Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.
I recently outlined why I'm sick of the 'ROI in web 2.0' discussion. To be specific, the debate as to whether there is one at all.
In that post, I gave examples of how naysayers reacted to social media tools in the past - and how they were left in the dust of those who experimented with these web 2.0 tools. So, where do these naysayers come from? Why is there a resistance to web 2.0? In this post I'll explain how to sell social media to those people and/or your boss!
IBM’s got BlueTwit. Oracle’s testing OraTweets. SAP’s experiments include ESME, SAP Talk (laconi.ca), ShoutIt and apparently others. Yammer has an ad-hoc base at thousands of companies. But so far, no large corporation has rolled out microsharing company-wide.
Enter Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Senior Managers for Social Technology, and better known as the guys who built Blue Shirt Nation. Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation went on to become the prime internal enterprise 2.0 case study in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Now they’re about to launch Mix, an enterprise microsharing application.
Some traditional enterprise IT vendors are selling the line that SaaS is a passing phase, that it is "old wine in new bottles". They are telling their market that SaaS is really no different from the discredited Web 1.0 Application Service Provider (ASP) model or even that it is simply the ghost of the ancient mainframe Service Bureau come back to haunt us all. This post shows why their analysis is wrong. It also shows why some traditional enterprise IT vendors feel so threatened by SaaS and why the economic downturn just made this a major issue.
Swirrl is a wiki-like application that was built using Semantic Web technologies and launched as a beta last week. We heard about it in the comments to our post about the lack of commercial RDF applications on the Web.
As with most Semantic Web apps, it's a little difficult to describe what Swirrl is. On its homepage Swirrl is said to be "like a wiki, but better." The further explanation is that it's a web application that "allows your team to store, share, edit and analyze information." Basically its a data collaboration app. The main feature of Swirrl is a wiki interface, for editing web pages. But it also has spreadsheet and database functionality too.
Mumboe isn't just another enterprise collaboration suite. Instead, they focus on doing one thing and doing it well: making business agreements searchable. That's a very unique need they fill, which is why is why they already have 3000 customers using their free Express solution after only having launched earlier this spring. To compete with the handful of other vendors in this narrow space, Mumboe has now added a new feature called On-Demand Contract Intelligence, which takes advantage of the service's semantic processing engine to deliver something the others don't: automatic extraction of data.
To kick off our new Gritty Entrepreneurs interview series, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York we sat down with Jim Fowler, the Founder and CEO of Jigsaw, a business information and networking service that we noted in our recent review was a complement to LinkedIn rather than a competitor. As we sat sipping espresso in the Starbucks in the lobby, the CNN screen above us told of market mayhem. Ho hum, just another day in the life of a gritty entrepreneur. Let's find out how this particular web 2.0 company is competing in this climate...
Last week, we covered how Zoho is defying conventional wisdom in the Web Office market. But is being unconventional all it takes for a bootstrapped start-up to take on both Microsoft and Google, in head to head evaluations by giant enterprises such as GE? Far from it. Whenever you see a surprising 'overnight sensation', you will usually find years of hard work and careful execution.
In Part 2 of this story, we reveal some of Zoho's cookbook.
New Dev Suite Lets LongJump Work With Other Apps
When LongJump first launched, the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model was only just taking off. Since then, we've seen Google launch their App Engine and more services than ever are taking advantage of Amazon's EC2. Today, the Sunnyvale, California-based PaaS provider, LongJump, tries to one-up those big-name sites with the launch of their new LongJump Development Suite, a tool set that helps developers extend the power of LongJump by allowing interoperability with other systems and applications.
Back in July Apple released a handful of tools for enterprises looking to deploy iPhones to their organization. One of the tools released was the Web Configuration Utility for Windows and Mac OS. This allows enterprises to easily create, sign and distribute configuration profiles using a web browser.
Now, Apple has released another tool to extend the functionality, allowing enterprises to access logs and install apps on iPhones as well as configure them.
