Some users like managing their portfolio using a simple spreadsheet like this one (it uses our recently launched VB Macros, BTW).

While a spreadsheet is good one for such use, research is a different story. Apps like Zoho Notebook comes in handy in such cases. Good news about Zoho Notebook is, you can even include such spreadsheets inside your notebook.

Mike Hogan from Barron’s talks about using Zoho Notebook (and Google Notebook) for your Stock Research.

BOTH NOTEBOOK SYSTEMS make it easy to sort out the HTML-bound text, pictures and videos you want to keep from those you want to lose. Yes, popular desktop applications accept hyperlinks, graphics and other HTML gingerbread, but not with anything approaching predictability. Web elements can change a receiving file’s formatting; and, if your mouse stumbles over an embedded link, you can find yourself transported to an image or video application or some other Web page.

Google Notebook is better at selectively stripping out Web links and other formatting, or turning a big note into plain text with the click of an icon. Zoho Notebook is more oriented toward page-building than text conversion. It has standing menu options that let you create multimedia notebooks by mixing images, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, presentations and other non-text elements, or even record audio and video directly to a notebook. In addition to text- editing tools, it has a drawing toolbar for page layout and object manipulation — and a truly impressive ability to deal with disparate Web-page elements.

Google Notebook’s strength is in on-the-fly research, where the fewer mouse clicks, the better. But Zoho’s multimedia elements make for greater comprehension, and facilitate sharing. In this age of social media, being able to bounce your research and ideas off other market speculators is an important part of investing.

Both services let you create public folders online — including password-protected ones accessible only to approved collaborators. But Zoho Notebook has more version-control and collaborative features for group projects, as well as chat access via Skype’s (www.skype.com) instant-messaging and phone service. Both can be included as toolbars in Mozilla’s Firefox browser (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com). With a right mouse click, you have the option to capture a Web page’s URL to Google Notebook or the entire Web page to Zoho Notebook.

Full article here.

Research is obviously the core usage of Zoho Notebook. We have been making some good progress towards it for the next version to further simplify the research process with a better plug-in etc. More on that later.

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I know the Olympics just ended. But I am not going to talk about it, because India was, like 50th in the medal tally. Did you know no Indian had ever won an individual gold medal before, until this Olympics. If you said “Indians suck at sports”, I would say you are being too polite.

So we prefer to celebrate the wins we do get, like this one from The Hindu:

India, which crushed Russia 3.5-0.5 in the second round but almost lost its way in the second half of the 10-round competition, caught up with the top seed at 28.5 points and took the honours due to superior tie-break score.

What is particularly thrilling to us is we at AdventNet had a small hand in it. About a year ago, the Hindu carried an article that said a gifted chess player in our state was looking for help acquiring a laptop, so he could polish his game. We gifted him one. He is one of the players in the team that won the World Youth Chess Olympiad.  Congratulations, Priyadarshan, you make us proud!

I want to emphasize that our role in this is small and incidental, but we are really happy it made a difference. There is plenty of talent where he comes from. One of the most satisfying things we do at AdventNet is to help surface such talent - in the field of software. But there is a lot more than software talent in India, that is waiting to be discovered.

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Today’s Zoho Projects update brings in a few more goodies.

Project Templates : Zoho Projects has had Tasklist Templates for quite some time now. This has now been enhanced to include defining whole projects as templates. In addtion to defining tasklists, you can now have Milestones (consisting of various tasklists), documents, forum posts & users added to a template. And whenever a new project is created, you needn’t start from scratch but make a copy of a suitable project template (whereever applicable).

Bulk Upload Documents : Typically, when a new project gets started, you upload various documents like requirement docs, drawings, design plans, test procedures etc related to that project. What better way than to choose once and upload all of them in one go? Zoho Projects now offers multiple file uploads.

Log time : Logging time has now been made easier. A clock icon comes on moving your mouse over the days in the calendar view. You can click on it and log the time for your tasks in that project.

You can also log time, edit the logged time in the List View under the Timesheet tab now.

Do try the latest features in Zoho Projects.

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Many of you have used our applications to create, share and publish content. While you’ve had control on the creation part and the sharing part, there was little visibility on the published content. The documents you published are a list of URLs. We plan to change that with our new addition to Zoho Suite - Zoho Share.

Our vision for Zoho Share is Sharepoint meets YouTube: the business benefits of organizational document repositories, presented for the YouTube generation, with a friendly, familiar interface.

The Sharepoint part is very important: Zoho Share is a central place where we bring together all published content. If you are an individual publishing your documents, the content appears in Zoho Share under your profile. Zoho Business users have an option to publish the documents within the organization. In this case Zoho Share acts as a published document repository within (and only within) the organization. The analogy here is an organization’s internal Sharepoint repository, but with YouTube style enhancements.

Zoho Share is about content that is published and the people who publish it. All the public content from Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show can now be viewed in Zoho Share. You can browse through various documents, presentations, spreadsheets and PDFs under the Content section of Zoho Share. These different types of documents can be viewed in different modes. You can Comment, Rate, Bookmark, Email and Embed the content from Zoho Share.

The following video provides a quick overview of the application.

One of the unique functionality of Zoho Share is the ability to define a license for the content you upload/publish. Users can also view the content by the license type.

Under the People Section, Zoho Chat is integrated into Zoho Share to facilitate interaction between content creators and content consumers. ‘My Area’ section lets you view all your documents from Writer, Sheet & Show.

Currently documents published with Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show will appear in Zoho Share. Other content will follow. Going forward, we will also add the ability to publish documents directly to Zoho Share from other Zoho Apps.

Please note that only published documents will be listed under Zoho Share. Any shared documents will continue to remain private. If you wish to remove any public documents, please do so from the ‘My Area’ section in Zoho Share or the appropriate Zoho applications.

Please do give this a try and let us know what you think.

(Update: Reviews at TechCrunch, Webware, Mashable, …

Many reviewers think of it as “YouTube for documents” which Scribd & Docstoc have popularized. We view Zoho Share more of as “Sharepoint Meets YouTube” or “Sharepoint for the YouTube generation” which is a key difference. In keeping with it, we have avoided too much Flash (!) and kept the players as simple HTML/Javascript. It is an intentional design choice.)

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My last post on why we compete with Google attracted a bit of attention, and quite a few questions. Ignoring the questions on my IQ or my competence in English (isn’t the internet great?), let me come to the most central one of all: if business software is so much less lucrative than consumer internet offerings, why does Zoho want to be in it? To rephrase it, if the argument is that it won’t prove to be lucrative enough for Google, why does Zoho want to do it?

The pat answer, of course, is “Zoho is not Google”. The long answer is “AdventNet is not Google”, and what that means is you should understand our history. In a nutshell, for AdventNet, this market means moving up in the value chain, while for Google, it represents going down that value chain. Here are a couple of quick examples to illustrate this process: why does McDonalds want to compete with Starbucks while Starbucks clearly isn’t going to enter the fast food business? Why does Wal-mart want to offer organic foods, while Whole Foods is never going to offer clothing or toys? Coffee has better margins than hamburgers, organic food has better margins than clothing.

AdventNet, the parent of Zoho, is an unusual company: we have never ever raised any outside investment in our 12+ years in business, and we still remain private. We are over 850 employees now, and the company has multiple divisions, Zoho being the most recent and the most glamorous. But we haven’t forgotten our roots. We are still the leaders in the market we started to serve 12 years ago. That is the business of selling software to network equipment vendors (the so-called OEMs). It has been a good business for us, but it is also a famously low margin business. We cut our teeth in that tough business.

So why would we enter a low margin business? Leaving aside the IQ question of the CEO, a low margin business let us get a toehold with relatively little marketing/sales/branding investment, relying purely on our engineering skills.

By 2004, we had gained sufficient scale to enter the next higher level in the food chain, with our ManageEngine suite of products, sold directly to business customers. It offered us the opportunity add more value than we could in the OEM business, but it also required higher investment in marketing and branding. We have been quite successful in that business.

In 2005/2006, we took the next step, with Zoho. Clearly, Zoho addresses a far bigger market than what our OEM or ManageEngine product lines address. To address that larger market, much larger investment in infrastructure, marketing and branding would be required. Fortunately, AdventNet is at a size now to be able to afford that investment. Of course, Zoho also offers us more opportunity to differentiate our offerings, which is the key to creating higher value.

None of this is particularly original. Most bootstrapped companies go through these phases. Microsoft started as an OEM software company. Oracle was originally a consulting company. 37Signals started out as a design consulting company, before evolving to be a strong player in software-as-a-service. Atlassian started out offering issue tracking software, before branching out into Wikis and enterprise collaboration, which is a much higher margin product. Let’s not forget that Google got its start OEMing its search engine to AOL and Yahoo - a much lower margin business than the one it is currently in.

The reason this model looks odd to most people is the relative rarity of bootstrapped companies in recent times. The venture capital model enables companies to leapfrog these evolutionary stages, directly going higher in the food chain, in their quest for rapid value creation. That comes at a price, which we have not been willing to pay at AdventNet - more on that topic later.

So to answer the question on Google vs Zoho: the business software market makes perfect sense for us, as a move up the value chain. I am not sure it makes all that much sense for Google.

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Anoop @ Daily Gyan has a nice post with a video tutorial explaining how you can add a contact form to your blogspot blog using Zoho Creator.

If you want to be a better blogger, you need to listen to your readers. You need to give them an opportunity to get in touch with you.

That’s why it is important to have a ‘Contact Me’ page in your blog. A ‘Contact Me’ or ‘Send Your Feedback’ page not only makes your blog look professional, but will also make you understand your readers better, help you in getting a lot of tips from them and ultimately will make you a better blogger in the long run.

But, have you seen our Send Tips page? It has been done using Zoho Creator. In today’s post we teach you how to create a similar form for your blog.

Read more @ the Daily Gyan blog. Thanks, Anoop!

You can try the above for your blog / website as well. And we have other examples of Zoho Creator in action. Ming Jack Po says in a blog post about using Zoho Creator for registration at New York City Interscholastics Mathematics League.

if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just co llected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

If you are managing your projects using Zoho Projects & are interested in giving us a case study, you can do so by filling up this Zoho Creator form and you will be featured in our website.

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How do you plan to compete with Google or why do you compete with Google? That is a question we get asked very often. It is better to ask why Google is interested in the business software market. Let me explain with a spreadsheet.

Focus on the revenue per employee and profit per employee metrics. I have grouped together the business software industry and the consumer internet industry separately. Notice how very successful companies with mature business models like Oracle or Intuit don’t even pull down half the revenue per employee of Google, and perhaps surprisingly, they pale in comparison with the supposedly struggling Yahoo. Ebay also towers over every software company except Microsoft. Finally, even Microsoft falls short of Google’s revenue/profit per employee metrics - and Google isn’t even milking a mature monopoly.

Salesforce.com is very instructive. Though it likes to pass itself off as an internet giant, its revenue per employee is only in the range of its business software peers, and is a fraction of the real internet giants - I know an internet giant when I see one, and you ain’t no internet giant, Salesforce ! This, I must add, despite their out-of-this-world pricing for their CRM subscriptions. They pull in almost $1 billion in revenue on the backs of - those are some really overloaded backs - a little over 1 million users, leading to almost $1000/user/year.

Now it is clear why we compete with Google. Google is perhaps the most stunning technology success story ever, but we simply don’t believe Google has the rational business incentive to get too deep into the business/IT software category. The lower revenue and profit per employee figures would be tolerable if there were huge growth opportunities there, but when very successful companies like Adobe and Intuit pull in revenues well shy of a Yahoo, when even the enterprise software leader SAP is smaller, and slower growing than Google (Google makes nearly as much in profit per employee as SAP or Oracle Salesforce make in revenue per employee), it is fairly clear this market is not going to make a material contribution to Google’s growth and profitability objectives. So what is Google’s plan here? It is fairly obvious they are in it to put Microsoft on the defensive on its home turf, so that Microsoft’s offensive capability in the internet is diminished. It is also perfectly clear why Microsoft wants to be an internet player - as Google has shown, it is a higher margin business even than its monopoly-profit core business.

So why is business software so much less profitable than the internet? I can think of two reasons: a) purchasing departments that know a thing or two about supplier margins and specialize in putting the squeeze b) sales and support costs, particularly support costs. When you sell software to businesses, they have all kinds of support expectations, which adds to headcount. A search engine or a news portal isn’t expected provide any customer support.

Another conclusion that leaps out is that within business software, companies that sell to small and mid-sized businesses, such as Adobe & Intuit (Microsoft is also very strong in SMBs), have higher revenue per employee than companies that focus on large enterprises, such as Oracle or SAP. This is likely due to SMB-focused channel strategies leading to “outsourced” selling.

When push comes to shove - and there is a lot of very messy push and shove in the business software market -  Google’s resources are going to flow into figuring out how to monetize the humongous traffic of YouTube or compete in online auctions, rather than figure out a way to squeeze a bit more margin compared to Oracle or Adobe or Salesforce. That may explain why Google has been silent on CRM, Project Management, Invoicing or HR type of tools, because those markets don’t offer the profit potential they already enjoy.

(Update: Dan Farber’s take here)

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Zoho Sheet was painfully slow for around 6 hours from Sunday 8:30 pm PST to Monday 2:30 am PST. We apologize for the slow response time. This happened basically due to a huge number of requests (hundreds of thousands) to couple of public spreadsheets which were linked to from a popular website. We restored the site to normalcy by redirecting public spreadsheet views to a different part of the infrastructure there by reducing load on our servers serving regular users.

We hadn’t anticipated that a spreadsheet (we are not talking about a popular video here!) would get hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of a few hours. We are working to speed up and avoid such performance bottlenecks when public spreadsheets become very popular. It is not a difficult problem to solve (caching), just one we didn’t anticipate.

Again, we apologize for the intermittent issues and slow response times in Zoho Sheet last night. Until we put in a permanent solution (about 2 weeks), please contact us at support to let us know if you expect your spreadsheet or document is going to get a lot of page views, so we can plan ahead and redirect the traffic accordingly.

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Managing duplicate records is one of the hardest things to accomplish when using CRM software. Just trying to determine what is a duplicate is hard enough and when you find a duplicate somehow you have to decide which fields need to be merged from the duplicate records.

In ZOHO the process is almost automatic. I have spent so much time on this issue with other CRM systems in the past that when I saw how ZOHO handled it I shed a little tear of joy.

Check it out. Go to any kind of record, Lead, Account, Contact, Vendor, whatever that you think is a dupe and click the Find and Merge Duplicate button.

You will go to a UI that allows you to narrow your dupe search. In this case I am using the email address and last name. I came up with 6 matches and four of them have the same email address.

I can merge three at a time so I check them and press the View Duplicates button. This is where the magic happens. I can choose which record is the master record and if the fields within each record are different I can choose which field will get merged. It works perfect. This is a huge feature that solves a huge problem and is so easy to use any temp admin staff person can do with minimal training. Not the case with any other CRM system I have used.

From a software development standpoint this is a deep and complex problem to solve.  The fact that Zoho CRM does it so well is a solid indication of the thought and planning that has gone into the product.

More information on the ZOHO Find and Merge process can be found here.

Adam Stone is a Zoho CRM customer and CEO/Founder of D-Tools Software.

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Olympic fever has gripped many of us. This edition could provide a much closer finish at the top of the table with China and USA running head-head. China being the host nation, could have the home advantage to topple US leadership this Olympics. Anyway lets wait and watch….

Some of the Olympics enthusiasts here at Zoho thought about building a Live Olympics 2008 Dashboard for a quick preview of the latest trends. We used Zoho DB & Reports to upload the latest Olympics results periodically and built some insightful reports. We designed a live dashboard using Zoho Wiki collating some of the top reports created. You can access this @ http://olympics2008.wiki.zoho.com

Some of the reports available:

1. Day by Day Medal progress in Olympics 2008 of top performing countries
2. China vs USA head-head comparison
3. Top 7 countries - By Overall Medal count, By Men Event Winners, By Women Event Winners
4. Performance of a Country when being a Olympics Host vs as Non Host
5. many more…

You can also access the entire public Olympic 2008 database done in Zoho DB & Reports.

So just bookmark the Olympics Dashboard, keep track of the progress and enjoy the games…..

Clarence
Zoho DB & Reports - Online Reporting & BI service

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