iPhone Application Developers, this post is for you. Don’t be scared away by the length of this post. The results are going to be extremely useful.
If you are an iPhone Application Developer, iTunes Connect provides you daily and weekly sales trends for your application(s) as a CSV file. Sure, you can open that up with Excel or Zoho Sheet and do some basic analysis. But we have a better solution for you in Zoho DB & Reports.

The ‘DB’ part of Zoho DB & Reports might scare you away, but the ‘Reports’ part of it will be REALLY useful when it comes to analyzing your iPhone Application data. What kind of reports can you do with Zoho DB & Reports? Here are few examples (click to enlarge).

If you really want to see this in action, I made this sample database public with some reports created.

Now that I got your attention (hopefully), let me drill down into the details on how you can create similar reports for your iPhone applications. Before we get started though, make sure you download all your daily reports (.CSV files) downloaded from iTunes Connect.

Obviously, the first step is to create a Zoho Account and enter http://db.zoho.com. Once you are in, Create a Database from ‘Import .XLS, .CSV, .HTML…’ option. Give your Database a name like ‘iPhone Reports’ and select the ‘Data Location’ as ‘Local Drive’. Now browse and select one of the downloaded CSV files (you can add others later) and click ‘Next’ and then select the ‘Create’ option in the next screen. This will create a table from the CSV file with 24 columns and multiple rows.

Once the table is created, you are all set to create Reports from this data. Before jumping there, let us make sure you have all the data imported from all the .CSV files you downloaded from iTunes Connect. To Do this, use the ‘Import’ option available on the top and select ‘Import into this table’ option and import all your CSV files using the ‘Local Drive’ as the ‘Data Location’. You’ll end up using this ‘Import’ option daily as and when you have reports available from Apple.

Now that we have the data in Zoho DB, we can now start building different types of reports. Let us start with a simple report that shows ‘Daily Sales’. For this, select the ‘New Report’ option (top left) and choose the ‘Chart View’ option and select the database we just created. Here, you’ll see a simple drag & drop interface where you can drag the columns from the left to the right to generate the report you need. Lets try this together.

Application Daily Sales

Drag the ‘End Date’ column from the left to the ‘X-Axis’ column on the right. Similarly, Drag the ‘Units’ column from the left to ‘Y-Axis’ column on the right. After you dragged the ‘Units’ column, change the ‘Actual (M)’ option to ‘Sum’ for ‘Units’ and ‘Actual (M)’ to ‘Actual(D)’ for the ‘End Date’. The top section will look like this.

Now select the ‘Click Here to Generate Graph’ option and you’ll see the Graph created for you with the daily sales of your application. You just created for the first graph which might look like this.

You can change your graph type with the ‘Other Charts’ option. There are many options available including the 3D Graphs. The nice part about the Graphs in Zoho DB is, these are click-able. Which means, you can click on the graph to view the underlying data.

Now, Save the Graph, give it a name (like ‘Daily Sales Report’) so that you have this graph saves permanently that updates automatically whenever you import the data.

You can also make changes to the Graph. For example, if you want to see the number of units you sold every day displayed on the graph, simply drag the ‘Units’ column from the left to the ‘Text’ section on the right and you’ll see the number of units sold in the graph.

But there is an issue with this graph. As we added the ‘Units’ column to ‘Y-Axis’, it counts every downloaded unit as a sale which may not be the case as your application might have several versions and users download it as free upgrade. It is important to filter this data out to get the correct numbers. To filter out the right information from this graph, let us do this…

Select the ‘Filter’ tab (the vertical tab) and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column. What we are basically doing here is  excluding all the units where ‘Royalty Price’ is 0. Now Refresh the Graph and you should see the correct values for daily sales in your graph.

Now, lets try another graph. This time, let us analyze the daily sales and separate them based on country. For this, it’ll pretty much be the same graph with one simple modification. So let us use the ‘Save As’ option to save this Graph as another graph and call it ‘Daily Sales By Country’.

Daily Sales By Country

Now that we created a new Graph, simply drag the ‘Country Code’ column from the left to the ‘Color’ column on the right and refresh the graph. You’ll see the daily changes color coded by country. Again, you can mouse-over or click on the colors to see the underlying data for this graph.

Let us quickly try some more graphs.

Application Sales By Country:

Create a New Report from ‘Chart View’ option and drag the ‘Country Code’ from ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to ‘Y-Axis’ and voila, you have sales report by Country. But then, don’t forget to filter the upgrades. For this, select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

You can change the graph type to fit your taste. Here is how it looks.

Application Sales By Currency:

Drag the ‘Customer Currency’ to ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to ‘Y-Axis’. You can also drag the ‘Units’ column to the ‘Text’ section to see the number of units displayed. Select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

Application Sales By Currency & Country:

This graph is pretty much similar to the above graph with one additional step. Drag the ‘Country Code’ to the ‘Color’ section. This chart also lets you see which country accepts what currency.

Application Sales By Royalty Price

Drag the ‘Royalty Price (Actual (D)) to ‘X-Axis’, ‘Units (Sum)’ to ‘Y-Axis’ and ‘Country Code’ to color. If the ‘Royalty Price’ is 0, they are upgrades.

Application Total Sales

To see the total sales of the app, simply drag the ‘Vendor Identifier’ to the ‘X-Axis’ and ‘Units’ to the ‘Y-Axis’ and ‘Text’ sections. Select the ‘Filter’ tab and drag the ‘Royalty Price’ column to the ‘Filter’ section and select the ‘Actual Values’ from the drop down. In the next column (Royalty Price), select ‘Individual Values’ and select ‘0′. Select the ‘Exclude Items’ in the drop down in the next column.

You’ll see a graph something like this.

Now that you some of these graphs created, what do you need to do to keep them updated? It is simple. Download your reports fromiTunes Connect and Import them to the table. All the charts are automatically updated.

All the graphs I talked above assumes that you have a single app. If you have multiple apps, you can create other interesting graphs. More on that later.

Once you have these graphs created in Zoho DB, you have many other options too. For example, you can right click on any graph and Export the graph as a PDF, Image etc. You can also embed these graphs in your blogs or website like I did above which means, when the data changes in the DB, these images are also updated.

I hope you find Zoho DB useful for this use case. As you play with it you’ll uncover more of its power. Looking forward to see how innovative you’ll get with Zoho DB.

BTW, did I mention that you can do all of this for FREE?

Related Posts:
Olympics Dashboard using Zoho DB

Popularity: 2% [?]

We have been getting quite a few requests from our customers as to how they can import data from their Blinksale account to Zoho Invoice.  Earlier we used to send manual procedures and assist customers individually but still it was not easy for our customers to import the data.

Now with the last upgrade, we have made this import lot easier.  Here is how you can import your data from Blinksale to Zoho Invoice –

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Now, click on the “Import from Blinksale” link at the left under the “Import & Export Settings”
3. Fill in the requested details and click on the “Import” button

All your invoices and customers along with their associated details will be imported into Zoho Invoice.

We also recommend you to take a look at the following wiki doc – “Importing data from Blinksale” in which we have listed out the known issues.

After moving to Zoho Invoice, if I want to switch to some other invoicing service how easy or difficult will it be?

We sincerely hope you won’t do that :)  Anyway it is your choice.

You can export data out of Zoho Invoice anytime you want.  All you have to do is export the data from Zoho Invoice, change it to the format supported by that particular service and import it into that service.  We have a pretty comprehensive set of options to export your data.  We help exporting the data in CSV, TSV, XLS, JSON and other standard formats.  For further details you can refer the blog post that I made on importing and exporting options in Zoho Invoice.

What Next?

We are also working on our APIs and we will be releasing them shortly.  APIs will definitely add to the list of import/export options and will make the job of importing/exporting data lot easier.

Give this a try and share your comments.

Regards

Siva

Popularity: 3% [?]

Yankee Group recently released a report - ‘Business Collaboration Tournament: And You Thought the Madness Was Over‘ that matches up 16 of the top business collaboration vendors in a head-to-head contest. We are glad to see Zoho included in here along with some industry heavy weights. Its a good read. The complete article is available here (Sorry, its a PDF).

These are the 16 vendors considered for this article divided into two pools - like a Basketball game.

In the first round, Yankee matches up Zoho and Google. Here is what they have to say…

Collaboration fans could not have asked for a more exciting first round matchup. However, the misinformed fan might want to double-check where to place his or her bets. To the average fan, Google is the clear winner because a. it’s Google and b. all journalists in the space use Google Apps as their example when referring to web-based productivity suites. However, like Apple, Google is a consumer company and in a matchup against SMB-focused Zoho, Google’s business solutions do not stack up.
….
Google’s Gmail (e-mail), Calendar (shared calendaring) and Talk (IM with VoIP, presence and file-sharing capabilities) are top-tier online collaboration and communications solutions. However, Zoho is SMB-focused and Google is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. IT departments have not been convinced that the service-level agreements (SLAs) Google offers with Google Apps Premier Edition are worthy of a total conversion to cloud computing. Both Google and Zoho suffer from this roadblock, among others. But for Zoho, it’s do or die; whereas for Google, it’s do or continue to make billions in online search and advertising.

The last comment above is interesting. If this sounds familiar, this is because Sridhar already talked about this.

…but in the end, Zoho’s Head Coach pushes it into the Elite Eight in a decisive victory over Google.

According to Yankee, Zoho wins over Google in the first round.

The round of Elite Eight is an interesting one with Zoho positioned against Verizon. This is an interesting comparison.

This Elite Eight thriller has some interesting mismatches on the floor between the telecommunications powerhouse Verizon Business and the agile web-based collaboration and productivity services provider Zoho.

With detailed analysis, Yankee advances Zoho to the next round.

In the end, Zoho squeaks by Verizon Business into the Final Four and continues its Cinderella run in the Yankee Group 2008 Business Collaboration Tournament due to its product road map. Without a focus on community-centric solutions, Verizon Business’ game is too communications-centric and therefore too old-school to make it to the Final Four in 2008.

This puts Zoho in final four against Microsoft, IBM & Cisco. These are some big names to be compared with. The analysis goes on to describe how Microsoft goes on to win against Zoho.

Sure, we are not the winner here nor do we expect to be so. Being considered as part of the final four is a privilege. As we always said, we understand that this is not a zero sum game. We are focused on building great affordable apps and let the market decide.

The article contains lots of other details about all 16 vendors covered. It is a good read with good analysis of the existing business collaboration market.

Popularity: 6% [?]

In the last post about Zoho Wiki, we saw how Zoho Wiki can act both as a help authoring tool and to host the help documentation. Zoho Wiki can be used to host business portals also. We will see a couple of examples below.

ManageEngine is the flagship brand of AdventNet. And ManageEngine has a separate portal for its partners, called ManageEngine Partner Zone. This portal is hosted on Zoho Wiki.

As you can see, the web site’s look and feel is completely customized. And some of the pages there require authentication to view. Thanks to the fine-grained access control provided by Zoho Wiki, you can have a web site where some pages are visible to all visitors of your site (in ManageEngine’s case, visitors who are interested in becoming partners) and other pages are made accessible to a defined set of people (to those who end up becoming ManageEngine’s partners).

The Zoho Alliance Partner Portal (ZAPP) is on Zoho Wiki too (requires login for viewing).

Other than the above partner portals, ManageEngine’s MSP Center Plus documentation is also a wiki.

How are you using Zoho Wiki?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Happy to announce the availability of one of the most requested and long awaited features in Zoho Invoice – “Google Checkout Integration”

Yes, we have integrated our service with Google Checkout.  We have already integrated our service with PayPal and now this integration gives more options to our customers.  Now they have the option to choose either PayPal or Google Checkout for accepting online payment from their customers.

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice:

Configuring Google Checkout in Zoho Invoice is easy and can be done by following the steps below-

1. Sign-in to Zoho Invoice and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. In the settings page that comes up, click on the “Payment Gateways” link under “Invoice Settings” on the left.
3. Specify your “Merchant ID” and “Merchant Key” and click on the save button.

Updating the invoice balances:

When your customers pay you online via Google Checkout, we can automatically update your invoice balances.  For us to do this automatic update, you will have to do the following-

1. Sign-in to your Google Checkout account and go to settings.
2. Click on the “Integration” link on the left.
3. Now set the “API callback URL” to “https://invoice.zoho.com/gnh.ma”

Getting notified when customers pay you online:

Over and above updating the invoice balances, we can also notify you when your customers pay you online.  Just select the “Notify me on online payments” option in the payment gateway settings page to receive the notification.

Sending payment thank-you to customers:

We can also send payment acknowledgement mails to your customers when they pay you online.  Just select the “Send acknowledgement to customers” option in the payment gateway settings page to send the thank-you mails.

What next?

We definitely have plans to add support for more payment gateways.  If you want us to add support for any specific payment gateway, let us know.  Based on the number of requests, we can prioritize and add support for it.

You can try out this feature by signing into Zoho Invoice now. We would definitely like to hear your comments and don’t forget to drop us a note when you enjoy using this feature.

Regards
Siva

Popularity: 8% [?]

There was an era (not very long ago) when shooting videos and sharing them on the internet was an esoteric art. Then YouTube and some easy-to-use video cameras and software came along and made it easy for regular folks like you and me to shoot anything and post it on the web.

This is what some people refer to as the ‘democratization of the tools of production’. It was a concept popularized by the ‘Long Tail’, a best-seller book by Chris Anderson. Regardless of your own views of that book (there is some controversy about it), the concept of the democratization of the tools of production is evident in YouTube, blogs, music and some other cases.

Where am I going with this? Bear with me for a second.

Not long ago, ‘geeks’ were the only people who could create data-driven applications on the web. And there was a reason for that - doing so required quite a bit of training, and even years to master just one of the many components involved in creating applications - the operating system, database, application server, web server, security…

But that’s not the case anymore. Zoho Creator is another example of the democratization of the tools of production. In this case, it is about the tools for creating web, business and data-driven applications. With Zoho Creator, everyone can create applications for their own particular need.

But the question is – what kind of applications? There are many kinds of applications out there, and while Zoho Creator can certainly be used by professional developers looking to commercialize their applications, but right now I want to focus on the kind of applications that everyone can create on their own, for themselves and their own consumption.

Let me explain with a simple 2-by-2 matrix.

On the horizontal axis we have the ‘Complexity of the Application’ - how advanced they are in terms of their logic, the formulas and algorithms they use. On the other vertical axis we have ‘Uniqueness of the Requirements’. Lower in the scale means more people share those same requirements. And these two axes are a continuum, but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll imagine just two scenarios for each axis.

So in the high-complexity/common-requirements quadrant we have those applications like ERP and CRM. They are complex applications which required a lot of logic, but millions and millions of people share the same basic requirements. Sure, people spend a lot of time (and money) customizing their ERP system, but most of that has to do with the underlying business process than with the software itself.

In the high-complexity/unique-requirements quadrant we have those applications that land rockets on the moon. Don’t expect to just ‘buy and install’ those applications.

Then there are those applications which are low-complexity and share common requirements - that everybody needs. Say, a calendar or calculator application. Pick one, they all yield pretty much the same result and are used pretty much the same way.

But then there are those applications that are not quite as complex as a rocket-launching system, but they are so unique to a particular situation that you can’t readily get them off the shelf either. What should we call these? Luckily, Clay Shirky already came up with a name for them - “Situated Software“.

Situated Software is the kind of applications people need to collect, share, keep track and report on a variety of data. But they are not long projects that warrant the formal involvement of your IT department, formal methodology and end-less meetings. They might be short-lived projects, almost bordering on disposable software, or they may be applications created to be used for a long while.

In a business environment it might mean keeping track of their IT assets, people registering for an event, managing contacts in a simplified way, tracking bugs, issues or customer requests/comments, etc. For a school, situated software might be about keeping track of student information and their parents, or a simple library records app. There are as many examples as unique ‘situations’ for people – that is, too many to list.

How many? Well, there are already more than 100,000 applications created with Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator makes ‘Situated Software’ possible for everyone. No, we’re not all turning into Star-Wars-and-Star-Trek-loving software developers. We can continue to be regular folks, but we can write our own (situated) software every once in a while.

 

Popularity: 10% [?]

GigaOm has a guest post on how start-ups can survive the financial crisis. We have some experience at AdventNet on this, which I want to share. First a bit of history: AdventNet was born as a bootstrapped company in 1996. Our initial business was selling software to network equipment vendors. By 1999-2000, there was a raging bubble in networking and telecom; while the media focused on the flashy dotcoms, it was really telecom service providers and their equipment suppliers that had by far the bigger financial bubble, amounting to over a trillion dollars of capital eventually written off, split between debt taken on by service providers to finance new network construction and the venture capital raised by their equipment suppliers. For every dotcom that raised $5-10 million rounds, there probably was a SONET or WDM start-up that was raising $50-100 million. There must have been a hundred of them just in the San Fransico bay area, but Boston, New Jersey, RTP in North Carolina, Dallas and Toronto all had their fair share of bubble companies, and I must have visited each of these places at least 5 times during 1999-2000.

I had a really good vantage point on the bubble because I personally must have visited 80% of those equipment companies, as a software supplier. Fortunately for me, I was aware of the Japanese bubble of the late 80’s (when Japan was going to take over the world) and its painful aftermath in the 90’s. So even in the middle of the telecom bubble as a supplier, I could not help feeling it was going to end badly. There was a point when I realized that the same exact pitch was made by dozens of companies, yet most of them didn’t know so many others existed, pursuing the same exact business plan.

Having said that, I have to admit even I wasn’t mentally prepared for the extent of the carnage to follow. In 2000, I would have thought may be 20% of the start-up companies would survive. It turned out may be 3 out of 200+ survived. By 2003, over 90% of the companies we had supplied to in in 1999-2000 had gone out of business. That is something to keep in mind on the extent of wreckage bubbles cause - for those keeping score in the bay area or in Chennai for that matter, it is worth considering that real estate prices in Japan eventually fell 80% from the peak they reached in 1990.

So how did we overcome that shock? Here are the things that helped us.  In 2000, there was a venture capitalist who was offering us $10 million for a 5% stake, in order to enable us to grow faster. After careful thinking, we turned that money down, because we felt the industry was going to shrink, not grow, and we didn’t want to commit to a growth projection when our instinct told us to get ready for contraction. We felt if we were to be honest to ourselves, we had to tell the VC we expected to shrink, yet the money was coming in at such a high valuation that it needed growth as far as the eye could see to justify it. One of my friends in venture capital did tell me I was a fool - but that folly saved us.

We didn’t expand our headcount in line with revenue in 2000. We simly banked the cash - which came in really handy in the subsequent nuclear winter. Indeed, it was that cash that enabled us to diversify in 2004, and that was ultimately what led to Zoho.

It seems clear that we are heading into another nuclear winter, this time led by housing and financials. It is going to impact the tech industry, but this time as suppliers not as direct bubble-blowers.  Companies that have a strong balance sheet (we prefer zero debt), and the ability to adapt and flex will survive the wreckage. Customers are hurting, so attractive pricing is a must - there is going to be price deflation in tech. These are the rules we live by at AdventNet & Zoho.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Received an email with a docx attachment and finding it difficult to view/edit it since you don’t have the latest MS Word 2007 in your desktop? No probs. With the latest update, Zoho Writer allows you to import docx documents. Import the document into your Zoho Writer account and you can view it online using your browser.

Note that the docx email attachment you received is now on the cloud. You can view and make changes to the document where ever you are, from any computer. And you can either share this document to the intended recipients or export it back as a docx file & send it as an email attachment (for the old-timers who still insist that you send the document as an attachment).

You can now import and export the below document formats in Zoho Writer.

Import : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf and txt
Export : html, doc, docx, sxw, odt, rtf, pdf, LaTeX and txt

Popularity: 9% [?]

Zoho Projects has had this feature for quite some time now - to export an employee’s Timesheet as an xls or csv file. And one of the requests from our users has been to enhance this and allow the timesheet data of all employees to be exported as a single file. This is available now in the latest Zoho Projects update.

Managers and Administrators can now export timesheet data of all users under a project and all users across all projects. Once the timesheet data gets exported, an email containing a link to the file to be downloaded gets sent.

Export timesheet for a project’s users (Project -> Timesheet -> Export)

Export for all users across all pages (My Home -> My Log Calendar -> Export)

Try this new feature in Zoho Projects and let us know your comments.

Popularity: 13% [?]

In the past few weeks we had been really busy adding some nice little features to our service.  One such feature is the support for currency symbols.  Now you can have your currency symbols ($, €, £, ¥) on your invoices instead of the standard currency code (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY…).

As you may know, we already support multi-currency in our service.  Now you can configure a unique symbol for each and every currency that you use.  You can configure this in “Currency & Time” settings.

To configure your currency symbol, follow the steps below-

1. Click on the “Settings” link at the top right.
2. Click on the “Currency & Time” link on the left, this will take you to the currency and time zone configuration page.
3. In the currency and time zone configuration page, you have the “Currency Details” table, where you can add as many currencies as you want and for each currency you can specify a unique symbol.
4. In the same table you can also specify the format for the currencies and select the currency that has to be used as your base currency (the currency, in which you do all your accounting).

Hope this makes your invoices look much more professional.  Give it a try and share your comments.

Happy Invoicing!

Siva

Popularity: 7% [?]