Recently I was the keynote speaker at the Unlimited Potential W2W (Wellington to the World) event in Wellington, New Zealand. The topic of my presentation was running a virtual company.
In the presentation, written by our Marketing Manager Elyssa Pallai, I spoke about the unique nature of ReadWriteWeb's virtual business model and culture. Watch the video of my entire presentation below, for details of how our company is run and the Internet tools we use.
Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.
Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.
Office Web Applications, the browser-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, are now being made available to more users according to a post on the Windows Live Team blog. The online office suite, which began its initial alpha testing (in Microsoft terms, it's called a "Technical Preview") in mid-September, was originally made available to only a limited number of users. Today, the Technical Preview is opening up, allowing more people to try the Web Apps, Microsoft's first attempt at porting their desktop Office software to the cloud.
Don your togas and break out your favorite beer koozie, Microsoft is set to crowdsource a series of global soirees in conjunction with the public launch of Windows 7. According to TechFlash, the company hopes that employees, partners and advocates will help spread the praises of the new operating system. Party hosts will receive a free copy of Windows 7 and are eligible to win a PC.
We recently had the opportunity to test the new Microsoft Office plugin from OffiSync, which integrates Google Docs and Office. We can sum up our findings with one word: WOW. Although still in beta format, the plugin worked extremely well, providing that one missing aspect to the Microsoft Office software suite - an online component for storage, sharing, and collaboration.
Today, the web office company Zoho, whose line of products competes with other web applications like Google Docs and Gmail as well as desktop-based suites like Microsoft Office, has launched a new product: Zoho Gadgets. With these gadgets, data from Zoho applications can be integrated into Facebook, Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut and other online networks. Because the gadgets are built using the OpenSocial standard, they can be supported by any OpenSocial compatible network.
Zoho, the web office company that competes with Google's online tools (and does so quite well), has introduced a new feature to their online suite of productivity applications: Zoho Chat 2.0. Built atop the original Zoho Chat platform, this iteration now integrates all the major instant messaging networks. But a multi-protocol IM client is not the big news - it's the fact that Zoho Chat 2.0 is integrated within the majority of the company's applications to allow for real-time collaboration with colleagues.
Zoho just released version 2.0 of its Zoho Writer word processing application. While the company has added quite a few new and useful features in this release, the most obvious change is a new user interface which looks a lot like the 'Ribbon' in Microsoft Office. Thanks to this new user interface, the application now feels even more like a desktop application and has a far more professional and uncluttered look.
Now that we have online office suites like Google Docs, Zoho, and even Adobe's Acrobat.com, you may not have much desire to go and check out yet another would-be Microsoft Office killer. However, Shutterborg, a new online word processor does one thing really well which makes it a unique tool in this space: it lets you open any URL on the internet and edit it like an Office document.
In July of this year, Google finally gave webmail users a way to make sure that Gmail always used SSL - the protocol that encrypts connections to prevent hijacking. Through a flip of switch in Gmail's settings, users could rest assured that their email was at least less vulnerable, if not totally secure from hackers. However, Gmail is not the only Google-based web application where you may be storing personal data. Your files stored in Google Docs should be protected, too. But are they?
