Cool Products & Hot Companies

Google acquires Writely

Big news today as a very cool product, writely.com (owned by Upstartle LLC) gets acquired by Google (http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-yep-google.html).  Google now owns an extremely well implemented web 2.0 based word processor. Writely has many uses but one of writely’s powerful capabilities is letting users collaborate on the same document in real time.  Now you can maintain one source of truth when taking meeting notes over a teleconference. Writely helps keep everyone on the same page (pun fully intended.) 

There will be lots of talk about Google pushing into Microsoft’s space.  But I think the most exciting possibilities is if Google makes writely available for mash-ups.  How nice if you can have a collaborative word processing environment to embed in other web applications. Tie this in with Gtalk and cool things start to happen.

Zimbra demo gets better and better

Although I know I am not the first to blog about Zimbra , I have gotten to see Scott Dietzen, President and CTO work on his demo over the past few months and it keeps getting better. Zimbra is a “collaboration suite,” think Outlook, built with an Ajax front end and a service oriented architecture (SOA) for the back-end. Further, the enterprise version has archiving and compliance built in, making administration much easier for companies that this capability.

 Zimbra embodies Web 2.0 in that it has a rich, browser based UI, SOA, and can do mash-ups. Scroll over an address in an email and a google map pops-up. Roll over a name and their contact info appears. You can also subscribe to public icalendars, such as the Boston Red Sox schedule, to overlay when setting-up other appointments and trips.

 Zimbra is a great demonstration of a rich web UI. But even more interesting, Zimbra is an example of Web 2.0 pushing into the enterprise, where most of the early web 2.0 innovation was in the consumer space.