Zoho Writer Adds Offline Support

Aug 25th, 2007 by admin | 1 Comment

There are two seemingly divergent themes in the Web Office world currently: 1) office software is increasingly heading online, in the form of products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho and ThinkFree; 2) web apps are increasingly adding offline functionality. The reason for the ‘bob each way’ is that broadband service is not yet ubiquitous or entirely reliable. So you may want to do some word processing on the train, or in a cafe that doesn’t have wireless (believe it or not, in my part of the world that is the usual scenario!).

Enter Zoho Writer’s offline support, just announced tonight. Note that it is read-only for now, but Zoho plans to make it ‘read/write’ in 3-4 weeks. Interestingly, it was built using Google Gears. Users have to install Google Gears to use the offline functionality - it works on Firefox (Windows and Mac) and IE. Perhaps this will compel Google to offer offline functionality for Google D&S, because as yet it doesn’t have it. ThinkFree however does have offline support in ThinkFree Premium.

Web 2.0 Tools Favor Democrats

Aug 25th, 2007 by admin | Comment

As a follow-up from our post earlier today - The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? - The Washington Post is reporting that online “friends” could be pivotal in the 2008 U.S. race. But it seems Democrats have a big advantage on popular social networks:

“Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook and 3-to-1 on MySpace, said Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who studies online politics.”

So far Barack Obama has 299,000 supporters on MySpace and Facebook, compared to 169,000 for Hillary Clinton. John Edwards ranks third among Democrats with 64,000 supporters, says the Washington Post - noting that Edwards is also using lesser-known social networks like Ning, Bebo and Care2.

Google May Map the New York City Subway

Aug 25th, 2007 by admin | Comment

In December 2005 Google announced a Labs project called Transit to help residents of Portland, Oregon plan local trips on the TriMet public transit system. The Transit app is essentially a Google Maps mashup that lets users plan local trips and navigate public transportation systems. Google Transit now covers 15 cities in the US, including Seattle, San Diego, and Dallas, and all of Japan.

This morning Bloomberg is reporting that Google is now working with the grand daddy of all transportation systems New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Along with the New Jersey Transit, which is also working with Google, the New York/New Jersey metro area transit systems transport 9 million people each day.

2nd Generation of Online Video

Aug 25th, 2007 by admin | Comment

Mefeedia was one of the online video aggregators that Josh Catone reviewed in his Guide to Video Aggregation Sites. It claims to aggregates video blogs and web shows from over 15,000 websites. Their index include 3.3 million episodes from over 24,000 different video feeds.

In a recent blog post, the Mefeedia team noted that YouTube (and Flash Video generally) has revolutionized online video, “making it easy to browse and view what you are looking for”. The problem, says Mefeedia, is that quality suffers on 1st generation video sites such as YouTube. Mefeedia thinks it’s time for the next generation of online video, which the company says will have the following attributes: