Back in March, we said Adobe was slowly building an online empire. Today, that news turns out to be true. Adobe is has just launched their version of an online office suite available at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe has also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.
Blist, the cloud database application, which we covered back in March when they launched into their public beta, just received a big update yesterday. The update addresses, for the most part, stability and performance issues, but it also includes some new social features as well.
We can't all eat, breathe, and live social media 24x7, as much as we might like to. Some of have day jobs that require a bit of our attention, too. And unlike the web-app embracing startups we read about, the policies at more traditional companies actually discourage mindless web surfing, tweeting, facebooking, and the like. However, there are still plenty of ways to fit in your social media addictions at work, without getting noticed by your nosy co-workers or getting blocked by I.T.
Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend of pitching via Twitter. Meanwhile, another company had a completely different idea: pitch via mail. Yes, postal mail.
There are a lot of ways to collaborate online - wikis, forums, social networks - but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools.
Like a Microsoft Office for social tools, Grou.ps offers the following modules: chat, blog aggregation, wikis, talks (forum + mailing list), photo albums, links (bookmarks and news), calendaring, maps, subgroups, and people (profiles).
Today there's been a sensational claim by 2 Gartner analysts that "Windows is collapsing". In Computerworld, Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald are quoted as saying that "Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts." One of those fronts is of course web applications.
These days when someone mentions the term "web office," you probably think of the online suites like by Zoho or Google Apps. But alternative office suite, ThinkFree, has also been plugging along since their launch of an online suite in 2005. Lately, even though ThinkFree has been losing ground to their competitors, they aren't ready for you to count them out just yet. Yesterday, ThinkFree launched a newly redesigned online suite with more features, including mobile access and online/offline synchronization previously a premium feature, now available to everyone, for free.
In today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. In developed countries, broadband access is available in more places than ever, and even poorer countries have internet cafes sprouting up left and right. Modern web workers and business travelers even take extra precautions to maintain always-on connectivity - packing air cards in their laptop bags or buying laptops that already have built-in EVDO access.
The latest ReadWriteTalk podcast is up and it's a chat with Eric Gilmore, Senior Product Manager for Office Live at Microsoft. In particular Eric talks about Office Live Workspace, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office that lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Our own Sarah Perez recently compared Office Live Workspace to Google Docs. In the podcast, Sean Ammirati questioned Eric about that comparison...
The blogosphere was abuzz today with the launch of Adobe's online photo-editing and storage platform, Adobe Photoshop Express. The new tool isn't so much of a web-based version of Photoshop as people had hoped, but more of a simple online photo editor, more on par with a service like Picnik. What's interesting about the Adobe offering, though, is more than just how well it crops and sharpens - it's the fact that Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free storage for your photos, which makes it less of just an online tool, and more of an online service.
