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Posts Tagged ‘google-docs’

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.

Tonight is the 82nd annual Academy Awards. Some people watch the show for the movies. Some watch it for the glamor. And some, watch it to gamble. And Google is making that easier than ever.

While the show is almost always way too long, one way to get into it is to have an Oscar pool, where everyone picks who they think will win in each category. Google has set up a special Google Docs template that allows you to easily create this pool and send it to all your friends. It’s so simple, that you can even set it up to be filled out right within an email.

When you send the email to a friend, they’ll be asked to enter their name, and then simply select who they think will be the winner in each category. Google has already populated all of this data in the template, so there’s really nothing more for you to do. When they send this information back, it will be imported into a Google Spreadsheet, so you can compare the data from all your friends. You can also see a more visual “summary” of the data.

Categories such as “Best Short Film (Live Action)” also ensure that this can be a pretty fun drinking game, as well. You have a few hours til the show, get picking.

This guest post is authored by Alex Rampell, the founder and CEO of TrialPay. This is a follow on to an earlier article “The End Of Brand Advertising,” where Rampell argues that the collision of online and offline advertising paradigms will have a profound impact on free content. Rampell’s most recent guest post for us was in the wake of the Scamville series: Tragedy Of The Social Gaming Commons: A Blueprint For Change

The marriage of brand advertising and free content is facing peremptory annulment. There is no shortage of punditry around “the death of the media company” and whether it is a just dessert or a societal travesty. But that’s looking at it from the media company and consumer viewpoint – what do advertisers think about all of this? Where is online advertising headed and what does that mean for free content?

Making content free was not a well thought out business model. Rather, before the days of Sirius XM and DirecTV, there was no more of a way to charge for freely accessible radio waves than there was to charge for air or sunshine. Making content free, and charging for advertising interspersed in that free content, was pretty much the ONLY business model back then.

And it worked pretty well, because supply (advertising “units”) was limited by the amount of content produced and, more importantly, by the narrow “channels” where such content was made available. With such low supply, high demand, and massive reach, it was easy to reach large swaths of the populace. The advertisers couldn’t really quantify their results, but they came up with a wide variety of methods to attempt to do so. Market research firms such as ACNielsen flourished to fill the need for “metrics.”

But, as I argued in my last piece, brand advertising doesn’t really work – or, perhaps better put, is superseded by “transactional advertising.”

The old logic went like this — people were more likely to buy Coca-Cola versus Carbonated Dark-Colored Sugar Water X because Coca-Cola had a brand (which Coca-Cola has spent billions on). What’s the value of Coca-Cola’s brand? Pure math – it’s the Net Present Value (NPV) of the difference that consumers will pay for Coca-Cola versus, say, RC Cola, for the lifetime of the consumer and duration of the brand. When you pay $1 for a Coke versus $.50 for an RC Cola, the $.50 difference is chalked up to the “brand.” (Yes, perhaps there are differences in taste, too – but even with an identical formula and taste, I would argue RC Cola wouldn’t sell as well as Coke). Multiply $.50 times billions upon billions of cans of Coke, and you see the power of brand.

I don’t disagree with this notion, but I would argue that it is becoming largely irrelevant for a large class of goods and service providers (think soda or television set, not Rolex or BMW), and that the “brand” advertising money can be better spent, thereby imperiling expensively produced, freely distributed content. To wit: what if Walmart refused to stock Coca-Cola, instead stocking just RC Cola? Granted, Walmart stocks Coca-Cola because consumers demand it, and consumers demand it because of the brand that Coca-Cola has created, but that can easily be reversed. If Walmart decided to stock only RC Cola and expel Coca-Cola from its shelves, this would change RC Cola’s fortunes, and harm Coca-Cola, quite a bit.

Preferential placement of a good or service at/near the point of a transaction is something I call “transactional advertising,” which I predict will expand as a category in the coming years. Transactional advertising describes a clear food chain of brand and positioning; the titans at the top are Google, Amazon, Walmart, and other “aggregators” who themselves hold considerable brand equity and/or organic traffic. Smaller players exist in niche fields: BankRate, Shopping.com, Edmunds.com, Lending Tree, even Diapers.com have become destinations that steer consumer decisions. These have potential to be the new “media” companies in a transactional advertising universe, odd as that might sound.

This form of transactional advertising exists today, although you might not know it. Proctor & Gamble spends great effort and expense (though it pales in comparison to their brand advertising spend) to ensure eye-level placement wherever its products are sold. Many retailers “charge” for shelf-space, with the clear understanding that better merchandised goods have a better chance of ending up in consumers’ shopping carts.

Today you see very little in the way of transactional advertising online; rarely does one brand pop up in another brand’s checkout experience. There’s a good chance that will change in a major way in the near future. If old media companies can figure out how to attach themselves to more transactions, they have a fighting chance of sticking it out online.

Many of us take the disaster readiness of servers and data centers for granted. But for IT admins from both small and large companies, being prepared for disaster and emergency situations is complicated and expensive issue. Google has made an announcement today for any enterprise users of Google Apps; assuring IT admins that the suite is now fully prepared for disaster recovery. Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps, tells us that as of recently, Google is prepared for disaster recovery for all of its products in the Google Apps suite, which include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video.

Google’s secret sauce is live and synchronous replication. So every action you take in Gmail is immediately replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google will transfer data over to the other one. Traditionally, Google says, synchronous replication can be very expensive for companies. For example, the cost to back up 25GB of data with synchronous replication can range from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs per employee. Google says that exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. Of course, Google replicates all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. And data from Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video, which encompass most of the applications in Google Apps, is also synchronously replicated for free.

The reason that Google can offer these services for free is because the tech giant already operates large data centers simultaneously for millions of users and also balances loads between data centers as needed. Google also claims that its high speed connections between data centers allows the company to replicate and transfer large amounts of data quickly from one server to another.

Google says synchronous replication is a more attractive option than the common practice that many small businesses take by backing up email by copying the data to a tape on a weekly or daily basis, which seems to be an arduous task. Larger companies opt for a storage area network (SAN) to back up data, which Google says is an expensive process.

Sheth declined to identify the timeline of when each app began to use the backup solution. Sheth did say that bringing all the apps together into replication was a complex process. Google Apps is currently being used by 2 million businesses with 20 million active users.

Photo Credit/Flickr/ClayIrving

Last week, Google announced a new feature for Google Docs that may be the closest thing to the fabled GDrive that we may ever get: the ability to upload and store any kind of file to your Google Docs account. This is a big deal, because it allows you to use Google as a storage service for the first time. But Google only went half way — they let you store the documents, but they didn’t actually build any desktop clients to help you sync them. For that, Google teamed with a handful of third parties. Today sees the launch of the most interesting of those: a desktop syncing client called Memeo Connect that lets you manage your Google Docs account from your desktop, giving you offline access to your Google Docs and making it easy to sync your files across multiple computers.

Most people probably aren’t very familiar with Memeo, but there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of their products at some point — the company makes the local backup software that comes with most external hard drives. But Memeo has also recently been offering some cloud-based file transfer services, which is probably why Google approached them last year about building a local client for the upcoming Google Docs storage feature. Memeo has built native applications for Mac and Windows (both of which are available today), and the service will cost $9/user per year. That’s on top of the $50/year fee you pay Google to become a Premier account holder (which you need to upload files).

Getting started with the service is simple. After entering your Google Apps credentials, the application will quickly download local versions of each of the documents that you’ve already stored in your Google Docs account (you’ll see a ’synced’ message under each as they complete). And you can quickly add locally stored files on your computer to your Google Docs account by simply dragging and dropping them onto the app.

For the most part, navigation is intuitive: at the left hand side of the screen are filters that let you choose which kind of file you’re looking for, be it a presentation, spreadsheet, document, or ‘other’, and there’s a search box if you know the file name. Clicking on a file will show you a list of other users with access to that document via Google Docs sharing functionality, and there’s a pane that displays any local revisions of the document. The application also respects the navigation features offered by Google Docs, like Starred document, and shared folders.

My biggest gripe with the service is one that isn’t really Memeo’s fault (it’s also a bit confusing, so bear with me). Using Memeo Connect with Google Docs, your documents can be stored in one of two ways: as an online editable Google Doc, or as a Microsoft Office document (PPT, DOC, etc.). If you sync a Word document from your desktop, it will be initially stored in the Microsoft Word format. You can view this document from any computer, but in order to make changes you’ll have to download it and edit it with Microsoft Word.

That is, unless you decide to convert that Word Document to a Google Doc. This is very easy to do from Memeo Connect —  you simply right-click the document and tell it to convert, which takes a few seconds. There are plenty of benefits from doing this: you’ll be able to use Google Docs’ collaborative features, and you can edit the document from any computer with online connectivity, regardless of if it has Word installed. But it has some downsides too, namely that you’ll probably lose some of the document’s formatting, which is going to be a deal-breaker for essential documents.

In other words, while Memeo Connect makes it very easy to make sure you’ve always got the most up to date files with you, there’s a good chance you won’t always be able to tap into the collaborative cloud-based features offered by Google Docs. Again, this isn’t Memeo’s fault (it has more to do with Microsoft’s proprietary formats than anything). It’s just something to be aware of.

One other gripe I have with the service is that you can’t currently monitor your local Documents folder and automatically upload any new documents to your Google account. Memeo Director of Business Development Spencer Chen says that this is actually in the experimental stages, so we’ll likely be seeing this in an update soon.

Memeo Connect does a good job complimenting Google Docs, despite my complaints. The question that seems to be on everyone’s mind, though, is whether or not this is going to kill off other file syncing services, like Dropbox (which we’re huge fans of). Chen says that he doesn’t see Memeo Connect as being directly competitive with Dropbox — he says they serve different markets and needs, with Google Docs/Memeo Connect helping with enterprise/office productivity and collaboration, while Dropbox is file syncing for consumers. Instead, he sees Memeo as being more directly competitive with Box.net. I know plenty of companies who use Dropbox for business purposes (TechCrunch included), but it’s clear that the Google Docs integration will have appeal to the enterprise space.

As part of the launch, Memeo is offering 20 TechCrunch readers a chance to win a free year subscription. To enter, go to this page, hit ‘Try Now’, and include “TC” in the comment field. The company will randomly select 20 winners from the entries.

Other services that offer services that work with the new Google Docs fuctionality include Syncplicity and Manymoon.

“This is not GDrive” said Google Docs product manager Vijay Bangaru yesterday while showing me something that sure does look exactly like the fabled GDrive.

“How is it different,” I asked.

“That’s hard to say, because GDrive doesn’t exist.”

Alrighty then. Putting that aside, you can soon upload any file type at all to Google Docs, not just the dozen or so Office formats that the service allowed as of yesterday. Video files. Images. Audio Files. Even Zip files. As long as those files are 250 MB or smaller, you’re good. The new feature will roll out over the next several weeks, says Google.

Like other documents in Google docs, files can be kept private, made public or shared with a few users. Google Viewer can be used to view many file types, with the notable exception of video.

Regular users have 1 GB of free storage and can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Enterprise customer pay higher prices, starting at $17/year for 5 GB. There are no bandwidth charges.

Three Third Party Apps Available Now

Three partners have been working with Google to build value add features on top of the new product. The most interesting, Memeo Connect (from Memeo), lets users sync files between the desktop and Google Docs.

Syncplicity is offering businesses an automated backup and file management application. And Manymoon, an online project management application, is also now integrated with Google Docs file storage.

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Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.

Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community.

DocVerse is a product Google is likely to keep. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Shia drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectiveley. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server’s web strategy.

With DocVerse Google will have a direct software connection to Microsoft Office, allowing users to collaborate real time on documents. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with Office 10. In effect, Microsoft is countering Google Docs with the new Office. And Google is countering that move with the acquisition of DocVerse. For more on this fight, see Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers.

DocVerse has raised just $1.3 million, in 2008, from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital and Naval Ravikant.

The deal has not yet been finalized, says our source, but is past the term sheet stage.

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There’s no shortage of wine-focused iPhone apps that help users access listings, varietals and recommendations on the go. Wine.com, a popular wine retailer with a fantastic domain name, is launching it’s own free iPhone app to help wine lovers everywhere find the perfect bottle.

You can research and buy from Wine.com’s database of 45,000+ wines, save them to your “cellar” to keep track of what you like and buy, create wish lists and more. The app also provides nifty recommendation lists, such as “90+ Point Rated Wines Under $20.” There are definitely practical uses of the app, which could be useful when you’re out at a restaurant and need more info on a particular wine, or want to compare prices and see how much the wine has been marked up.

Wine.com also recently released its API for third-party developers to create and enhance wine applications connecting to the site’s e-commerce and wine database platform. The online wine industry is steadily growing with wine-related startups raising significant amounts of funding. Online wine store and community Vinfolio got a $4.5 million infusion recently and social wine review site and retailer Snooth raised $1 million earlier this year. And the newly re-launched Corkd has added a social stream and a new business model. In makes sense for these sites to venture into the mobile space to engage wine lovers on the go. Vinfolio and Snooth both have iPhone apps.

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We’re hearing whispers that Google is in the process of acquiring AppJet, the small startup that builds the popular collaboration tool EtherPad. A number of ex-Googlers are AppJet executives, including CEO Aaron Iba, CTO J.D. Zamfirescu, and COO Daniel Clemens. The acquisition price is apparently in the low eight figures. We’re probing for more details. Update: EtherPad has just confirmed the deal.

EtherPad is a powerful real-time collaboration tool that’s similar (but superior) to the Google Docs text editor. Users can collaborate in true real-time, with virtually no delay. AppJet actually launched as a tool for building simple web apps. The team built EtherPad for internal use, but then decided to release it to the public. Since then, the product focus has shifted to EtherPad, which has started to take off.

EtherPad may have been a threat to Google Docs, but it’s also quite likely to Google’s interest in the company is tied to Google Wave. The two products share some overlapping features, but AppJet has built technology that can be deployed behind company firewalls. If Google ever decides to roll out Wave as an enterprise product, which seems logical, this technology and the team’s experience could prove valuable.

AppJet, which was part of the Y Combinator program, has raised around $700,000 in seed funding.

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It was exactly five years ago today that Digg went live as a simple site where you could vote on your favorite content from around the web. (Here is our initial profile from over 4 years ago.) They’ve grown a lot since then, to over 40 million monthly visitors and 80 employees, founder Kevin Rose writes today.

But perhaps more impressive is that for their fifth birthday, Digg received quite the gift from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: An official proclamation that today is “Digg.com Day” in the city.

Now, I’m not really sure what this means, but it certainly is all official-sounding; I count 5 uses of “whereas” and one “whereof” thrown in for good measure. “We are proud and humbled by this honor,” Rose writes.

To celebrate the milestone, Digg has also launched a new visualization tool called Digg 365 to surface some of the most dugg items from the past 5 years. Built by The Barbarian Group, it’s really slick. And it’s a good idea. Much of the content on Digg has a very short shelf-life due to the nature of the site, but that doesn’t make some of it any less interesting, even 5 years later.

Though recently, Digg has lost much of its early hype to services like Twitter and Facebook, the company is trying to push forward into a new phase of growth. They recently stole a Google executive to be their VP of Product, and are prepping the next version of the site. And thanks in part to their new Digg Ads, they could see revenues of up to $15 million this year, we’ve heard.

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