TechBizMedia

Michael Arrington’s announcement of Google’s plans to offer up a new set of APIs on November 5 has opened up a firestorm of discussion on the web. Part of the discussion is around semantics, which gives me quite the chuckle. Who cares if it is a social network or a social graph (although I did love Dave Winer’s post). In the end it’s about what it means. To some extent, even though I really love leveraging social networks, I feel sometimes we overdo it. Read the rest »

We have web office related news from Yahoo, Google, and … IBM (yes, you read that right). If you throw Zoho into the mix, the space is getting crowded fast. Read the rest »

It’s been talked about for a long time, but the (renamed) Google Docs is finally complete with the release of the presentation app. Read the rest »

TechBizMedia and others have reported about Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra, the open source enterprise messaging company. Zimbra has made collaboration easier with their suite containing email, contacts, shared calendar, VOIP, online document authoring, etc. Zimbra already boasts of powerful clients like Comcast, educational institutions, etc. Yahoo has already teamed up with IBM to develop an enterprise level search solution called Omnifind. With the acquisition of Zimbra, Yahoo could be aiming at the enterprise market. What do you think?

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo has acquired the office suite Zimbra for $35MM in cash. If this news is confirmed, its huge. Yahoo is laying down the gauntlet here, to Microsoft, and especially to Google.

Is this a smart decision? Should Yahoo play Google’s game again? The web office space is still young (and Zimbra has offline functionality as well), so the take here is that this is a smart move for the company to get back some of its lost mojo.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Zimbra, Microsoft, Google

I am a big fan of SplashCast, and not just because the company is based a couple of hours down south in Portland. The company has been on a roll lately, beginning with participation in the launch of the Facebook platform earlier this year. Recently, SplashCast released a new and improved player with a slew of cool new features. As it turns out, that was not the end, but just another step in what appears, at least to me, to be Splashcast’s larger plans; to enable viral, branded, distribution of video content. Read the rest »

In response to Michael Arrington’s post at Techcrunch about the exclusivity of certain walled communities, Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web is arguing that such an exclusivity is needed to establish the trust. I completely disagree with Bernard that you need a gated community to establish trust. You don’t have to be exclusive to have a trust. The trust inside an exclusive walled community is as good as the weakest node that has entered inside the community through their established invitation process. Also, there is no widespread distrust between the members of the open communities. The trust is a result of how well you define the relationship with other members.

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There is a meme going on after Noam Cohen wrote an article on NY Times highlighting some of the moral claims about online advertising. I don’t buy the moral claims about ad blocking software like Adblock Plus. I am not against online advertising. I do understand that it is one of the major reasons why we get most of our web content for free. However, if someone develops a technology to block advertisement, it should be countered with better ad serving methodologies (or rather better ad experience) or better business models. Instead, putting moral spins on ad blocking software is not correct. I don’t believe in making moral or legal threats to any technological innovation, even if it is disruptive to business models. One should beat it with a better technology or business model or both.

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For over a month, I have been sitting on a post about people search, wondering how to tie some of those thoughts together. The news that Facebook was going to open up itself up to search (see Techmeme discussion) makes me glad I waited, although the following has only passing resemblance to the original post. Read the rest »

Zoho, the most active Web 2.0 company around, is considered as a direct competitor to Google for quite some time now. Today, Zoho will announce Zoho Business at Office 2.0 conference. Essentially, they are categorizing their services into Zoho Personal and Zoho Business. Zoho Personal is same as their current offerings. It includes all the apps currently offered to users and it will remain free forever. Zoho Business comes in two flavors, free version and pro version. The free version will remain free, as the name suggests, and the pro version will include more features than the free version.

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