This isn’t the regular Gizbuzz podcast, but the PodDev web development podcast which is also part of Oratos. It normally lives over here , but I’m putting this episode into the Gizbuzz podcast feed because I think you’ll like it! We have Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes with us for the whole episode, and he has some great insight into the issues we talked about.

The fourth episode features:

• Jotspot has some support problems during the Google transition
• The Wii has a browser, and the web is in new places – what does this mean for webdev?
• Yahoo’s new content properties forgo RSS, can enterprise accept RSS as a standard?
• An interview with Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30boxes.com

Download

Enjoy!

Zoho emailed today to say that they had launched three new features for Writer and Sheet. I had just finished a post I was pleased with about them, when IE6 crashed and the lack of an autosave in the host-your-own version of WordPress meant that I lost it. Since I can’t be bothered to write the whole thing out again, here’s an [edited] extract from the Zoho blog post, with some analysis (the interesting bit!) below that.

Today, we announce three different additions to Zoho.

1. Zoho Plugin for Microsoft Office

We are very excited about the plugin for Microsoft Office as this extends the Office functionality online offering mobility etc….or should I say ‘This is what Office Live is supposed to be’ .

2. Zoho APIs

Zoho APIs is our first major step towards opening up our applications to be integrated into other services. With these well defined APIs, other web apps can now integrate closely with Zoho applications.

3. Desktopize for Zoho (Download)

Desktopize, our partner customized their offering for Zoho making our applications behave more like a desktop application. If you like desktop shortcuts, quick tray access, Drag-n-drop documents into Zoho apps, I recommend installing this application.

Two significant things which come out of this. One concerns the ‘ideology’ of Online Office (OO) and the other Zoho specifically. Firstly, the plugin for MS Office and the Desktopize for Zoho releases are a clear attempt to blur the line between desktop and web apps, in what I see as a very sensible move. At the moment when I start to write a document I have to take a decision; do I sacrifice all the advanced features and fantastic UI of Office 2007 for the better revision control and superb collaboration features available with OO, or do I spurn the revision control and collaboration for the UI and features? With the office plugin release, Zoho is hoping that people will chose to store all their documents with them, and then when they don’t need collaboration they can use their desktop suite, and when they do they can switch into online mode.

The Zoho-specific point is that I guess this is the end of Zoho Drive. When Peter and I interviewed Raju Vegesna in July, he talked of an imminent launch of Zoho Drive, which would be a central location in which to store all your documents, which you could then chose to either open locally or on the web. It looks like they are taking an individual product approach, which I think is a shame. The API means that they are obviously hoping that online storage providers will build that functionality for them.

[Definitely not via TechCrunch, but Arrington's new editor did get the scoop (I'm not bitter!)]

Update: Raju confirms in the comments that Drive will not now be released. I have mixed feelings on this. In some ways it helps them maintain the focus, and maybe Zoho/Adventnet isn’t the right company to do it. However, I liked the premise of it, and it is radically different from what the storage companies are interested in at the present. There is a massive niche there, and the first to market with an online storage solution built around an online office suite has the potential to make a lot of money. It’s a shame I can’t code!

I’ve decided there are a few products that I really should write about, that I don’t. Mozy, an online backup tool I use, is one of them. The reason I haven’t written about it before is frankly because I don’t think about it, because I don’t need to. It just works.

Everyone should backup, few people do. A proper backup strategy for a normal home user would consist of backing up absolutely everything to either a NAS or an external hard disk, and then backing up as much as possible to an offsite secure facility where your data will be held encrypted. In reality, the closest most people get to the above is a few CDs of data kept in a draw, burnt whenever someone remembers. That’s all I did, until I had a scare when I thought my laptop’s hard drive had died, and that I had lost all my work (in fact it had merely become unplugged). I now backup quite carefully.

Mozy is an important part of my new found responsible behavior. It sits on my desktop and my laptop, running in the background, doing a differential backup every few hours of the files and folders I have told it to, encrypting it first, sending it off to a data center. There is a free version, though that only gives you a 2GB storage quota.

Mozy’s success can be measured in the fact that I pay for the extra storage. I have a Dreamhost account with a total of 200GB of space, and as far as I can remember 1TB of bandwidth. I could backup to Dreamhost, but there is simply no easier way to do it than Mozy, so I pay the few dollars a month.

Sorry if that read like a press release! Although they do have an affiliate program I’m not part of it! I hope to do more features like that in the future; these sorts of products that work really well don’t tend to get much coverage, because, lets face it, who’s interested in backup tools until they lose their data!

As some had predicted, Apple is to try and emulate the US tradition of ‘Cyber Monday’, which is the first Monday after Thanksgiving, over here in the UK with special deals both online and in store, with rumoured DJs in every Apple Store.

The discounts over in the US for the event were quite good, and so hopefully we’ll see significant cuts off our prices, which are higher than those in the US anyway.

Have fun!

This is the first post on a series about challenges for the future internet and new media industries. Think of it as a todo list for web entrepreneurs – problems which need to be solved. Maybe Jason Calacanis could help himself to an idea!

We live in a widely heralded age of new media; anyone can put out a podcast, video or music track on the internet, and make it available to whoever wants it for next to no money, and in many cases hardly any time. Everyone’s doing it as well, right from Oratos with the Gizbuzz Podcast and PodDev to the BBC with From Our Own Correspondent and many other programmes.

What Oratos and the BBC have in common with regards to our publishing of rich media is that we both lack any tools to tell us any meaningful analytics concerning our publications. It is easy to find out how many times a file has been downloaded from your server from your logs. You can do an IP lookup and find out where any given downloader downloaded it from. But that’s about where the definite information ends. (more…)

This is a really good interview, even if we say so ourselves! Peter and I interviewed Jen Mazzon and Sam Schillace, both formerly of Writely, and now part of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets team since Writely was acquired by Google and integrated with their Spreadsheets product. We’ve previously written lots about Writely and subsequently Docs and Spreadsheets, and its a really interesting product.

In the podcast we talk about:

• who uses rich web applications, and who should be using them,
• what their future is,
• whether AJAX is sufficient as a technology for building web apps, and if there is an alternative,
• online office integration,
• the challenges of building web applications for different browsers, and whether it is getting better.

The interview will appeal to you whether you’re just starting to understand what rich web applications are or whether you’re a hardened user of RWAs. If you like this, you might also be interested in our interview with the Chief Architect of Zoho, a competitor with Google in this field, last August.

More great interviews coming, so: Subscribe to the Gizbuzz Podcast
For a quick fix: Download the podcast directly

Enjoy!

The Office User Interface blog is reporting that Microsoft will be offering to licence their new ‘ribbon’ user interface design to third party developers to use in their applications.

It’s free, provided you accept their licence, and that you’re not making a product that competes with any of the Office apps.

It’s an interesting move, as clearly Microsoft do want to push forward this UI change for the future. My personal view on the new Office ribbon UI (which contrasts with Huw’s views) is that it looks terribly inconsistent with the rest of Vista. In fact, to me, Vista looks horribly inconsistent, with some apps having menus, some not… but that’s a different story. What this hopefully will mean will be that in the future we’ll start seeing more consistency among all Windows apps, whether MS or third party.

Unfortunately, it seems Microsoft’s site is experiencing a few problems and I can’t at the moment read the licence terms (I’m also not a lawyer, so it probably wouldn’t be very easy to read).

[via Slashdot]

I reviewed project management system Teamwork Live a little while ago on Gizbuzz. It didn’t get a good review; despite an excellent, possibly best in class feature set, the UI was a usability disaster. At the time, I said:

Despite this [good feature set], I did not like Teamwork Live, for one simple reason. It suffers from appalling UI design. When using it, I had the feeling that it was created by some fantastic developers able to execute complex features, but that no designers had been involved at any stage. The whole system almost always behaves counter-intuitively, without any obvious reason for doing so. 

Tuyen, the founder of Teamwork Live got in contact, and I have since done some consulting for them [proceed with caution!], laying out specific problems and putting forward ideas for how they could improve. Last week they launched a new version, which is significantly better. I would describe the UI as now neutral (this is a good place to be): it allows intuitive access to all the features, it makes good use of space and does not hinder the user in any way. In my last review I complained that I wasn’t aware of what was contained in each tab. TWL have managed to cut the number of tabs down from 7 to 5, each tab with a meaningful name, making it obvious what each one does. If that isn’t enough, a simple mouse over will display all of the sub-items of that tab.

TWL takes a dual approach to project management; personal and team. Each user has a Personal Workspace and a Team Workspace. I have found that this works nicely, as it makes sense to organise both areas using the same tool, from the point of view of integration. As far as I know this is unique; whilst Zoho have both Planner and Projects, the two do not integrate. This innovative approach, combined with the robust feature set make Teamwork Live an increasingly sensible choice of Project Management Suite.

[note I also have also been given a free premium account on Teamwork Live]

Big in Japan, the company behind social media tools, aimed at ‘prosumers’, such as FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail, have announced that they will be releasing the source code to all their services under the GPL license, other than PodServe (and presumably Fancast, as that is aimed at the enterprise). They will also maintain the hosted version. The reason they have given is that in order to remain relevant the tools need a lot of work, but they are too busy working with paying clients (they also advise corporations on how to ‘do’ social media) to spend that time. (more…)

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are starting to roll out Internet Explorer 7 automatically to Windows XP machines via Windows Update.

This means that all machines currently running IE6 that have the default update behaviour of ‘automatically download and install updates’ will automatically download IE7 as a high priority update. It’s a major new release, but I would argue it’s not ‘high priority’ if it’s not a security fix.

They’re currently rolling it out slowly to different target user groups, as they’re apparently not trying to overwhelm IT departments with upgrades. Also it’s worth mentioning that users will be prompted whether they want to go through with the install after the automatic download.

Remember – you can always upgrade manually at Microsoft’s site, but also remember that upgrading in any form requires Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Validation. Enjoy.