Geesee – Slovakians on the fast track in chatting!

A recent article in the Economist posed (in my opinion) the most pertinent question about web 2.0 companies – is there enough of an audience to justify the slew of web based companies and services? Their reading was that instead of looking for the mythical critical mass, these companies focused on micro-audiences, right down to the level of one family, one group of friends or one company. Given that, yes, it made sense.

Geesee too is in this list of companies in the process of creating their own audiences, giving them a pertinent reason to visit and revisit.

Techcrunch defines it is "an embedded chat service that lets users communicate across any number of web sites in common chat rooms organized by tags."

It goes that one step ahead to personalize and make your site or blog more welcoming. The idea is to have your own chat rooms with the option of video-in-profile. You can invite whom you want, public and private chats are possible. There's not even a download involved, the user just needs to copy and paste a line of code and incorporate it into their blog html. It does however need Adobe Flash Player 8, which is downloadable for free.

Sounds too good? There's more. Your chat rooms can be organized using tags. So a visitor who clicks in, wanting to chat about frustrations at work, can easily find a few fellow sufferers to let off steam!

Technorati says 'Users from all over the world can connect to the service from various entry points. Users can join any room and talk to any other user about their favorite topic'

The company's logic is that even a single visitor to the site can connect up to anyone, anywhere, on any subject. Tags ensure a higher quality of information exchanged, giving visitors reasons to revisit/use Geesee. Plus features include simultaneous multiple chats and tabs that let you set it up that way you want (audio off/video on etc.).

Script.com rates Geesee a 4.66 on 5, saying 'High-quality chat service will add value to your site and will make your visitors return for more fun.'

The company behind GeeSee is located at Slovakia, and was co-founded by Milan Zigmond and Roman Pohancenik. Geesee gets its name from the acronym for Global Chat.

Geesee is a relatively new entrant to the web 2.0 market, there is no direct competition as yet, though services like MeeboMe and 3bubbles offer site owners messaging and limited chat services with visitors.

What they say in Slovakia – a chat with team Geesee

How does adding video to a profile enhance a blog or web site?

Adding video to a profile in chat does not have any impact on our blog or web site. It just makes chat more attractive and fun.

How active are the chats between Geesee users in terms of time length, details, and familiarity?

I can only tell that a chatter chats for about 5-10 minutes on an average. English speaking chatters do not have any problems with the UI and functionality. It's a bit of a problem for those who do not understand English, but we do have a language mutations support implemented and will make it available later this year.

How do you use your blog to market Geesee?

A Blog is a great tool to keep people informed. We are trying to post interesting content relative to our focus areas. Our blog is pinging many blog tracking services to make sure everybody knows about our new posts. Another thing is a high level of interactivity on our blog, through newsletters, flash poll, comments, chat, comment subscriptions and easy membership. The aim is to market Geesee by spreading the word and providing the necessary information for those who want it.

What sites or businesses would make strategic partnerships with Geesee?

We are very new to the market and are currently dealing with different businesses to set up some strategic partnerships. Different blog services, community sites, actually anybody can put Geesee on his site and that can evolve to some partnership eventually.

Can Geesee be used for interoffice communication or customer service?

Geesee can be used in many different ways. It was designed to give people the tool to play with and to invent its possibilities. On the other hand we haven't specialized the software for any specific purpose. Our vision for Geesee is: one big community of chatters with many user advantages.

What are the advantages of advertising in the Geesee chat network?

Advantages are in the structure and segmentation of Geesee users. They like to have fun, to chat, to play, to entertain themselves…They would be the target audience for just about any kind of product or service. Another advantage is that we can target the advertising based on the current conversation in the chat room, which makes it very effective in terms of CPC. Imagine you are chatting about a trip to London and you'll start getting the London Hotel deals and discounts ads. You change the conversation to software and there you go – new Vista is coming ad :).

What is the company culture of Geesee?

We are a small company, with relatively low expenses, since we are situated in Slovakia. We are very flexible and fast in terms of fixes, customer support and new features. An interesting thing is that we do not have any internal employees. The company consists of several people widespread across few cities (and countries) and collaborating together mostly through the Internet. It's amazing what you can do with your laptop and internet connection.

What specific skills will Geesee expect to see its employee in the near future?

We want to keep hiring young, enthusiastic, energetic people with a passion for technology and communication.

What do we see in Geesee?
The idea of finding a high quality chat is very attractive, though it depends entirely on the users…but hey isn't Wikipedia a great example of trusting users to set the standards? Video-in-profile chat sounds interesting, chatters can finally come out anonymity, though how many want to is the moot point. Chatter with other blog visitors can allow bloggers to generate buzz faster and easier.

The company seems to have got its commercial aspects right, but there's always a danger in letting advertisers in. Just remember what happened to TV, the ads always got in the way, right?

SOUNDCRANK: Hitching Their Wagon To A Star!

Just like Nike was created by a former athlete, SoundCrank is the product of genuine music lovers. In an attempt to re-capture the glorious days of records (record? What is a record? Says the young people), SoundCrank brings you an i-tunes plug-in that helps you see the original album art and lyrics, all while your song is playing.

Better still, you can figure out if your friends are as cool as they claim…the My Music option allows you to share preferences and see what everyone is listening to.

"The iTunes plug-in allows you to automatically add album artwork and lyrics to the songs in your iTunes library. You also get a 'My Music' page on Soundcrank.com where you can share information about your musical tastes. Now I have to confess that I'm always a little nervous about sharing my muscial tastes with others, especially with people I know. So for me the neat thing about the 'My Music' page isn't that I can share my dubious musical tastes with others, no the neat thing is my friends can share THEIR musical tastes with me. It's a really great way of exposing yourself to new music."   Read more

Once downloaded, it comes down to a few clicks to complete all of the above. Then the plus features – real interviews with bands, information on live music events and user reviews of all new releases- comes in quite handy. SoundCrank will also search and display all those hard-to-remember lyrics that typically torment you while driving!( I love something, something, something...)

On the usability front, with this plug in you can copy music videos, podcasts, photos from your iPod to PC…recording is also possible through your PC speakers.

Competition seems absent at the minute, though the company is keeping a wary eye out for the likes of mog.com, and last.fm.

But the simple and telling comment on Sound Crank is:

"The plug-in was easy to install. I liked getting lyrics for my songs. I've tried other programs and this one works better than most of them"   read more...

Sound Bytes from SoundCrank – a convo with them.

I personally love album art and reading lyrics (especially when I don't know exactly what they are saying.) How important do you think those two are to music fans?

We really feel that those are two of the most visible benefits that we have lost as we've moved into the digital age. As we've talked with users, making sure that artwork and lyrics remain has been a big priority when we bring it up. I think that for a lot of people, it's sort of an intangible missing piece that they may be hard to notice at first, but contributes to a sense of detach from artists.

Who are some of the main competitors of Sound Crank?

mog.com, last.fm... there are others that are popping up. One thing we've realized is this is definitely the moment when a music service like ours, to add back in to the music experience, is ready to be embraced, because the vacuum is filling up.

How does Sound Crank plan on bringing back the complete music experience?

Album artwork and lyrics were the most obvious so we focused on them first. The heart of the music experience is bringing people back together to share their musical tastes and experiences. This includes the ability to find new music and friends in new and exciting ways. There are also a few surprises that will be included in the next release of our plug-in. I can't tell you specifically what they are but users we've talked to are very excited about them.

What type of content do you provider to music fans?

Soundcrank is a central location to find out about music and share that. We have a massive database of artists, songs and albums that users can tap into for information such as artwork lyrics and discographies. We also have artist recommendation podcasts where current artists talk about what they like.

I noticed a question on your homepage concerning the Grammy Awards. What are some other questions that you have or plan on asking visitors?

As we've looked at the different features we are currently offering and what we're bringing on board, we're probably moving away from that particular feature because the other items we've developed are more compelling.

How important will pod casting be in the next 3-5 years for music artists?

Podcasting (or webcasting) will become more and more significant in the next few years as on demand content on the web grows as a viable entertainment and information source. The essential benefit of a podcast over a traditional broadcast program is that it fits into your time frame as opposed to the other way around. What will be interesting to see is how copyright issues play out in new media.

Music artists have an unprecedented ability now to get their music out to the world. More and more control goes to the individual artist as the barriers of communication drop away. Webcasting is a very effective way to bring artists and fans together without having to worry about the economies of scale that are necessary in traditional broadcasting. (Read Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" for the real word on this subject)

What is the process or selection for interviews on your site?

We focus on artists that we know are relevant to our users. It also helps that they are going to be in town so we can talk to them face to face, but is not totally necessary.

How does Sound crank compare to similar sites such as Napster, Bearshare, or IMEEM.com?

We are user driven like peer to peer applications but that's were that comparisons end. Users can purchase music through our partners, but our focus is really enriching and enhancing the digital music experience.

Do we like the sound of it?- Our Opinion

Yes. Getting lyrics and album art, though it sounds simple, actually enhances the experience for the listener. It makes them more involved with their music. Knowing what everyone else is listening to is a great way to be in the know, given our paranoia of being "with it"! Personally, I would be shouting from the rooftops about SoundCrank's marketing potential for musicians. Word of mouth or should we say Word of i-tune could just land them that elusive big break. Our team definitely sees it as the next micro-marketing tool!

Quintura leads the search engine race!

Imagine being John Anderton- Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report, sifting through volumes of data with the flick of your fingers on a huge virtual screen to arrive at the precise information that could save someone? Quintura's "see and find" visual search engine is a first significant step in that right direction.

You first encounter a bunch of tags (which they call "cloud") akin to a visual map when you start the search process. Each comes with a sub-list of keywords and phrases, to help broaden or narrow down your search as the case may be! The right hand side (like all right brains) behaves in a conventional search engine way, displaying lists of search results. The further you delve into the cloud, the search engine adds the selected words to the query to narrow down and refine your search results. The search process is also aided by 'Auto-refine results' and 'Coverage' options.

The company promises this: "Quintura, Inc. is the next-generation web search company that was launched with a mission to make web search easier and faster by adding context or meaning to keywords and visualizing search."

Does it live up to it? For example, typing in the term "California" generates a map with words like department, find, home, hotel, United States, etc. Click on hotel and you get more keywords associated with both "california" and "hotel." One can add or remove words from the cloud to make the query more specific. On a lark, I double-clicked the visual map to add "song" to my query. Success! The Eagles come up to the top. see & find here...

Easy visual navigation and intuition are two themes that jump out about the search process. We see the semantic relationships of words on the visual map, for example the size of a word shows its significance in relation to the query, Is this the end of my relationship with the "Next Page" buttons of Google and Yahoo? What if I don't have to retype various combinations of the same set of keywords to try and get my relevant results displayed on first couple of pages? As you salivate at that possibility, why not ' Save it ' your search and ' Share it ' with a friend (Who wants to hang out at my cloud nine?! )

We are not just members of the club, we want to be the President
For Extra Credit, we downloaded the more robust version 1.5 of Quintura Search. Quick to download and it easily installed on our PC, this is when you are really welcomed to the full potential of the engine. Now we are in the advanced search mode. We loved these additions:

• Choose search engine of our choice
• Scope** feature to virtually drill into a topic of choice by adding and removing query words at each level to set further directions of searching
• Functional Toolbar to Undo, Redo, Stop, Start, Update results and Save search
• Simple Visual map Context Menu to add, remove, exclude, edit query words
• Results Filter (*editor's choice award winner* ) to display new links since last search, create Favorite links, Exclude selective links, Hide sites, Delete old links not relevant to modified scope
• Lucid help sections

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, then kids are definitely from another dimension!
So thank Team Quintura, who are convinced that men, women and kids not only process information differently, but search for it differently as well! Quintura for kids, is a colorful, cartoony treat, sure to be highly appealing to kids. Plus, the site only has kid related material, so nothing taboo is going to come their way. On the cards is Quintura for women.

Quintura has raised monies through Mangrove Capital Partners of Luxembourg, an early-stage investor in Skype, ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston.

Though Google and Yahoo! are considered competition, serious rivals include Clusty.com, which has tied up with Wikipedia, to provide a search and info model. It all points to just one thing, it's never quiet on the search engine front!

Quizzing Quintura – our chat with them

As with most online companies, your company is pretty cool. Where did it come from?
The technology of Quintura is based on over a decade of the founders' innovative research and development in the area of neural network and artificial intelligence. Quintura is privately held and has US offices in Alexandria, Virginia and Research & Development operations in the Moscow region of Russia.

What is the advantage of searches based on tags versus Boolean strings?

Visualization that is the main feature used in Quintura, becomes the center of the user experience, replacing antiquated listings and Boolean strings. Searches based on Boolean strings provide users with too many results, if your query is rather loose or, conversely, too few if your query parameters are too tight. With the tags, Quintura visual map shows the context of your query, those words and word combinations that are most closely connected with your search query. Quintura allows you to change your query at any step by clicking a tag and drill as deep as you need.

Your user interface has a great & unique layout, where did the idea come from?

Having in mind the idea of making web search easier and more intuitive we wanted to create a user- friendly interface. Quintura tag cloud ensures faster and easier results with fewer mouse clicks.

Will Quintura ever consider offering pay-per click advertising?

Quintura continues to distribute MIVA's Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Call Ads on our downloadable version, giving users the choice of either clicking or calling through to relevant information. We are also planning to introduce search ads into our online services.

How does Quintura index content differently than Google?
Currently our search results are powered by Yahoo! XML We started building our own index.

What role does your blog play in marketing Quintura?
We are blogging to let our users know about our plans and achievements and get feedback.

How will Quintura and similar companies influence how web sites are created & marketed?
We shall come up with our recommendations later in 2007.

What is the thought behind the upcoming versions for women & children?
We believe the 'search for everybody' market is overcrowded. This is why we turned to vertical searching and designed Quintura for Kids. The intuitive nature of the cloud is especially beneficial for children.

Quintura for Women could make a portal for a modern, goal-oriented woman. A specific predefined Quintura cloud gives an additional advantage.

How does Quintura ability to index images & video differ from Google's ability?
Again, it is currently powered by Yahoo! XML. However, we give our users additional benefit by allowing manipulating their query context and rearranging the list of found images or videos according with their needs.

Is there RSS feeds available with Quintura?

No, Quintura doesn't provide its users with RSS feeds. We plan to add this feature in the near future.

May Lag in Science & Math BUT Still Number 1 in Creativity & Imagination

US of A may be lagging others in Math and Science scores, but can students in Japan, Korea, India come up with these brilliant ...

The review team cannot help themselves but publish this. Do not know the source of the following, but thank the friend who forwarded this

Too Much of "Where's Waldo" Growing Up?

Can You Come Up With a Better Answer? I think this is brilliant.

But Seriously, Can Anybody Solve This. Describe How You would do It

May Lag in Science & Math BUT Still Number 1 in Creativity & Imagination

US of A may be lagging others in Math and Science scores, but can students in Japan, Korea, India come up with these brilliant ...

The review team cannot help themselves but publish this. Do not know the source of the following, but thank the friend who forwarded this

Too Much of "Where's Waldo" Growing Up?

Can You Come Up With a Better Answer? I think this is brilliant.

But Seriously, Can Anybody Solve This. Describe How You would do It

Weekend with Wikis

The new PB Wiki promises to be a cross between a blog page, a soft board, a fridge top and a web site! PB which actually stands for Peanut Butter, is all about usability and simplicity. Their 90 second video shows you, rather enthusiastically, that can use a PB wiki for your class, an office project or simply to share information with friends. With plug-ins that upload graphs, videos, reports, calendars, recipes et al. It was fast, it was easy, my wiki was up and running in 2 minutes flat. The PBWiki for ordinary mortals is free with 10 mb of file space, while they have 'yummy' packages for office users. But like classic coke, for all diehard wiki-ites, who want things the way it was last week, you can click and go back to your old wiki. The official site is cheekily named yummy.pbwiki.com For those who want to check out the competition, try www.wetpaint.com, where you can open a "wetpaint" wiki on just about anything under the sun.

ZPWiki, is the latest in the line of "Ask and thou shalt be answered". The only catch, you unfortunately have to pay for it. It's quiz time meets gambling hour. For $1 to $10,000, you can get those doubts firmly out of your heads. The site is starkly severe and means business. In contrast, Yedda ( a competitor site) shows sample questions and answers, so you can judge the quality for yourself. Google Answers is sulking, no questions please was the message. Yahoo! Answers needs you to swear eternal loyalty to Yahoo! before letting you in. But I question the wisdom of making anyone pay…for instance, ZP wiki promises book reports, which any student with half a brain can put to-gether just surfing a couple of blogs or registering with the countless student specific sites like directessays.com or termpaperslab.com.

Who's calling the shots in Web Analytics? Not Google.

Big Brother never had it easier. With web analytics companies springing up out of the ground, he just needs a single dashboard to find out which sites you visit, what you saw and how long you stayed. Most are even working on outbound clicks, i.e. where you are heading out as well! Our spotlight this week is on two companies, on either side of the Atlantic. Basil, based in the UK and Get Clicky, sitting pretty in Portland, both claiming to have outmatched Google Analytics offering for small to medium businesses.

Is Basil more to customers' tastes?

A name like Basil, a field like web analytics, you can smell those puns on spicing up a mile away! Jokes aside, this UK based company is steadily garnering business with an extremely user friendly interface and focused results, without any of those migraine inducing charts and tables. Basil's approach is to take the number crunching where it belongs (behind the scenes) and present only the findings in a relevant, useful way. The application gives you a single dashboard view of the number of visitors, the number of pages viewed, what was viewed (the contents), how did the visitors find your site (through search engines or other websites) etc. The client can choose to have the reports on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Basil charges a fee of just £12.99 ($25). It currently targets individuals and small businesses.

Why the comparison with Google Analytics?
The general opinion is that Google Analytics takes up too much of the users' time. Across reviews, the one thing that stands out is the complexity of results churned out (those darn tables and charts again) and the lack of real time data. Basil scores higher both counts. (Basil's spokesperson however hastily denounced all comparisons to the web giant!)

The flip side however is that Basil has no RSS or SPY features, however the company assures us that they are in the process of upgrading.

And Basil has a lot to say.

What's the story behind the name?

Nothing interesting here am afraid. The idea for Basil came one day when we were looking around for a decent small business/personal/blog stats package that didn't suck. We came across a nifty package called mint that seemed good but didn't really serve our needs. We decided to implement an internal stats package. It was only when it was completed that we realized there was a gap in the market and calling it basil was just an amusing tribute to mint.

Where are you located?
United Kingdom

How does your product differ from your competition?

I don't think we have competition at all. At our price point ($25), the features, the ease of use, the fantastic support and the ability to install it on your own hardware, there is nothing else that compares in this market.

How does Basil compare to Google Analytics?
I am flattered people even mention us in the same breath as Google Analytics. I've tried to address this comparison as a GA/basil thing.

GA targets a different market. It targets stats junkies who love spending the better part of their day looking at meaningless numbers, charts and data. Basil targets people who want information at their fingertips without having to dig through tables and tables of data.

GA targets people who love counter-productive time, fiddling with reports (if they can find them). Reports with basil are a matter of minutes. The only reason you would want to spend more than 5 minutes using basil is because you cannot believe how simple it is and are trying to find a bad point about it :).

GA targets people who do not want real-time data. Basil provides real-time data.

GA targets people who have no issues giving up their data to a third party. Basil allows you to own your data and do what you want with it by installing on your own machine.

I could go on, but these are some unique differences.

Do you have any solutions for pay per click?

Basil is soon going to include a marketing module which will enable PPC tracking. However, do not expect a solution like Omniture or the like as our motto is always "web analytics that make sense", meaning they have to be easy and relevant.

Different versions are due out throughout this year, one of which is Basil-Live- how does it compare to live chat solutions?

Basil live is quite different from a live chat solution. Basil live is about gaining insight into real time visitor interaction on your site and making informed marketing and webmaster decisions. Live chat is a poor excuse for bad support.

Who are your ideal clients?

Individuals, contractors, and small companies who don't mind dishing out the price of a large pizza in return for a reliable and simple analytics solution that takes out the pain out of obtaining stats, yet delivers information in a user friendly way.

We are also looking to target web hosting companies as we are confident it will help them add value to the service they provide to clients.

What type of reports does Basil produce?

Basil currently produces reports on visitors, pages, referrers and searches. It will soon produce more reports which are available from the dashboard.

Does your product assist sites in search engine optimization?

Although we are not aimed at SEO, the whole point of analytics is SEO. The ease with which you can track keywords and search engines and content performance (through pages) by itself lends to great SEO.

What are the capabilities of the demo compared to the full version?

There is no difference except the demo version will not allow admin level access to edit information.

Does your product assist in describing where visitors go after visiting a site?

Are we talking about which sites your visitors are going to from your site (i.e. outbound links)? Basil does not do this currently but with the rapid upgrades due and the roadmap, this is going to happen soon.

Get Clicky – sees what Google can't?

You are surfing without a care…but a sweet little application called GetClicky is helping the site's owners see exactly what you are up to- in real time! Created with blogs and smaller sites in mind, this web analytics tool lets you get as close to your visitors as is virtually possible.

The rave reviews are because GetClicky is perhaps one of the few sites to offer RSS feeds and SPY features. It uses Google Maps (which ironically enough, Google Analytics doesn't), to give you the geographic location of your visitors as well. All this in addition to regular reports on number of visitors, pages visited, and all those details a research person craves for.

The application is free for low traffic sites, while others get a premium account at quite an affordable rate. If you are looking for blips, the wow features (SPY ,etc.) are available only for paying customers.

Straight from Portland – Our chat with Get Clicky

How does Get Clicky compare to Google Analytics?

Services like Analytics concentrate on summarizing your traffic and calling it a day. That's great, but completely useless for smaller web sites. Clicky provides nice looking summaries too, but we also let you delve into the details of every visitor to your web site, which is extremely interesting to small site owners. We also have a much cleaner interface than other services like Analytics, whose triple-layered sub-menus with oddly named choices like "Defined Funnel Abandonment" and "Visitor Segment Performance" make it difficult to find what you're looking for.

As well, we offer a number of features that Google does not, such as RSS feeds, Spy, and Google Maps integration.

Do you have any solutions for pay per click?

No, but we're looking into it. We're currently working on tracking outbound clicks, and we'd really like to track ad clicks as well. Since most PPC ads are displayed via Javascript, however, that adds another layer of complexity. Ad clicks probably won't make it into the first version of our outbound click tracking, but definitely down the line at some point.


Besides giving detail on every visitor, how does Clicky differ from the competition?

Lots of ways! We created a chart (http://getclicky.com/compare) comparing us to most of the other big boys in the analytics world. While we are lacking in a few areas like being able to export your data (although we're working on that), the chart showcases the unique features of our product that you won't find anywhere else.
We also think our interface is key. It is very clean, very simple, and well organized. We get comments all the time on it, which absolutely makes my day.


Why is Clicky ideal for blogs?

Most blogs have very low traffic, so we think our service is appealing to them because of the level of detail we provide for every single visitor. As mentioned before, most analyzers provide overall summaries and nothing else. We go well beyond that.


Who are your ideal clients?

Clicky is aimed at bloggers, but the service works great with any web site. Any client is a good client.


What are the capabilities of your demo versus the full version?

The demo is the full version. If you mean free accounts vs premium accounts, the free accounts don't have access to the RSS or Spy features, and they are limited to a few weeks of detailed history. But you get a free 21 day trial of the premium service when your first sign up, so you get a taste of the full capabilities.


What types of reports does Clicky produce?

Most of our reports are the standard fair: unique visitors, page views, and popular searches/links/pages. But it's the way they are linked to the rest of your traffic data that makes them interesting. For example, when you view your popular searches page, you can click on a search term and be taken to the visitors' page which will then only display the visitors who arrived at your site via that search term. Soon it will also show things like the average number of page views, time spent, and most common entrance/exit pages for that search.

Or if you're looking at your popular links (refers), you can click the domain name of one and see all the visitors who came from that domain. You can then view the session details for any one of those visitors.


What is the thought process by making it free to all users with less than a 1000 views per day?

Our service has grown completely by word of mouth. We originally planned to make it a pay only service, but realized that we would be losing a lot of our users and in turn our voice to the world if we did that. So we decided to pursue other revenue streams such as advertising and licensing, offer Clicky for free to our target market (low traffic sites), and have an insanely affordable premium version for those with high traffic sites or who just can't live without amazing features like the RSS feeds.


Does Clicky assist in search engine optimization?
Not currently.


Are there any security issues that you have to communicate to your
customers and prospects? If so, what are they?

We aren't aware of any security issues that arise from the use of our product.

Open source is not only back in business but defining it! Venture capitalists are smiling fondly ($400 million was invested in open source start ups in 2005), revenues are soaring and so are the number of users. Typically plagued by service and user interface issues, the industry is working overtime to align technology to end users' needs. You have heard of Linux, Firefox, and Red Hat. The list of open source success stories is growing and rapidly challenging application dominance. For the consumer, it is good news all the way. Open source is all about a level playing field, where only innovation and creativity will triumph. Lower costs and access to newer technology will be out there for everyone to enjoy.

For businesses, especially small and medium business, an open source environment could actually mean "click and download" a whole host of applications, either free or for a small fee.

Nothing demonstrates this better than Zoho, a web applications integrated office suite, which is quietly making waves. Zoho combines all Windows Office suite features – Zoho writer (word), Zoho Show (power point), Zoho Sheet (XL) and more. All integrated with online applications like Wiki, chat, notebook, planner and blog. Forget email and attachments, with this new lot you can share anything from a word document to a spread sheet across users online. The suite comes with Windows plug-ins and options for working offline as well. Zoho has opened to rave reviews as a cross between Google Apps and Windows.

The company constantly updates and is adding new applications to complete the suite. AdventNet ,the creators of Zoho, are open source protagonists, although Zoho itself isn't open source.

As previously stated, web integrated applications will define the IT and the Internet space, just like Windows did in the 80s and 90s. As for Microsoft, perhaps they should focus less on the looming Google Apps and watch out for the small, but no less deadly innovators.

A chat with Zoho

How does Zoho's business model differ from other open source companies?

Zoho is an online services company. There are not many open source companies offering on-demand services compared to open source vendors offering products. If we compare the Zoho services with existing open source services, the business model is the same. There is a monthly charge per user for using our online application.

One of the primary differences between Zoho and other on-demand providers is the depth and breadth. There is no vendor who offers similar breadth of products that Zoho offers.

How do regular launches of new products every few weeks help Zoho?

We want to provide a suite of applications to small and medium size business. We need to offer most of these applications to complete our suite and we are in the process of adding applications to complete our offerings. In this process, we keep releasing new applications regularly. Typically this happens every month and we keep attracting new users for every application we release. Apart from releasing new applications, we also update our existing application on a weekly basis. All these updates are necessary as the applications are maturing for business use.

Who are your ideal clients?

Our ideal clients are SOHOs (Small offices and Home Offices) and small & medium size businesses who cannot afford to have an IT person on board. For these small businesses, we offer affordable applications. Of course, all our applications are free for individuals.

How does the release of Microsoft Vista affect the open source industry and your company?

Zoho applications are not open source. However, we use and contribute to a lot. We run on Linux, use MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and many other open source components. For Zoho, Microsoft's Vista doesn't mean anything. We just need to support the latest version of IE. I doubt if Vista will have a major impact on open source industry. Linux versions like Ubuntu are gaining good traction and are good for most of the common uses. As I use all operating systems, I use Mac, Linux and Window which every machine is in front of me. For me, personally, I don't need Vista.

Where do you see open source solutions going in the future?

Currently open source solutions are very good on the implementation side. But most of these solutions are not very good on the usability and user interface. There are commercial open source solutions that do a good job here, but they don't have the open source spirit. I think open source applications will move towards improving the user interface aspects going forward.

Tell me more about Zoho Challenge & how does it compares to application tracking systems?

Zoho Challenge is for students taking tests. Site24x7 is for application tracking. We have a very vast experience in application, website monitoring systems. The parent company AdventNet has more than 25 applications (www.manageengine.com) in this area and Site24x7 is offered as a service to bring in this functionality. We added this as part of the Zoho suite as it is going to come together in the big story.

How does Zoho Polls compare to Survey Monkey?

Survery Monkey focuses on data gathering and analysis. Zoho Polls is a very simple application that allows users to conduct simple polls online which can be embeddable. The target market is different in most of the cases.

How is Zoho Chat different than other online chat solutions?

Zoho Chat was created to provide instant collaboration functionality across Zoho applications. It doesn't compete with existing online chat applications. But this will be integrated across all Zoho applications. For example, if you are working on a document and need to chat with others working on the same document at the same time, Zoho Chat is used here. It'll be integrated into all Zoho applications.

Our Take On IT

Zoho vs Google Apps vs Microsoft -- as experienced by odinjobs.com

For startups like odinjobs.com[link home page]that don't have an IT budget to spend on software licenses, web apps is perfect. This is what you get with web apps, its accessible from anywhere (with an internet connection), upgrades/modifications are automatic and it has built in collaboration. Our team is dispersed and collaboration is key, in the old times we would have gone with MS project server and collaboration software from them and paid a hefty license and have the headache of maintaining the system. With web apps, we can concentrate on our business, matching the right IT jobs to a job seeker.

We use Google apps for docs and spreadsheets and Zoho for project management and it is working out brilliantly. We experimented with Dot Project (open source project management), but the problem was more of maintenance and support and we did not have the manpower to maintain another system. Zoho was built on Dot Project, the interfaces are exactly similar to Dot Project, but its hosted, maintained and supported. Google Apps is perfect for sharing documents and spreadsheets. Now a days rather than emailing documents/spreadsheets we just update google apps.

Zoho's PM may not have the bells and whistles of Microsoft project ,but really how many people use them? For majority of the users who want to track tasks, milestones, and projects Zoho is easy to use and to start off it is free. Zoho offers different pricing offers based on data stored, number of users, etc. A friendly word of advice- come up with a business model that does not depend on charging based on data size and users as "office suite" is becoming a commodity and is surely going the way of the IDE (Nobody sane pays for development environment anymore).

My guess is that corporate adoption will be slow, as IT departments will raise data security and data privacy issues and they are valid, but for smaller companies it is a trade off between those concerns with a trouble free & hassle free availability of the system.

What do you think of Zoho?

Here are 3 more unusual ways you can find your ideal IT job:

Prepare A Competitive Analysis

Do a competitive on one of your targeted employer's products

and send it to the president or vice president of the targeted

firm. People assume that all companies keep up to date on

their competitors, but this is rarely the case. Most companies

don't have the budget or the ability internally to remain aware

of best practices. Your piece will likely be most welcome.

Follow these suggestions:

Focus on companies that are direct competitors of those you

want to work for, not your company.

Potential employers need to get something out of reading the

piece.

Use graphs and charts wherever possible because people like

visuals.

Make it only as long as it needs to be.

Offer to share your primary research if the company is

interested.

Write A Case Study

Write a case study that showcases your skills. This could

be as simple as a client you sold or as complex as a new

product you helped introduce to the market. Send the study

to firms that have needs similar to those emphasized in the

study. Not only do you get to showcase your writing as well

as your research and analysis skills, it demonstrates your

business acumen.

For example: Did you establish an innovative compensation

program for resellers that increased

sales and decreased loss or returns? This is a big deal in

retail, where 90 percent of profits are lost due to returns.

Choose an example that builds your credibility with your

targeted employers.

Results that would be of interest to a potential employer

include increased efficiencies, new marketing techniques,

and new or different distribution channels.

Areas that would be promising include:

Manufacturing: just-in-time inventories

Operations: enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems

Call Human Resources

I know this sounds like crazy, but there's method in the

madness. Call the HR department. Ask what outside agency

or 3^rd party recruiting firm they use.

Why? Two reasons.

First of all, any human resources person will immediately

ask why you want to know. Your answer: "I've been to your

web site and I understand that you're not looking for

someone with my skill set right now but the agency you use

may be dealing with other firms- so I guess I'm looking for a

recommendation from you." If they don't press you for an

interview, insist on knowing whom they use and why.

People in human resources love saving money on fees, so they

may try to hire you directly. They tend to group together by

industry and make referrals. Getting a referral from one of

their customers will ensure an agency gives you special

attention. Always ask for the name of a specific person and

their direct dial number. Get permission to use the HR

manager's name as a reference.

Ask if they personally know of any other companies that

could make use of your skills. Send them a thank-you note

with a copy of your resume to keep on file.

That's not all. We have three final recommendations that

will come in the very near future.