for expensive servers. The applications reside in the Zoho “cloud”.

There are two free packages for Personal and Business users allowing 5 applications and 200mb of free storage. After that price plans increase varying with nunber of applications that can be created and storage space.

Among the highlights of Harsha’ presentation for me were:

• The marketplace where developers/companies who have created apps can supply their work similar to AppExchange
• A new facility to post requests for applications that are delivered to all the Zoho Creator Developer community. This is a classic problem in software development, reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again….
• There is increased ability to use HTML when designing forms

It’s obvous that Zoho are targetting applications for every concievable business sector and function being developed on the platform and not just 1 degree of seperation from CRM type systems.

We’re investigating migrating a number of applications to Zoho Creator which could prove very interesting.

A Zoho Creator demo shows a screencast of how the system works

I just read this article on Read, Write, Web. It’s very comprehensive and goes through all the main players. Their message is that if you’re not familiar with these technologies then you’re going to be left behind.

“If you were interviewing someone for a position with your company and they admitted that they didn’t know anything about the new trends and innovations taking place in their field, what would you think? Likely, what you would think is “next candidate, please.”

Article here

Says it all really.

Following on from my last post about Office 2.0 in San Francisco.

Ishmael has put together a system called Extreme Productivity System. It’s a combination of Office 2.0 tools and the processes from David Allen. Personally I’ve been following This System, the problem is that is based on using Outlook 2003 which I don’t do anymore (Zoho Mail) so I’m going to look into Ishmaels system

This is a very impressive directory of current Office 2.0 productivity solutions out there. There’s a handy menu on the right to filter by application type.

The chap who put this directory together is called Ismael Ghalimi who is organising the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

This looks like a fascinating event, the opening Keynote speaker is David Allen ala Getting Things Done.

This is a great introduction to the Zoho product suite from Raju. Especially worthwhile for those who may be familiar with online office applications.

Raju from Zoho talking on FastCompany.tv