The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘outlook’

Last month we wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.

CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online.

Every few weeks (and sometimes even more often than that), dozens of techies gather together for regional Startup Weekends —  fast-paced code writing frenzies where entrepreneurs and developers conceive of and build a new application in less than 60 hours (and lose quite a bit of sleep in the process). Many of the apps die off soon thereafter, but some of them live on. And now they’re becoming acquisition targets: Learn That Name, a game that uses your LinkedIn contacts to help you remember the names of your business acquaintances, has been acquired by Gist. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the LTN guys say they’re “very, very happy” with the result.

Learn That Name was built last August at a Microsoft-sponsored Startup Weekend and won top prize (which was amusing, because it was built for the decidedly non-Microsoft iPhone). The app’s idea came from lawyer Eric Koester, who was inspired to create it after he failed to remember someone’s name earlier during the event. A team of 14 people came together to build the app that weekend, and since then, a subset of the original LTN team has continued working on it, releasing an updated iPhone version, Palm WebOS app, and Flash app.

The deal is for LTN’s tech assets, and the proceeds are being split among the 14 original team members. Going forward, the standalone iPhone and Palm applications will still be available, and the game is also integrated into Gist’s own iPhone application, which you can find here.  The Gist version will tap into Gist’s database of contacts (the original uses LinkedIn).

For those that haven’t used it, Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network. The service’s web interface allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plugin that shares similarities with Xobni. Given the business oriented nature of Learn That Name, this seems like a good (and fun) fit.

Given the success of the Learn That Name team, it will be interesting to see if more Startup Weekend teams continue working together following the conclusion of their events.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr, perhaps the most celebrated venture capitalist and certainly one of the most successful, will leave the Amazon board of directors this year.

Venture capitalists often try to stay on public company boards well after their investments have run their course. It’s a status thing, but it also puts them in a terrific position to help their younger portfolio companies. There’s no reason for Doerr to step down from the Amazon board of directors based on time commitments, which is what Amazon is saying. There’s just too much upside to being on the Amazon board of directors.

So what is the reason?

Our guess is that Doerr is leaving the Amazon board for the same reason Google CEO Eric Schmidt left the Apple board of directors in 2009.

Competition and conflicts of interest.

Google is increasingly competitive with Apple. But the company also competes with Amazon in a number of areas, particularly web services and big data. And down the road, Google may compete directly in other ways as well. Froogle was a flop, but don’t think Google doesn’t want a bigger chunk of ecommerce revenue from people who begin their product searches on their search engine. We’re betting Doerr had to choose between the two companies.

Or maybe Doerr just got sick of flying up to Seattle for the board meetings.

Google is reaching out to mobile companies for help in getting their proposed Admob acquisition cleared by the FTC. Specifically, they’re asking select companies to write letters in support of the deal, which Google will then forward to the FTC.

We spoke with one mobile advertising company this afternoon that received the request from Google. The company was asked to write their thoughts on “Do you think mobile advertising is going to keep growing, and that Google’s acquisition of Admob won’t hurt your business or decrease competition in the mobile market?”

Last week Bloomberg reported that the FTC had reached out to Admob competitors about the deal. Our source that was contacted by Google says they were also contacted by the FTC months ago about the deal. Since then, silence.

Oddly enough, we had also heard recently that Google was actually looking for ways to back out of the Admob deal, which clearly isn’t the case based on this new information today. But there is speculation that Apple will change their SDK to require application developers to use Quattro Wireless if they want to include ads in their iPhone/iPad apps. That change would likely be paired with an argument that consumer safety requires Apple to filter these ads.

Real estate listings and search site Zillow,Android app to allows users to search its 95 million listings on the go. The startup has seen considerable success with its iPhone app, which launched in April of last year and has seen 1 million downloads with more than 2 million homes viewed each month on the app. The Android app is expected to hit the Android Market by tomorrow.

Zillow’s Android app has similar functionality to the iPhone app. The Android app uses GPS technology to find and follow users on an aerial map, and displays values, homes for sale, homes for rent, listings and recently-sold data on the homes around their local area. Users can also search for homes, even if they’re not nearby, utilizing the Android’s voice search capabilities. You speak the address, neighborhood, zip code or city into the phone and the app will instantly take the user to the location on the map.

And the app leverages Google Street View by displaying curbside images of homes and streets. Each listing features the same details as the listing on the web, with multiple photos, home details, and contact information on homes for sale or for rent. Users can also filter their home searches by sale price, rental price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms and listing type (for sale, for rent, and recently sold).

Zillow, which launched as a mortgage marketplace in 2008, recently added rentals to its business, opening up the site to a new market in the wake of the burst of the real estate bubble. Zillow is also hoping to IPO in 2011 and according to reports, is currently courting Wall Street investors.

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

Leena Rao picked a great title when she wrote a post about fledgling Inbox2 late last year, writing that the startup essentially aims to rule all incoming communication streams, as the Web service turns your email and micro blogging updates from friends and contacts into a single, ever-synched activity stream.

Now, the Holland-based company is launching a nifty, free software program (Windows only for now) that does exactly the same in the form of a native desktop client.

Inbox2 collects all messages, document attachments, links and contacts from your existing email and social network accounts and brings everything into one place. The app doesn’t merely import incoming streams for consumption, as it also allows you to reply, search and manage all those incoming communication streams without having to login to multiple accounts.

The list of supported services is key, and impressively long: the app boasts support for (deep breath) Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, AOL, any custom IMAP/POP3 account, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer and Hyves.

In addition, Inbox2 allows the user to organize their inbox around people or content discovery, including through social and real-time channels. In that sense, it reminds a lot of Threadsy, one of the TechCrunch50 finalists, but they haven’t publicly launched yet. Also worth checking out for different reasons is OtherInbox.

If you even use but two of the services that Inbox2 supports, I suggest you try out the Web service to start and give the desktop client a good whirl if you’re on Windows. It might just be that messaging management tool you’ve been longing for.

Me? I’m waiting for them to integrate simple RSS reader functionality into the tool.

Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding from Qualcomm Ventures with Worldview Technology Partners, ATA Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and Emergence Capital Partners participating in the round. This funding brings the company’s total funding up to nearly $100 million.

Visage Mobile’s SaaS application basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband.

Visage Mobile says the new funding will be used to invest in product development, and additional services to help businesses take control of their mobility budget and inventory.

As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.

The new social features make it look a lot more like Xobni, the social email startup backed by Vinod Khosla that Microsoft looked at buying nearly two years ago. Well, a poor man’s Xobni. With Xobni, which itself is a plugin for Outlook, you can pull in relevant contact information, photos, and social stream data from both LinkedIn and Facebook today. It also supports Twitter, and Hoover’s information on companies. Salesforce integration is currently in beta, and SharePoint is coming soon.

The idea behind bringing social streams into Outlook is that as you are reading or composing an email, you can see recent status updates or pictures of the person you are corresponding with to give you some instant context. The Outlook plugins are built on top its “Social Connector,” and was previewed last year. The Social Connector was really created for Microsoft SharePoint, which supports corporate profiles and file sharing. Getting the major social networks to write their own plugins directly for the Social Connector means that Outlook can support additional social streams down the road. Of course, these have to be written in .Net and sent out as executable files, but that’s a different issue.

The bigger issue is that the Social Connector will only work on Outlook 2010, whereas Xobni works on every version going back to Outlook 2003. Companies tend to replace Outlook at a glacial pace, but it is clear that Microsoft is trying to make Xobni a feature of Outlook. And it only took two years to announce. And even now, many of the comments on Microsot’s blog post are complaining that the beta is crashing their computers. Some examples:

SocialConnector.dll crashes my 32-bit Outlook 2010 beta on Win 7 64 bit.

After installing this, Outlook will no longer start up. I’ve have removed the connector, but it still crashes outlook, not the computer. I’m using 64bit Win 7 Ultimate, with 32bit Office 2010.

Xobni could still be doomed, but it does have a few things going for it. The plugin has been downloaded more than 4 million times, its users are rabidly loyal, and the company will eventually expand to other email systems beyond Outlook. It also does email search a lot better (at least right now) than Outlook and can resolve different identities to the same person in your contacts list.

Most people don’t sign up for Facebook or even LinkedIn with their corporate Outlook email accounts. If the email addresses of your contacts in Outlook don’t match their email on LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace, you won’t be able to see their profile information or stream data using the Outlook Social Connector. Xobni does a better job resolving the multiple identities people choose to have on the Internet. That doesn’t mean the folks at Xobni should be breathing easy. Microsoft has endless patience and eventually it gets things right.

In November 2009, when Microsoft announced the release of the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010, the company also introduced an entirely new add-on for its Outlook product that we haven’t heard a peep about since.

That’s about to change soon.

The product, dubbed Outlook Social Connector, essentially aims to make Outlook more social by integrating streams from Windows Live and third-party networks directly into the widely used communication app and its familiar interface, among other features that will enhance the functionality of Outlook and other Microsoft products like SharePoint.

For more information about how Social Connector, check our previous post and/or watch this video from Channel 9.

Microsoft and its initial launch partner, LinkedIn, didn’t share many details about the product at the time of the initial announcement but stated that it would be made available ‘early 2010′. Since then, it’s been very quiet about the product.

A public beta version of Outlook Social Connector will be available next week, sources now tell us, and we also hear Microsoft will be announcing a number of additional partners that have been brought on board alongside LinkedIn. These partners include social network juggernauts such as Facebook and MySpace, which are of course far less business-oriented than products and services like Outlook and LinkedIn.

While a lot of people will appreciate the ability to see status updates from and interact with friends from multiple social networking services straight from their Outlook application, I have a feeling their managers and their employers’ IT departments will be far less enthusiastic about Social Connector.