Its been less than 3 years since we launched our first Zoho service (Zoho Writer) and we are excited to announce that @ Zoho, we now are serving Million+ Users. This is an important milestone for us and on this occasion we’d like to thank all our users for supporting and using Zoho.

The path to this milestone is certainly exciting. While we started slow, we picked up momentum adding more applications as we moved along and the applications improved week after week, thanks to our engineering team.

It took us 1 Year to get to the first 100K users. As of last July we were serving 300K users and one year later on Aug 1, when Dean Detton from Prestige Home Automation registered for Zoho CRM, he became our Millionth user.

For those of you who are coming to the Office 2.0 Conference, we are planning a party on Sep 4th in San Francisco (we’ll provide more details on this soon) to celebrate this occasion.

Once again, we’d like to thank you all for using Zoho.

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One frequent question people ask about cloud computing is “What do you do on a plane?” At Zoho, we are working hard to get off-line access enabled across the suite.

Today, Delta Airlines annouced the AirCell Gogo broadband service in its planes. I guess it is a matter of time before other airlines follow suit. This is just another step in the long march to the cloud. Here is an interesting factoid: AdventNet, the parent company  of Zoho, makes a suite of network management products, and we have a component of our suite in there somewhere. So this news is exciting for us in more than one way.

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Yesterday, Zoli Erdos asked me why Yuvi Panda, the blogger from Chennai, isn’t too excited about the prospect of college in Chennai - “What’s wrong with college? Is the education too theoretical?” Trying to answer that question in a sensible way would elevate the discussion to a higher plane than it deserves, so simply on a lark, I decided to search for the term “jail college” hoping Google would come to my rescue. You can see the search results yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=jail+college

That YouTube link is a direct hit (Google, I am really impressed on this one - it is the perfect answer to my search!) I have embedded the video below for your “enjoyment” - if that is the right word here:

The video is from a news channel in India, on the relatively recent phenomenon of the “jail college” in Chennai and surroundings. They follow the time-honored management principle: if you can’t gain respect, try fear.  Since the colleges don’t offer much of an education that gains the students’ respect, they tie them down with with arbitrary rules and procedures, the breaking of which attracts stringent punishment. The video mentions only one kind of rule - on avoiding all communication with the opposite sex, but there are many other such rules. They target the primal fear of parents of teenagers world-wide: their boy or girl may do what boys and girls naturally do.

That is what passes for education for a good percentage of college students in Chennai, which explains why we refuse to place any value on it. The best thing we can say is that we don’t discriminate against the victims - we would prefer, of course, that they don’t become victims in the first place.

Seriously, why are such colleges doing good business? Mainly because employers place value on the certifications they award. It is not like the employers don’t know the colleges don’t add much value, but it has become a kind of corporate superstition (”everybody does it”) to still require a degree. Breaking that superstition is one of the main goals of our AdventNet University.

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In an article titled ‘Understanding Zoho, the Quiet Company Taking on Google and Microsoft‘, C.G. Lynch does a comprehensive take on Zoho. Excerpts from the article :

Zoho is betting on the cheapness of delivering software over the Web and hosting the data on their own servers to cannibalize the traditional “on premise” method of businesses buying software (like Microsoft’s) on discs and installing it manually on employee workstations and company servers.

Zoho’s software doesn’t care what kind of hardware companies use, or what operating systems run on top of them. People merely need an internet connection and a Web-browser to access and use Zoho applications.

“Software is commoditizing as a result,” says Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of both Zoho and its parent organization, AdventNet, a privately held company that handles IT support and data center maintenance. “It’s going to be a more high volume, low margin business now.”

As Zoho expanded the capacity of its data centers and its developers began building more online software beyond its first application (Zoho Writer, a word processor), the vendor gained more interest from small and medium sized businesses (SMBs), such as law firms and doctors offices who were looking for minimal IT costs, says Raju Vegesna, the company’s chief evangelist. They have also received business from non-profits and the public sector, such as Teachers Without Borders and the Hawaii State Government.

More recently, they have begun seeing interest from large enterprises, particularly on the departmental level, where they have taken advantage of some of the collaborative functions (such as document sharing and wikis) and the addition of CRM software.

Many parts of Zoho’s offering are free for up to a few users. Unlike Google Apps, their experience is not subsidized by ads.

Zoho has focused on bringing the rich functionality of Microsoft Office to the Web, something Microsoft themselves have failed to do for fear of cannibalizing their current business model of delivering software on premise and with higher margins. Zoho also used a Google tool, Google Gears, to make portions of the Zoho applications suite work offline.

Thanks, C.G. Lynch, CIO.com for the nice article and Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research for the comments.

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Akshay at Social Media Research Blog has done something very interesting. He wants to find how every user in FriendFeed is connected to Bret Taylor, FriendFeed’s founder (reminded me of a similar example in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘The Tipping Point’ - the one mentioned there is actor Kevin Bacon). Akshay has all his data on Zoho Sheet containing more than 70,000 users listed along with their ‘bret number’ - the degrees of freedom or separation between you & Bret. That’s the largest public sheet that I’ve come across so far.

If you are on FriendFeed, find your ‘bret number‘.

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You have created a couple of Zoho wikis and have shared it with your team or made it public. Now you would like to be notified whenever someone edits your Wiki or a specific Wiki page. And here’s one more scenario - you want to watch a public Wiki that you are interested in. Zoho Wiki’s ‘Watch this Wiki/Wiki page’ option comes in useful.

You can either choose to watch a specific wiki page or a whole wiki.

And you will be notified by email whenever there’s some edit happening to that wiki page or wiki. Use this Zoho Wiki feature to keep yourselves up-to-date on wikis you own or your favorite wiki.

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Ian Wenig, Senior Director Strategic Alliances at Zoho got interviewed by Daniel Brusilovsky at the Structure 08 event presented by GigaOm. The interview is now up at Daniel’s Apple Universe podcasting site.

.

Thanks to Daniel.

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Zoho Projects underwent an update just now and the below features are now available.

Multiple Admins : Till now, Zoho Projects followed the single admin concept. But from now on, there can be multiple admins. The one who created the Zoho Projects account is assigned the super-admin / portal owner role. And he/she can designate other members as Administrators. These administrators have all the privileges as the portal owner except upgrading/downgrading the Zoho Projects account & changing the credit card details.

Task-Documents and Task-Forums Mapping : Along with adding Notes to a task (which is useful for knowing a task’s status etc), documents uploaded to Zoho Projects and discussion forums created for a project can now be associated with tasks. Multiple documents/forums can be associated with a task and a forum/document can be associated with any number of tasks.

Managers can add Clients : Project members in Manager role can now add (external) client members to the projects they manage. This gives a Manager fuller control over the project(s) he/she manages.

Separate iCal link for Google Calendar : Google Calendar follows the VEVENT component versus the VTODO component that needs to be followed for tasks/tasklists/milestones. To support GCal, Zoho Projects now has a separate GCal link. Clicking on the links, you can download an .ics file which you can import into your iCalendar / Google Calendar.

Test drive the new features in Zoho Projects and we would be glad hearing your comments.

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There is a NYTimes story today on the rise of “cloud computers” and net-tops like the Asus EEE. I have called them Fireboxes in the past myself, but cloud computer would work! Here are some reasons I think why this trend is inevitable.

1. Convenience: On any kind of decent broadband connection, launching a cloud application is faster than launching the desktop equivalent.The fact that you could do that from just about any machine is icing on the cake. On a regular basis, I now work from 4 different machines: 2 desktops and 2 laptops (see reason 3 why).

2. Lazy Computing: flossing teeth, backing up files - I don’t want to diss those oh-so-disciplined folks who do these regularly, but alas, I am not one of them. My single biggest reason for switching to cloud applications is that I never have to do a backup ever again - that’s what data center administrators are for. I was reminded of it twice recently, because two laptops decided to crash on me suddenly. That brings up the third point.

3. Resurrection of old computers: I actually like to use old computers. Partly it is to force myself to experience our own software in fairly challenging circumstances. The reason reason is that there are plenty of unwanted old computers around, so using old machines you are always in a state of super-abundance. In fact, one of my laptops is a “loaner” from a friend who was going to send it for recycling - Firefox works great on that one!

One consequence of using older computers is I encounter frequent crashes. But it is not just old computers that crash. Last week, a brand new loaner given to me by our sysadmins in our Chennai office had a disk crash too. Since I don’t store anything on the local machine, it was a 2 minute operation to swap it with another laptop and I was on the cloud again.

Try moving yourself to the cloud entirely. I bet you won’t ever go back!

(Update: Just after I posted this, I find that Mike Arrington wants a dead simple web tablet. I would love to buy one too!)

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We have featured the friendly Technologist cum Educator, Barry Dahl of Lake Superior College before. Barry continues to be a strong Zoho (and ToonDoo, Jambav) advocate for more than a couple of years now. From a recent post of his,

At the risk of sounding too much like a fanboy – I just have to say it one more time - love Toondoo and Zoho. This is nothing new for me since I’ve been sort of an evangelist for the past couple of years now. However, they continue to surprise me with how much they pay attention to their users and how responsive they are to suggestions or comments. With regard to Toondoo, back in Dec. 2007, I included them in my end of year list of the Top 12 Web 2.0 Tools. In that post I lamented the fact that I had wanted to use Toondoo with the elementary schools kids where I run the after-school Tech Club, but that I wouldn’t do it because there was too much inappropriate content on the site – mostly lame attempts at adult humor in cartoon format. Within a day or two of that post I received an email from Toondoo telling me that they had added a safe search button at the top of each page and a personal setting that can be turned on to not show any content that has been flagged as inappropriate. I was impressed with their responsiveness, but not terribly impressed with the solutions.

Then, earlier this month I included Toondoo in my post of the free web tools that I would be willing to pay for. My caveat here was that I would be willing to pay for the tool in order to use it with the youngsters if they could give me a protected environment

Lo and behold, I received an e-mail from Rajendran D. of Jambav within just a few days of making that post. TPTB at Jambav thought that was a good idea and were especially intrigued that I had even offered to pay for it. They are proposing that I be a beta tester for their new branded sites opportunity. They will provide a unique URL such as LakeSuperior.toondoo.com and allow me to host the members of my choosing. They are thinking that this service will probably sell for about $50 US per year, but they are offering it for free to me as a beta tester to use it with the students and to report back to them with suggestions and comments. This isn’t yet a totally done deal, but I’m confident that I will be able to try this out with the Tech Club when school starts up again in the fall.

Jambav is owned by Adventnet, which is a profitable software development company. Zoho is also owned by Adventnet, which gives them a potent 1-2 punch in my book. The most recent moment of Zen for me regarding Zoho tools was when I was presenting at the Tennessee Board of Regents Summer Institute last month (TBR08). I did two sessions on Zoho tools that were well attended and well received. There were many times that jaws dropped during those sessions as people saw some of the functionality that they didn’t know existed, or hadn’t taken the time to investigate. I always say that I think the Zoho suite is far advanced over Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and a few Google users confirmed what I was thinking about the power that is Zoho. I also did a session there about Toondoo, and there were so many great ideas about how to use comic strips for both student projects and for other purposes related to online courses and programs. For example, (1) make a Toonbook of frequently asked questions, (2) have students prepare a comic strip to introduce themselves at the beginning of the class, (3) instructor-created comic strip or toonbook as a topic teaser (introducing a new topic before more in-depth study), and several others.

Deepa, who uses Zoho for her day-to-day activities, writes about her usage of Zoho Creator, “Zoho Creator :- Only intuition, no programming”

I came across Zoho Creator, and have been trying it out for the past 6 months before making my first post about it here. I proudly admit the fact that I have integrated Zoho into my actual working environment, which has taken the load of report maintenance off my shoulders. These days, I spend only 2 hrs a week to consolidate my report. I use the free version, but sure have the plan to switch to business version soon enough.

The advantage of Zoho [Creator] lies in the fact that

1. There is no huge download or installation.. Because this is a WEB APPLICATION
2. The Registration is free
3. You need not have any programming knowledge
4. The interface is exceptionally intuitive
5. Drag – and – drop allows you to design custom forms
6. Logical flow of events will guide you to do the scripting.
7. Embed the form in your blog and collect data
8. Various choices on how you wish to process the data collected ( HTML, Excel, JASON, AJAX, Pdf , ) for novices and advanced users alike.
9. The feeds can be integrated into feed readers, HTML displayed within iframe,.. possibilities are immense.
10. Applications can be shared with any number of users ( say you have created the application and want you friend to moderate the content… go ahead and share it)

You can develop a simple form like Guest Book , which has minimum scripting ( auto date ), or , developing a complex form that allows you to generate and send email-verification code right from zoho form, which involves more complex scripting.

Bloggers have long loved interaction with their readers. After all, isn’t that why we enable comments? Here is something to take this level of interaction a step further. How about developing a custom application to cater to your needs?. Well, if you feel lack of programming knowledge, and the mind boggling software installation ( not to mention the price) is pinning you down, not anymore. Try Zoho Creator, I am sure you will eventually end up using it.

Thanks Barry & Deepa!

Do tell us how you are using Zoho, ToonDoo or Jambav. Email us or leave your comments below.

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