Plotting the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices

Jun 30 2009 12:12:45 PM Posted By : Arvind
Comments (3)

Standard & Poor's publishes the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices on the last Tuesday of every month. The indices are calculated from data on repeat sales of single family homes. The indices are normalized to have a value of 100 in the first quarter of 2000. It is calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag. We imported the data released today into Zoho Reports and created a few charts to see how the house prices have performed over the years.





There's also a separate chart that plots the Composite 10 and Composite 20 (an aggregate of 10 and 20 cities respectively) index values.


Inferences from the above charts
  • West
    • Los Angeles, followed by San Diego are the cities where the prices peaked much (indices of around 275 and 250 respectively)
    • In Seattle and Portland, the prices peaked almost a year late when compared to other cities in the West (around Sep 2007 as against Sep 2006)
    • There was a mini bubble in Los Angeles in 1989-1990
  • Midwest
    • Chicago and Minneapolis have seen the maximum rises
    • In Detroit, prices have fallen the most (given the state of the auto industry there)
    • Prices in Cleveland have almost remained level (just went up by 20 points)
  • Northeast
    • During the bubble years, New York's prices rose at a faster rate than Boston's (from 1999 to 2004, prices rose almost at the same rate in both the cities)
    • In the 1987-1996 time period, prices haven't varied much in the two cities
  • South
    • Prices rose the most in Miami, followed by Washington DC and Tampa
    • Like with Cleveland in the Northeast, prices in Charlotte, Dallas & Atlanta didn't rise by much
    • There was a brief bubble in 1989-90 in Washington, DC
  • General
    • The indices for many of the cities are showing a small uptick for April 2009
    • Almost every region in the US has got uniformly affected by the current housing bubble
Do let us know your own inferences from the above. The data is available here. Play with it and create as many charts as you like. For example, the below is an interactive chart of how the indices in the Midwest cities have been since Jan 2001.


We will be updating the data on the last Tuesday of every month. The charts embedded above being dynamic will change automatically.

Related Links

New Zoho API Partner : Rabbit

Jun 26 2009 05:11:00 AM Posted By : Arvind
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Rabbit is a web-based operating system that connects people, processes and content, combining the power of social networking into an enterprise environment. A key component of Rabbit is its information sharing capabilities, which let users work on documents they’ve uploaded to Rabbit’s web workspace, and share this with other users. Rabbit has selected Zoho for this because of Zoho's proven ability to provide high levels of functionality and performance, and to provide a smooth transition for enterprise users from working locally on the desktop to working on the web.

All documents, spreadsheets and presentations uploaded and stored in Rabbit can be opened using Zoho. The documents and spreadsheets can be edited and saved back where as the presentations can be viewed. Below is a screenshot of files in Rabbit being opened using Zoho.

Rabbit and Zoho

New documents and spreadsheets can be created too from inside Rabbit by invoking Zoho Writer and Sheet. This video by the Rabbit team explains the functionality in detail.

Rabbit has a 14-day trial. Try them out.
The latest update to Zoho Docs brings in a good many business-centric features. Let's see them in detail.

Groups Dashboard
When you login to Zoho Docs, you'll see 3 tabs - Desktop, Groups, Tags (with Desktop being open by default). Clicking on the Groups tab will get you a page where you can add Personal Groups & Organization Groups. For creating a group, you just need to give the email addresses of those you would like to be part of that group. You can originate a group chat, send a group mail & see the group's member details from the Groups dashboard. You can also view the files belonging to each group.

Groups Dashboard
Note that only business users can see their organization groups and the administrator has the permission to create such groups. Non-business (Personal) users won't be seeing the organization groups.

Business Pricing Plan
We have introduced a new pricing plan for businesses. Plans starts as low as $9 per month for 15 GB disk space and 3 users.

Business pricing plan
Admin Console
As you can see from the pricing page above, the Administrator buying a business account gets an Admin Console from where the organization's Zoho Docs account can be configured / controlled. Features of this admin console include,
  • Uploading a customized logo
  • Registering for a new domain or configuring your present domain
  • Adding the organization's users. This includes LDAP support & importing a bulk user list from a comma separated file
  • Defining user role policies (whether a user can export/publish documents, create personal/org groups etc)
  • Defining trusted IPs (IPs from where the organization's members can access the account)

A slideshow done in Zoho Show about this update below.


Test the new features in Zoho Docs & do let us know the features you would like to have.
As you may know, you can share the reports and tables with your colleagues & contacts in Zoho Reports, your effective online reporting & business intelligence service. And this makes collaboration a lot easier. Zoho Reports now provides fine-grained permission options while sharing. When you share a report or a table, you now have the choice to specify what can be done with the table/report by the user to whom its shared. Let's illustrate this with an example.

The following example consists of US GDP data (in actual and chained year 2000 dollars) over the years. For sharing the chart, click on Share -> Share this View to New Users.

Sharing a report
In the dialog box that opens, give the email addresses of those you want to share the report with.

Specify sharing email addresses
Now comes the exciting part. In the Permissions tab, you can specify what the shared users can do with the report you share with them. Whether they can Export the report's data and whether they can view the underlying data etc.

Specify sharing permissions
Similarly, there are permission options when sharing a table too. Like you can specify whether a table's data can be exported or modified (appending or modifying rows etc).

Specify sharing permissions for Tables
Supposing you want to share a number of tables/reports, you can do so from the Share option in the Explorer view. Check the Tables and Reports that you want to share, click on Share -> Share this View to New Users and choose the appropriate permission options.

Share from Explorer view
Whether the sharing notification email is to be sent can be specified too.

Sharing notification email
Also, such fine-grained permissions can be provided when sharing with the Database Group. You can define a Database Group consisting of a set of email addresses. This feature comes in handy when sharing reports & tables to the same set of users (than sharing to the individual email addresses each time).

Sharing from Explorer view
Try the new fine-grained sharing permission options in Zoho Reports & do let us know your feedback.

Related Links
  1. Dynamic Chart Filtering and URL Data type in Zoho Reports
  2. Zoho Reports : Pivot Table Enhancements
  3. Quickly Generate Similar Reports in Zoho Reports

The latest update of Zoho Reports brings in dynamic filter in live charts and support for URL (HyperLink) as a datatype.

Dynamic Filtering in Live Chart     

Say you are analyzing how the various campaigns of your Google Adwords account have performed using your Adwords Reporting database in Zoho Reports. Let's say you have three campaigns for mountain bikes, one each for the Europe and the US and one for other countries/continents. And you want to look at the data from Europe and the USA alone. You can mouse over on the chart legend and uncheck that data alone.

Google Campaign Analysis
Zoho Reports hides that particular data and will dynamically regenerate the chart with the remaining data.

Dynamically hide data

You can click on the same checkbox again to see the hidden data back.

Tick the same checkbox again to see the hidden data

You can hide multiple data lines too. For example, you can see the data for the US alone (hiding Europe and Others) by clicking on the yellow checkbox as shown below.

View data for US alone



The dynamic filter
functionality is available on charts that are embedded in any of your web applications or blogs too. Embedding the chart used in the above screenshots below. Go ahead, click on the checkboxes and try the functionality yourselves.


URL Data Type

Zoho Reports now supports URL (hyper links) data type. You can now set a column data type as URL and store accessible web URL addresses in those columns. When you view the data, Zoho Reports automatically places a HTML link sign besides URLs, clicking on which will open the URL in a new browser tab.


URL Data type in Zoho Reports

Like what you see and interested in knowing more about how Zoho Reports can help you analyze your business data? Contact us for a personalized demo.

Related Links

Zoho Wins 2009 Webware 100 Award

May 20 2009 12:54:55 AM Posted By : Arvind
Comments (6)
Rafe Needleman who hosts the Webware 100 awards every year has announced the winners for 2009. We'd asked you to vote for Zoho in this year's Webware 100 awards and you've responded enthusiastically!! Thanks for making Zoho a winner in the Productivity category. And congratulations to all Webware 100 winners!

Related Posts
  1. Zoho : Webware 100 2008 Winner!
  2. Zoho in PCWorld’s "The 100 Best Products of 2008"

Zoho Wins TiE50 Award

May 14 2009 05:10:50 AM Posted By : Arvind
Comments (3)
We are delighted to announce that Zoho is one of the winners of TiE50 for 2009! The TiE50 awards are announced by TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a global, not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering entrepreneurs across its international network. See the full list of winners here. Congrats to all the winners!

The TiEcon 2009 conference is being held on May 15-16, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Zoho is one of the event's sponsors and our CEO Sridhar Vembu will be speaking at the conference.

Use Zoho to Edit your Files in Humyo

May 12 2009 02:28:46 AM Posted By : Arvind
Comments (2)
Humyo provides an online storage and backup service for both businesses and personal users. All documents, spreadsheets, presentations uploaded to Humyo can now be viewed, edited & saved back online using the Zoho API.

The below screenshot lists files in my Humyo account and right-clicking on a spreasheet file opens up a dialog as shown.


Clicking on the Open this document option will open the file in a new Zoho pop-up window, in this case Zoho Sheet's.



Likewise, documents (doc, odt etc) will get opened in Zoho Writer and presentations (ppt, pps, odp etc) in Zoho Show. The embedded video below by the Humyo team explains the functionality in detail.


Give Humyo a try.
Zoho Wiki has been offering a zipped backup option of all your wiki pages for quite sometime now. And this got better with this update. You now have the option to set an automatically scheduled backup everyday. Click on the Settings link and you'll find the URL in the BackUp section.

Zoho Wiki Auto Backup

You need to copy the URL marked in the image and add it to your 'Scheduled Tasks' in Windows or run it as a cronjob in Linux. Your wiki pages will be backed up regularly at the said time (11 pm to 12 am PST) everyday.

The equation editor and LaTex format support that's been present in Zoho Writer is now available in Zoho Wiki too. Students and educators will make the best use of this feature, we believe.

LaTeX Equation Editor


The last Zoho Wiki update introduced bulk comment delete. You can now do bulk page operations too. Like deleting, giving permission & copying of multiple pages.

Page Bulk Operations

Zoho Wiki supports re-branding of logos & re-directing to custom URLs. And a customer asked us for changing the browser favicon from the default Zoho Wiki's. This is now possible too. Click on Settings -> Customization tab and you can upload your own favicon. [Note : This feature is available for premium Zoho Wiki users only, as of now]

Custom Favicon

We hope you will like these new features in Zoho Wiki. Give them a try and as always, we are eager to hear your feedback. Leave your comments here or email us @ feedback at zohowiki dot com.
The latest Zoho Reports update brings in the 'Query over Query' functionality, which has been one of the top request from our users. You can now have SELECT queries that combine already existing Query Tables. Let's see an example of how this comes in handy. Say you have a Sales table with sales figures for various customers, products, regions etc across years.



Say you would like to know who your Top 10 customers with respect to sales value were in 2006. Your query table would look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the top 10 customers arranged in alphabetical order.



And now you want to know how much you sold to those top customers of 2006 in 2008. This is where the new functionality will come in handy. You will arrive with the required data by joining the base Sales table with the above top 10 customers of 2006 Query Table. The new Query Table will look like,



The above Query Table in 'View Mode' with the customer names in alphabetical order.



You can save the resultant query table and create the necessary reports over it.

With this new "Query over Query" feature, you can create very powerful reporting queries on your data and use it for your report generation and analytics. It also helps in organizing your queries into reusable functional units. To know more about how to create a Query Table, checkout this video
.

Other Enhancements
Previously, direct import was restricted to CSV files. And you had to do a copy-paste from Microft Excel (XLS) files. From now on, you can directly import XLS files too.



Also, for xls, html files larger than 3 MB, you can now zip them and import into Zoho Reports.

Try these new features in Zoho Reports and let us know your feedback comments.

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