ReadWriteWeb

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which began its initial alpha testing (in Microsoft terms, it's called a "Technical Preview") in mid-September, was originally made available to only a limited number of users.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.

Today at its Wordwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Office suite has reached the 'technical preview' milestone, and that starting today the company will open up the Office beta program to a larger number of users. While a new version of Office is obviously big news for a lot of users, the really interesting part of the announcement is that Microsoft is also releasing more details about the Office Web applications - which are lightweight, browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (Microsoft's note-taking tool). Beta testers can expect invites for the Office Web applications to go out in August.

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.

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.

Every year we do a review of the top Internet companies, to identify the ones that had the biggest impact. Last week we announced that Apple was our choice for Best BigCo of 2008. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company, as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. There were a number of small companies that were in contention for Best LittleCo: FriendFeed, Meebo, and last year's winner Twitter would all have been deserving winners. In the end, we chose a 'little company that could' in the enterprise space. Our pick for Most Promising is something you could be using a lot on your mobile phone next year...

We all tend to think of fax machines as quaint, 20th century products that became irrelevant when the Internet came along. But in reality faxes are still the most efficient way to quickly deliver a signed business document. As with most office tasks these days, you can do faxing over the Internet and in many ways it's more efficient than using a fax machine. So in this post we take a quick look at some of the electronic fax options out there.

Microsoft announced this morning at its PDC conference that the next release of Microsoft Office will include browser-based versions of some of its main office software products - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be "lightweight versions", but Microsoft told us yesterday that they'll still have rich functionality and will be comparable to Google's suite of online office applications. The apps will enable users to create, edit and collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through the browser. The apps will work in IE, Firefox and Safari browsers (no word on whether Google Chrome will be supported). Update: Microsoft clarified in an email that these apps will use HTML and AJAX, but also Silverlight components.

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.

We all love the David and Goliath story. What about David vs two Goliaths? That is the improbable story of Zoho, the Web Office startup competing head on with both Microsoft and Google. On top of that, Zoho is from India and who ever heard of a product company from India? Indeed Zoho has only 10 people in America, yet it is winning really big enterprise accounts in head to head evaluations with both Goliaths. What's more, they have not taken a dime of external money - having bootstrapped it from the start.

At Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week I met up with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's founders, to find out how they're succeeding despite the odds.

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." In today's business world, job-seekers are expected to stay current with the happenings taking place in their area of interest. There was a time when those happenings were very much job-specific and anything having to do with technology fell squarely on the shoulders of I.T. That time has passed. Web 2.0 technologies lifted the veil of mystery surrounding computing technology and made it accessible to everyone. Today, if you're not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies' impact on business, then you're just not staying current. Period.

It's the weekend, so time to review the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at rising music social network Imeem, reported on Yahoo's Fire Eagle project, checked in on the latest Web Office developments, and covered some new iPhone apps. On the trends side we looked into the latest online Olympics stats, explored the relationship between tech and PR, analyzed the iPhone App Store, and advised you how to set up a company.

One of the software programs mentioned at this year's IORG conference (see our coverage here) was SmartDesktop. This program uses machine intelligence to automatically organize your information by project so you can quickly find what you need. In addition to organizing your emails and files created by desktop software, the beta version of this program also works with Google Docs and Zoho. These items appear in Smart Desktop as a "web resources," which allow you to quickly retrieve online documents without having to hunt through your browser bookmarks to find them.

Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity.

DreamFactory's suite of Enterprise 2.0 applications consists of a Project Management module, a Time and Expense Module, a Document Manager, and a Team Calendar. (See our coverage of their launch here). Originally, the company was available on Amazon Web Services, but it looks like they aren't interested in being tied to just one platform. As of today, DreamFactory's software will be available on Intuit's QuickBase platform, which makes it the fourth platform for DreamFactory's suite.

Google's hosted office suite Google Docs has been down for more than 30 minutes, rendering documents inaccessible and users frustrated. Short outages are not uncommon, but as the downtime extends this morning it seems a good time to ask - how long is too long for you? At what point would you personally deem a web service too unstable to use, and presuming that varies from service to service, what's your requirement for Google Docs?

Update:After 45 minutes of downtime, Google Docs appears to be back up.

It's no secret that not everyone can afford to buy Microsoft Office to create brilliant PowerPoint presentations for any event. While affordability plays a role, so does OS compatibility. Well, worry no more. ReadWriteWeb has a list of great services you can use to create presentations on the fly without downloading a thing. All you will need is an internet connection and a bit of creativity.