August 21st, 2007

Zoho takes the first step towards offline apps

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 5:23 am

Categories: Software, Web Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gears, Step, Zoho, Marc Orchant

Zoho announced early this morning that they’ve taken the first steps toward making Zoho Writer available as an offline app using the Google Gears tool. Initially the docs saved offline will be read only but full offline functionality is planned.

We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you’ll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.

Zoho Writer Offline capabilities is based on Google Gears. Many thanks to Google for a great open source project. We plan to support and contribute to this project.

A new commenting feature has also been added. A video showing the offline capability is available in the blog post announcing the new features.

August 16th, 2007

Worldwide Skype outage - updated

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 9:42 am

Categories: Web Apps

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Outage, Marc Orchant

Update 2: Friday morning and Skype is down again. Fellow ZDNet blogger George Ou thinks there may be a DDOS attack in play based on a recent, publicly released exploit but Skype’s official announcement refutes that. I had service most of the evening yesterday with intermittent outages but I’m not able to infer a lot from that.

Update: Service appears to be restored as 5:25 pm MDT.

I’ve been unable to access Skype all day and it turns out it’s not just me. User from around the world are reporting the service is down and impacting personal and business communications for potentially millions of people. There’s not a lot of information available at this time. Here’s what Skype posted on their blog earlier today:

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.

As of this writing – 10:40 am MDT (GMT -7), service is still not restored. Here’s hoping whatever te cause is gets discovered and dealt with quickly. Skype has had performance stutters from time to time but this is the first global outage I can recall since I first began using the service and it’s bound to undermine the confidence many people have had in their availability and viability as a replacement for a conventional land line.

August 14th, 2007

Musings on Gnomedex and evolution

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 5:12 am

Categories: Events, Web Apps

Tags: Event, Blogging, Conference, Twitter, Marc Orchant

So a funny thing happened this week. After 4+ years covering events and blogging about them live, I attended Gnomedex, the Blogosphere’s Conference, this past week in Seattle and I didn’t blog a thing. More about why below. Gnomedex is an event I’ve always wanted to attend. I’ve known Chris Pirillo for years and finally met him and his wife Ponzi in person in 2003 at the first MSN Search Champs event. Every year Chris asks me if I’m attending and every year I’ve had one bad excuse or another for not attending. But after last year’s event – a watershed moment in this conference’s history – I resolved to make it to Gnomedex 7.0 no matter what.

How I got there is a long story – the short version is I made reservations while working full-time for a startup software company on the West Coast and by the time I got to Seattle last week I was engaged in working with a decidedly different, established, and successful software company based on the East coast. One of the big goals in attending Gnomedex 7, as it turned out, was to share with a number of my blogging buddies and software industry friends what I’m engaged in doing these days.

If you’re the type that reads disclosure pages, you may already know that I’m consulting with Curl, Inc., a company I first learned about this Spring at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Jnan Dash, a good friend of mine, has been engaged with them for a few months in planning their relaunch into the North American market. He excitedly showed me the technology they’ve developed, born in the fertile ground of MIT in the mid-90’s, for developing and delivering Rich Internet Applications (long before anyone had uttered the three letter acronym RIA).

Today, we’ve officially announced I’m working with Curl to design and launch a Developer Center and to cultivate a community of developers and information architects looking for a way to deploy enterprise-grade applications over the web. Curl has an impressive list of customers in Japan who have built more 300 of these applications, used by tens of thousands of people in organizations whose names are very familiar – companies like Toyota, Panasonic, and others. You can learn more about Curl at the company’s web site and on the Curl blog where I’ll be a contributor. InfoWorld just gave Curl 5.0, the current release, a stellar review and called it “the best development language you don’t already know”.

So back to Gnomedex and why I didn’t do any event blogging. The content was generally quite engaging and ranged from marvelously entertaining (Guy Kawasaki) to poignant (a bedside chat with Gnomedex community hero Derek Miller who’s battling cancer) to controversial (Jason Calacanis whose presentation ignited a very public argument about conference etiquette). When it was on, it was riveting. Between (and during) sessions, there were any number of ad hoc conversations going in the hallways and side rooms and in multiple channels online.

The thing that really jumped out for me was how integral the Twitter stream during the event was to my (and many others’) participation. I did not attend South by Southwest when Twitter had its breakthrough moment but had been using it even before that event and have used it at all of the conferences I’ve attended this year as a way to locate and engage with others at the event and to discuss the goings-on with people unable to attend. But what happened at Gnomedex was on a completely new level. Rather than hanging out on the IRC back channel, I spent almost all of my time on the Twitter “front channel”.

The real-time commentary and analysis was dramatically different from the often anonymous and frequently trollish commentary on IRC. And many of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter were engaged in the proceedings in a way I’ve never experienced before. With a UStream live video feed and the Twitter stream, people around the world were “there” in a delightfully “in the moment” way. So whether the moment at hand was the standing ovation given by the audience celebrating Derek’s heroic spirit or the spat that erupted between Calacanis, Dave Winer, and others in the audience about conference spam, there was a meta-dimension of discussion and commentary that was something like watching Bloomberg or CNN.

I think the way we interact with these events, whether we’re onsite or participating from a distance, just underwent an evolutionary leap. I can’t wait to see how this trend continues to manifest itself in the coming busy season for conferences that, for me, continues next with the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and DEMOFall 2007 in San Diego next month.

August 8th, 2007

Media Temple offers iPhone Account Center

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:50 am

Categories: Mobility, Productivity, Web Apps, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, Web, Media, Media Temple, Marc Orchant

Media Temple is my hosting provider for my new personal blog and a few web projects I’m currently developing. This morning, they announced a web-based control center specifically designed for the iPhone that allows customers to manage their accounts, add domains, reboot servers, pay bills, and more from the iPhone from a very Apple-esque UI. It’s one of the best designs I’ve encountered to date for the iPhone and provides an anytime, anywhere portal for me to manage my (mt) account.

If you’re not familiar with Media Temple, here’s their self-decription from their About page:

(mt) Media Temple, Inc. is an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in Los Angeles, California. Since 1998, our company has provided businesses worldwide with reliable, professional-class network environments to host websites, email, business applications, and other rich media content. We are a friendly, accessible group of “technology agnostic” engineers, support professionals, and business developers focused on the continued financial success of our company while adding value to the services we provide.

I particularly like the “technology agnostic” statement. It aligns well with my personal opinion that the tools we have to choose from today, – Windows, Mac OS, or Linux – are all highly evolved, mature, and useful. It comes down to personal preference, experience, and what kind of work (or play) you’re interested in accomplishing.

What impresses me most about Account Center for the iPhone is how well the folks at (mt) have captured the touch screen experience. Out of all of the iPhone-focused web apps I’ve tried, this one looks and works most like the built-in applications on the device itself.

July 9th, 2007

beejive: multi-service IM for the iPhone

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:38 pm

Categories: Mobility, Web Apps, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, IM, BeeJive, Marc Orchant

BeeJive has just released an alpha of JiveTalk for iPhone – a web-based mutli-network IM client that allows you to chat on AIM, GTalk/Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo simultaneously. It works much better than Meebo and uses an iChat style bubble display. I tested connections on AIM, GTalk, and MSN and all worked without a hitch.

Point your iPhone to iphone.beejive.com . They seem to be able to detect twhether the connection request is coming from an iPhone as I was unable to get the service to load in Safari on the MacBook.

H/T to TUAW.

July 6th, 2007

Zoho updates Notebook

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:17 pm

Categories: Software, Web Apps

Tags: Notebook, Marc Orchant

Zoho just announced a few key updates to their Notebook application. The company has been busy this last week with the release of a Zoho FaceBook application that provides access to documents created with Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show and the release of iZoho which allows display (but not editing - at least yet) of documents in your Zoho account on the iPhone.

The Notebook enhancements include:

• Page reordering
• Undo/Redo
• A Book-level menu with options to rename, publish, share or delete a notebook. A similar page- level menu is promised.
• Improved support for Safari (specifically the latest 3.0.2 version).

That is a good week’s work.

July 3rd, 2007

Google buys GrandCentral - wow!

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 9:03 am

Categories: Google, Mobility, Uncategorized, Web Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Phone, Marc Orchant

I did not see this one coming but it makes a lot of sense. Google purchased GrandCentral, a very useful online service that provides a unified “inbox” for all of your phone numbers. I first encountered GrandCentral at DEMOFall last year and have been tracking the enhancements and improvements in the service ever since.

There’s not a lot of information available yet about the acquisition (I learned about this in an e-mail alert from the NY Times a short while ago) but I have no doubt that additional details will be forthcoming. When I logged into my GrandCentral inbox, there was a voicemail waiting from the company’s founders assuring me that this was a “good thing” and that being part of Google will make the service more available, more scalable, and better supported. When more information becomes available, I’ll update this post.

Update: Here’s an FAQ about the acquisition.

June 26th, 2007

Google calendar updates

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:49 am

Categories: Google, Web Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Marc Orchant

Google has recently added a couple of very nice new features to the Google Calendar application. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been using Google Calendar as the “glue” that binds all of my devices witht he assistance of some helpful utilities including Spanning Sync for Mac OS X and SyncMyCal for Outlook on my Windows Vista devices.

Plaxo has recently made a public beta of version 3.0 of their online address book and calendar tool available and it to can create a sync point with Google Calendar. I expect we’ll continue to see integrations like this as the API Google has exposed for Calendar is (by reports from my developer friends) very easy to work with.

New in this release:

• Receive notifications about upcoming events. Calendar now gives you more control over how and when you’re notified of upcoming events. Get reminders via email or text message, for every event or just the ones you want.

• Access your calendar with your phone. You can also stay on top of your schedule by accessing your Google Calendar account from your mobile phone. Visit calendar.google.com on your phone’s web browser to see a list of upcoming events with date and time information in an easy-to-browse format.

June 19th, 2007

Zoho Meeting now in public beta

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 8:59 pm

Categories: Software, Web Apps

Tags: Desktop, Beta, Zoho, Marc Orchant

Zoho has just announced that Meeting, their web conferencing and desktop sharing tool, has been opened for public beta testing. The service, which has been in private beta for some time, provides the following features and capabilities:

• Meetings allows you to share your desktop with multiple attendees.
• Attendees can attend the meeting from any operating system.
• Meeting has three viewers - Active-X, Java, and Flash.
• Participants can be given permission to control the presenter’s desktop.
• Meetings can be embedded in web pages and applications.
• Zoho Meeting is integrated into Zoho Show. Users can add a Meeting slide into Zoho Show. This combines presentations and desktop sharing functionality.
• Zoho chat is integrated into Zoho Meeting.
• Meeting is currently free while it is in Beta.

A video showing Zoho Meeting in action is here.

June 16th, 2007

Is Safari a honeypot for the iPhone?

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 8:13 am

Categories: Mac OS X, Mobility, Software, Web Apps

Tags: Apple iPhone, Apple Inc., Marc Orchant

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person. I came across the interesting notion that Apple chose to release the Safari for Windows beta to have the hacker community expose and document holes in the browser in advance of the iPhone release at the end of the month. Macenstein has a good theory on this. Sounds pretty plausible to me.

With the iPhone’s launch a mere 2 weeks away, this got me to thinking. The iPhone has a “full version” (minus Flash support, apparently) of Safari running on it. Apple has repeatedly said it does not want developers writing “real” apps for the iPhone due to security risks for cellular networks.

Is there a chance Apple is hoping that by releasing a beta of Safari for Windows, it can let the hacking community do its QC work for it?

Update: Oooh! Another conspiracy! At Hardware 2.0,  Adrian thinks Steve Jobs seeks to eliminate Firefox and be the “other white meat” in the browser wars. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But he makes a great case based on Jobs’ recent WWDC keynote and is absolutely correct in his observation that nothing the Steve does is accidental or unintended.