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Posts Tagged ‘document’

Google’s recently announced $25 million acquisition of DocVerse represented one saga of an ongoing war between Google and Microsoft over dominance in the productivity suite place. Today, Israeli enterprise software company Mainsoft is launching a Docverse-like plug-in that may up the ante in the battle. Harmony is launching free plug-ins that bring Google Docs documents and Microsoft SharePoint document libraries directly to Microsoft Outlook.

Once downloaded, Harmony for Google Docs will open in a sidebar pane within Outlook. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and forth. The plug-in allows users to locate, share, and work on Google documents directly from their email client.

Once logged in to your Google account, you’ll be able to drag any files (ie Microsoft Word files, PDFs) directly from an email to the Harmony sidebar to upload and convert them to Google documents. You can drag a Google document from the sidebar to create links in your e-mail messages and meeting requests to other users and viewers. Harmony automatically shares the document with the recipients. You can decide to give recipients read or write access. Recipients simply click the link in the message to open the document in their browser and don’t need to have Harmony installed to view the document.

Harmony also allows you to search document contents on Google Docs from the Harmony search box and locate documents using the View Bar, which allows you to switch between common views, such as spreadsheets, starred items, items owned by or shared with you, and more. One of the major features of Harmony is the ability to actually open and edit Google documents from directly in Outlook. All your changes are saved online and are available to your colleagues. You can organize and create folders to store Google Docs and also save Google documents in Office format. Harmony can export Google documents to Office, Open Office, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, and image formats.

The SharePoint plug-in isn’t nearly as sexy as as the Google Docs app but still offers a useful set of tools for enterprise users. The plug-in aims to transform Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with access to documents stored on SharePoint. Similar to the Google Docs plug-in, you can drag e-mail attachments or entire e-mail messages to publish them on SharePoint. You can search the contents of documents in your current SharePoint site or library and share documents via e-mail message, calendar appointment, or task. You can edit a document from within Outlook, view document history and more.

Harmony was built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs and in the process has transformed Microsoft Outlook into a more collaborative application. Most importantly, the Google Docs plug-in makes the transition between web-based documents and the desktop email client seamless. It gives Microsoft users the best of both worlds, much like Docverse did with Microsoft Word documents and web-based files. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, the plug-in seems like a no brainer to download. Plus its conveniently free. Considering the fate of Docverse, it may only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google come sniffing around Harmony.

Since its launch almost exactly a year ago, Foursquare’s website has largely had the same basic design. Tonight, it looks like that’s finally getting updated.

While it looks like the update is still in the process of rolling out to all the pages, Foursquare.com now clearly has new system-wide toolbars, a brand new sign-up page, as well as some new settings. You might also notice a new, name-only logo.

While it’s been clear for a while that Foursquare has been working on a site redesign, only in the past few days have signs started to show that it was coming. For example, a completely revamped History area showed up a few days ago, one allowing for venues to have categories as well as show which friends you checked-in with at places.

The biggest part of the changes currently rolling out is to the sign-up page. The new step-by-step process looks highly influenced by Twitter’s sign-up page (which they too tweaked a few times over the years). The process now allows you to sign up, easily find friends already using Foursquare via Twitter or Facebook Connect, as well as link up to those aforementioned networks. After you do that, there’s a one-page rundown of what you can do with Foursquare (such as download one of the mobile apps, earn badges, and explore cities).

These sign-up pages are important for convincing new users to not only sign up, but also showing them what to do. With Foursquare signing mainstream deals left and right, they’re going to need this.

Something else that appears to be new: an option in the setting page for  letting local businesses see that you have checked-in at their venue. When you click the link to learn more, it says:

We allow verified venue owners to see statistics about checkins at their venue. These stats include recent visitors, most frequent visitors and most popular checkin times. You can always opt out if you’d rather not share this data with the venues you visit.

Sadly, with the redesign, there is still no way to check-in from the site itself. You have to use one of the app, the mobile web, or text messaging to do that.

Speaking of mobile apps, Foursquare is about to launch a completely redesigned iPhone app as well. All of these moves are necessary if Foursquare is going to keep up with its better-designed rival, Gowalla (which also just revamped its website).

Something else interesting from tonight: apparently the concept of “checking-in” made its onscreen debut on the popular TV show Gossip Girl. Co-founder Dennis Crowley noted the move and tweeted out a picture of it captured from the show. While there is no specific mention of Foursquare, it seems obvious (at least to Crowley) what they’re paying homage to. And Foursquare actually has paid homage the other way, with its “Gossip Girl” badge.

The move towards the mainstream continues — or maybe Elizabeth Fisher was just actually checking-in to that hotel. Hard to know for sure.

You may remember Akoha, a startup which launched at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference which uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission ( i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal.) The idea is that users will socialize their missions, using your social graph to compete against friends and determine how your missions performed. Akoha has been played in more than 65 countries since the company’s launch.

Today, Akoha is launching an free iPhone app and a redesign of its site. Akoha’s iPhone app. With the new app, Akoha has increased the number of missions that can be played. A now Akoha is rewarding players for completed missions with badges, similar to Foursquare’s badge model. Akoha is also allowing users to socialize missions by integrating with Twitter to allow users to broadcast completed tasks.

Akoha was founded by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, who together co-founded Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Rdadialpoint) in 1997. In 2008, the startup received $1.9 million in funding from David Chamandy (co-founder, Lavalife), Ron Dembo (founder, Zerofootprint.net), film producer Jake Eberts (Chariots of Fire, Ghandi), and seed fund Montreal Start Up.

There are plenty of collaborative document editors out there, but when it comes to getting input about a new document or PowerPoint deck, many businesses still rely on the tried-and-true method of printing them out, handing them around the office, and asking people to scribble their notes directly onto their printed copies. If that situation sounds familiar, you’ll probably want to check out Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today. Crocodoc makes it easy to share and mark up virtual documents the same way you would on a piece of paper, and it only takes a few seconds to start using it.

Crocodoc is an extremely straightforward service, and you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it — just upload a document, and a second later you’ll be in the Crocodoc editor. Markup tools include Sticky Notes, a highligher, text strikeout, and the ability to leave your own comments (a ‘pen’ tool is on the way). Editing a document should be very familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. If you’d like to try marking up a sample document, you can use this demo.

By default, the service assigns each uploaded a document a unique, “unguessable” URL, which you can use to share the document with friends, who can mark it up and add their own comments. But there’s one catch to the free version of the service: if you lose the document URL, that marked up document is lost for good (remember, you didn’t create an account to sign up).

Fortunately Crocodoc also offers a ‘Pro’ version, which lets you create an account that includes an archive of your previously uploaded documents. It also allows you to password protect your uploaded docs (as opposed to just relying on the hard-to-guess URL for security), and to use SSL encryption. Pro Accounts cost $8/month or $36/year. And for companies that are wary of uploading sensitive files, Crocodoc offers intranet deployments, which means that these customers can run it inside their firewalls on their own servers.

My only gripe about Crocodoc is the limited number of collaboration options  — you can share your documents with as many people as you want, but everyone will be editing the same one, which seems like it would get messy fast. This will be fixed in the near future, when Crocodoc starts allowing you to review edits on a per-user basis.

Crocodoc’s still quite basic, but that might be exactly what its customers are looking for.  And they may well be willing to spend $36 a year if it means they’ll have to print out fewer stacks of paper.

Collaboration on editing documents and spreadsheets is becoming a key feature in productivity suites with the emergence of Google Docs, Zoho, Etherpad and others. Even Microsoft is adding collaboration features to Excel in its new version of Office. While Microsoft is adding this limited functionality to its new version of office, DocVerse offers a plug-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you collaborate with other users when editing a document.

Once downloaded, the DocVerse plug-in will appear on the right-hand sidebar of any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can invite other users to collaborate with you, and once all partied have downloaded the plug-in, you can share documents with each other. Whether users are working on a document online or offline, DocVerse will track, manages and sync all changes to merge them into one updated version of the document. You can communicate with other users via an IM feature within the plug-in as well.

And DocVerse also allows for documents to be viewed on web. So you can transfer your document to the web, where DocVerse will render a high fidelity version of within it’s platform. You can also add comments from the web, which are synced automatically, enabling collaboration between people with and those without Microsoft Office software installed on their computers. Each DocVerse-edited document will feature an activity stream which is viewable via Microsoft Office, any Web browser, or an RSS stream.

DocVerse is priced based upon users and number of documents. For example, the plug-in is $49 per month for 500 documents and up to ten users. Although DocVerse will face competition from Microsoft itself when Office is released with more collaboration features, the plug-in is extremely useful for past versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Founded in 2007 by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, DocVerse has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, Naval Ravikant and others. The startup also recently made an enterprise play by integrating its plug-in with popular social collaboration platform Jive.

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A document on Sega America’s official FTP server suggests that Sony will launch it motion control thingamajig this Spring. The document summarizes a meeting between Sega and Sony, which took place last month.

See the rest here: 
Leaked Sega-Sony meeting doc says PS3 motion control coming this Spring

The Big Deal yesterday was the FCC’s announcement of two additional proposals to its enforcement of Net Neutrality: non-discrimination (ISPs can’t play favorites when it comes to network traffic), and transparent management (ISPs should be upfront with their network management practices, like blocking BitTorrent during peak hours). That’s all well and good—I don’t think you’ll find anyone across the Crunch Network who doesn’t support Net Neutrality—but this is thought to apply to “traditional” ISPs: Comcast, Time Warner, etc.

Continued here:
How should Net Neutrality affect the mobile Internet?

AppJet’s EtherPad, the real-time Google Docs-like wiki tool that was recently upgraded to become more collaborative, has launched an uber-cool tool that definitely worth a look. Called the “Time-Slider,” the feature lets you see the complete history of a document’s evolution.

Here’s how it works. EtherPad keeps track of all your typing in realtime. At any time during the course of typing a document on EtherPad, you can click on the “Time-Slider” button that will play an animation of your document to see how it evolved over time. The tool also features a timeline where you can click into any stage of the document and see the evolution from that point.

You can also create “bookmark” in the document’s timeline to mark certain points during the evolution of document that you’d like to go back to. Time-slider is a really interesting tool, if only for the nifty screencast of your document’s evolution. But seriously, when it comes to collaboration between several people, the time-slider could be useful to see how a particular document took form.

You can also test out EtherPad’s new tool here, when the startup captured Paul Graham writing an essay on startups.

EtherPad was the brainchild of former Googlers (who founded online programming tool and Y Combinator funded AppJet) who wanted a real-time, yet group oriented way to collaborate on notes and documents. Thus, EtherPad was born. EtherPad continues to upgrade its product with compelling features and innovations. The startup recently partnered with video-chat startup TokBox to offer document collaboration.

And earlier this summer, EtherPad got a user interface makeover and added the ability to import and export Word, PDF, Plain Text and HTML documents. Appjet made writing a document in EtherPad more like writing out notes in Word or Google Docs, adding rich text formatting, including bold, underline, italics and strikethrough commands to the wiki. And organization of notes within a document became a little better with the ability to add bullet points. EtherPad’s tools and functionality could just give Google Docs a run for its money.

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Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser.

Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more. (Developers can get more details here).

The mobile Web is already a big deal for Facebook. Across all of its mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, etc), its mobile Website, and SMS, a full 65 million members reach Facebook via mobile devices every month. That comes to 26 percent of the 250 million total active members that Facebook puts out as its official number, or 18 percent of the 370 million monthly worldwide uniques that comScore measures.

Either way it is a significant and fast growing chunk of overall Facebook usage—between a fifth and a quarter. Back in December, only 20 million people were getting to Facebook via mobile devices.

http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php

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Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.

Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible - it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started. To use the service, you enter your Twitter user name and password, choose the document or photo you’d like to send out, and add any text you’d like to include alongside the document’s link. Hit upload and you’re done.

It’s a handy tool, but I doubt it will reach the same level of popularity as TwitPic and its ilk - most people simply don’t have as many documents that they’d like to share with all of their Twitter followers. Still, it will definitely be helpful for sharing reports you find interesting, or scanned images that wouldn’t be readable if they were shrunk and compressed (which some image services do).

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