Zoho

Tsunami warning knocks out Zoho phone support

Our telephone support will therefore not be available today. Apologies for the inconvenience caused! 2/2

— Zoho (@zoho) April 11, 2012

In view of the earthquake and tsunami warning, we're having to evacuate our office as a precautionary safety measure. 1/2

— Zoho (@zoho) April 11, 2012

Huge earthquakes in the Indian Ocean and tsunami warnings caused at least one tech company with Indian offices to evacuate today.

Zoho, an online application developer based in Pleasanton, Calif., used Twitter to notify customers that it had evacuated its offices in India and that phone support would not be available. "… Read more

Online word processors: Awesome and primitive

I love that you can now write full, rich, graphical applications for the Web--even for core tools like word processors. As Stephen Shankland recently noted, Google Docs has evolved into something surprisingly useful, even for a professional writer. I second that opinion, and add that competitors like Zoho Writer are similarly powerful, usable, and useful--as are other "Office 2.0" apps for spreadsheets, presentations, project management, and other tasks. Cloud apps have come a long way, baby!

Online editors let you move your work easily to just about any connected computer, and they enormously facilitate live, real-time collaboration. … Read more

Office Web Apps, Google Docs go head-to-head

Microsoft's first true browser-based versions of the venerable Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications won't make you abandon the programs' full-featured counterparts installed your hard drive. But if you splurge for Office 2010, you may find yourself spending a lot more time working in your browser.

You probably already do some word processing and spreadsheet work using Google Docs, Zoho, or another such service. (I described the Web's best desktop-app replacements in a post last month.)

These services have offered first-rate word processing and spreadsheet programs that run in a browser and let you create, open, and store … Read more

Zoho's winning strategy: open source + cloud

These days, it's virtually impossible to avoid open-source software. If you're a Web company, don't even bother trying.

That's the message I got from a conversation Friday with Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho, a leading competitor to Google Docs. According to Vegesna, the company--formerly known as AdventNet, now called Zoho Corp.--has been around for 13 years, and has always used free, but not necessarily open-source, software as part of its strategy. The company has released software under open-source licenses before, including the somewhat controversial vTiger project.

With 1.8 million users of Zoho.com, growing … Read more

John Chambers' video vision: Shortsighted

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.

Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?

Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."

Cisco gets this. At least, groups within … Read more

Webware 100 winner: Zoho

Site: Zoho.com Category: Productivity

Zoho is a suite of more than 20 Web-based productivity applications, nearly all of which are completely free to use. Many compete directly with Google's online productivity and office tools and give users a way to work on projects entirely on their browser.

In addition to having a slew of consumer-oriented applications, Zoho has dipped into some SMB applications including a CRM tool, invoicing service, and Zoho People--which is a recruiting tool. The company has also been known to embrace the latest Web technologies including Ajax-heavy editors and compatibility with offline data access using … Read more

Zoho preps mobile suite

This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Zoho on Tuesday rolled out a unified mobile front for its suite of Web applications.

Zoho had offered some basic iPhone and Windows Mobile support previously, but now is unifying applications like Mail, Calendar, Writer, Sheet, Show, and Creator into one interface.

The mobile applications will run on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian operating systems.

The company also added that some of its business applications will also be supported in the future. Zoho added in a blog post that it plans on supporting Palm in the future.

As … Read more

Zoho upgrades instant messaging service

Zoho has added some features to its instant messaging client, Zoho Chat, and dubbed it version 2.0. It remains a decent but unspectacular Web-based IM client, but it has a nice business slant to it, and it integrates well into Zoho's suite of business apps.

As an IM client, Zoho Chat does not compare favorably to Meebo. It supports fewer networks. While the bases are covered -- Zoho supports Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ, Google, and Jabber -- Meebo supports those six networks as well as Facebook, MySpace, Flixster, and server other consumer IM networks. Meebo also does a … Read more

Zoho upgrades Web word processor with good UI (two of them!)

Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features.

The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.

MenuTab is a curious design, but it does work. And users who grow … Read more