Forbes reviewed some of “The Best Web-Based Computer Applications For Small Business”, and thus gives us a very good overview of the leading office 2.0-apps available today. They covered everything from calendar and email over information managers to spreadsheets and word processors.
(from Apolemia)
Flickr added a fancy new feature to their service: it is now possible to geocode photos within flickr, just by dragging and dropping them onto a map within the organizer. The map is – certainly – provided by flickr’s parent company Yahoo. Geocodes are added to the photos automatically, and the name of the corresponding place is also found automatically.
Thus, it is now also possible to browse flickr-photos with a map-interface.
(from TechnologyEvangelist)
We see a lot of Web 2.0 sites upcoming these days, but how popular are they in fact?
Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List tells us!
After buying the Ajax-based word-processor “Writely” in March, Google now announces it’s “Spreadsheets“-service.
Together with it’s calendar-service Google now offers the most important elements of an Office-suite in a completly web-based and installation-free manner. Comparable to ajaxLaunch, but probably with more “impact” and a better quality.
Does Microsoft have to get afraid now? Like Nicholas Carr also thinks, probably not. Those web-based tools are – at least today – not more than an extension to locally installed office-apps. They are nice if you want to share documents, quickly edit an Excel-file if you are on a computer without Excel, and so on. Everything Microsoft plans to offer with their own ‘Live’-service.
By the way, would really like do to do your personal, private budgeting with a web-service offered by Google?
(See more of Google Spreadsheets here)
“Google announced new technologies to enhance and improve the search experience. Three new products – Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook – advance the state of the art in search by helping users worldwide find and share more relevant information. The products all incorporate new capabilities that leverage user communities, enabling users to either share more information with others or benefit from other users’ expertise to improve the accuracy of search results.”
(from http://biz.yahoo.com/)
Google has finally started it’s map-service also in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. You are now able to plan routes and do local searches at maps.google.de. And you also get high-resolution maps, like goyellow delivers them already since 2 months or so.
UPDATE: Google also offers a beta-version of a Google-Maps-Client for mobile phones. The Java-applet can be directly downloaded and installed from www.google.de/gmm. It offers local search and navigation-functions, but doesn’t transmit cell informations of the mobile network.
There was an interesting discussion between Nicholas Carr and Andrew McAfee about wether the "Web 2.0 toolkit" (wikis, blogs, RSS and the like) will find it's way behind the firewall into corporate IT-systems. One could well argue that busy professionals are overstrained already today handling email, phone-calls and instant-messages. But aren't the new techologies adequate to better master and control the information-flood? Anyway, i find it interesting that a company like SAP invests in a company like Socialtext, and I think Web2.0-features will come into enterprise-IT automatically: because the big software-vendors will incorporate those features into their already existing Web1.0-products (like MS Sharepoint, SAP NetWeaver Portal and so on).
mp3.com-founder Michael Robertson announces his 3rd completely browser-based office-application, ajaxXls. In contrast to ajaxWrite and ajaxSketch (all available at www.ajaxlaunch.com) this is (at the moment) only a viewer for excel-spreadsheets. Although the applications are missing some functionality and aren’t, let’s say “fully matured” yet, this is a very interesting project, which especially shows the power of AJAX-based web-applications. I will stay tuned for the other apps to come, one per week is announced.
Similar projects:
http://www.writely.com
http://www.irows.com
TechnologyDriven 