Hong Kong based EditGrid, a leading online spreadsheet that has also partnered with other Web Office startups, has just closed its Series A funding of $1.25M from WI Harper. We confirmed this with the founder and CEO, David Lee.
EditGrid, which we last covered in February 2007, was built by the 8-person company Team and Concepts Limited (TnC). The actual development of EditGrid began in January 2006 with funding from Silicon Valley-based angel investors and matching funds from the Hong Kong government. EditGrid was actually present in this market before Google Spreadsheets. Its public beta was launched in April 2006, two months before Google launched Google Spreadsheets. EditGrid got out of beta on 14 February, 2007 and then launched its subscription services. Since then, EditGrid has been partnering with a large variety of partners world-wide. Currently EditGrid has partnerships with Central Desktop, Salesforce, ShareMethods, StartForce and ThinkFree.
Adobe has just unveiled the official name of its much talked about Adobe Apollo product: Adobe Integrated Runtime, or Adobe AIR for short. Adobe is also announcing a beta version of the runtime, which will include Ajax
and HTML support. This means developers can create an Apollo application entirely based on HTML, without using Flash at all.
For those who may not know, Adobe Apollo was the code name for the cross-operating runtime developed by Adobe that allows developers to create Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. There's a myriad of possible use cases for this technology, from productivity applications that work both online and offline, to music players such as Finetune that can be accessed via the desktop.
Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb
In the area of computers and Internet, the open source movement is almost as old as computers themselves. In the beginning there was Multics, Unix, BSD, Minix etc. Than came Richard Stallman's GPL, GNU and FSF. That was followed by Linux, Apache and many more projects. Over time, the open source movement has begun extending to things beyond software and technology - to include media (video, pics and blogs etc.), creative content (creative commons) and communities.
Since the open source movement affects our lives in more and more ways, let's take a look at how the open source model is interacting with our market driven economic system.
AltSearchEngines is asking everyone to go one day, this Tuesday (whatever your timezone may be), without using one of the major search engines; Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, or Ask. This was inspired by a similar Between The Lines experiment.
AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight wants everyone to try one of the alt search engines in his most recent Top 100 Alt Search Engines list. Then on Wednesday, leave a detailed comment on AltSearchEngines describing how it went, and share your experience with others.
There are some ground rules:
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This week Ask.com released a new user interface, which they nicknamed Ask3D. The vertical layout scheme looks very unusual for a general purpose search engine. However it's aesthetically pleasant. But as well as the visual enhancements, the new vertical scheme has other wisdom behind it. Let me explain with this graph:
The alliance between newspaper publishers and Yahoo! that was unveiled last November has now grown to 17 publishing groups representing over 400 daily papers, reports Red Herring. Hearst, the publisher of 12 daily newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said the alliance has already generated millions of dollars in additional revenue this year.
The partnerships, which are currently based around job classifieds with Yahoo!'s HotJob's service, allow newspapers to greatly expand their audience. "Most newspapers' web sites reach between 10 and 20 percent of their audience in their local market. Yahoo!'s reach in the same audience in local markets is 70 to 80 percent," Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo! marketplaces, said at a conference this week. The alliance will expand to search advertising on the newspapers' websites later this year, and display advertising during 2008.
This week the winners of the 11th annual Webby Awards, billed nowadays as the "Oscars of the Internet", were announced at a ceremony in New York. Much of the publicity was over the fact that David Bowie was there (Prince attended last year). But other than that, what were the highlights of the Webbys? In this post we'll review the winners list, and in particular the web 2.0 sites.
All up, there were nearly 70 categories. In the categories focused on web technology and social media, the clear winners were Flickr, LinkedIn and last.fm. Flickr picked up 3 awards (5 including two Peoples Choice ones), for Best Practices, Best Visual Design - Function, and Community. LinkedIn grabbed 2 awards, for Services and Social Networking. And last.fm won the Music category, plus was voted Peoples Choice for Best Practices.
Written by Angus Lau and Gang Lu
Hong Kong, along with much of Asia (with the exception of China), is still playing catch-up with Web 2.0 in 2007. This is due to lack of initiatives by companies and lack of knowledge and interest from the market. It was only late 2006 that we began to see more Web 2.0 information being fed to the public; at that time we also noticed an increase in the number of startups being formed in Hong Kong and releasing services to the public.
Akamai Technologies delivers 15-20% of all web traffic each day, which puts them in a unique position to monitor the status of the global web. This week, they released their previously customers-only web performance visualization tools to the public. The set of six flash-based visualizations let users identify how data is moving across the Internet in real-time.
The flagship app is the Real-time Web Monitor, which shows the countries (or Canadian provinces or American states) that are experiencing the most traffic load. As I write this, California and the United Kingdom are together accounting for 15.5% of global data requests. The app also lets you view the ten worst performing cities (Hong Kong and Tokyo are really hurting right now), and the area experiencing the most outside attacks on the network. (Venezuela is not a safe place to be a server this afternoon.)
