Webware

After inconspicuously lurking within Web sites' code for more than a decade, JavaScript has emerged to become a key battleground in a second era of Web browser wars.

JavaScript, which lets developers create everything from basic Web site menus to online spreadsheet applications, was born in the mid-1990s when Microsoft's Internet Explorer challenged the incumbent browser, Netscape's Navigator. IE won that war, but now it faces its own challenge from the heir to the Navigator throne, Mozilla's Firefox, along with upstarts including Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

All the challengers tout JavaScript performance as a major part of their competitive attack--even to the point of naming their JavaScript engines built into their browsers: Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish.

Microsoft's tests of page-loading speeds gave it the edge over Chrome and Firefox. But page-loading speed isn't everything

(Credit: Microsoft)

Though IE lags all these rivals in JavaScript performance, Microsoft does care about performance overall and JavaScript performance specifically. Even as Microsoft launched a brand-new browser version, Internet Explorer 8, on Thursday, however, it's also clear the company has a big difference of opinion about the matter.

"We're going to keep making the script engines faster (but) right now it's not clear how many people are gated by script performance," said IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch in an interview. "JavaScript comprises a small portion of how fast a Web page will render. It is a piece, but by no means the holy grail."

The Y Combinator incubator hosted its ninth open demo meet-up today. Fifteen companies presented, most showing off not just strong technologies and concepts, but realistic business models. Here are the highlights of the six best companies (in my opinion), as well as two with good technologies but troubling business models.

Probably the most popular demo company at the event was Wattvision (site not live yet), which is making a whole-house real-time energy-monitoring system. The key is its hardware: a gizmo you literally stick on to your electricity meter that watches the little wheel turn around. The data is transmitted to a computer in your home, or via Wi-Fi to your router and then back to the Wattvision servers, where it's then packaged and delivered to you every 15 seconds, via a Web page or iPhone app. You can see your momentary energy cost with this service, and that's cool. Wattvision doesn't give you granular data: it's whole-house only. There are other issues with this service, but it looks like something that people will instantly understand and want--because you can see in a heartbeat that it will help you save money.

Get your boutique chocolate fix from Foodoro.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Foodoro is launching an "Etsy of food:" a marketplace that helps consumers and boutique food sellers connect to each other. The market for food and for food gifts is strong, and supports a large community of small specialty food manufacturers. However, the traditional multi-tier distribution channels absorb a lot of the manufacturers' revenues, as well as separating them from their end consumers. Foodoro, while it's a middleman for the transaction part of the sale, does not ship food itself nor hide the customer from the vendor, enabling, the founders believe, better relationships where they count. The company also has a smart widget strategy: There are affiliate widgets that bloggers can put on their sites to promote the food items they like. They get a cut of the sales that Foodoro then manages, but again, Foodoro connects the manufacturer and the consumer directly for delivery of the items. Foodoro could potentially impact the traditional food catalog businesses.

Voxli is a super-simple voice chat product for games that works via a browser plug-in (with a push-to-talk hot key that punches through to whatever game you're using). If you want to set up a team chat room, you just go to the site, name your room, get a URL, and send it to your teammates. Pricing will be $60 per account per year, and an account holder will be able to invite up to 200 people into a room. It's in free beta right now. I think the proposed price is a bit high, but the potential market is very large.

Online collaboration is one of the best uses of the Web, and project management is where it can really shine. I thought it would be worth taking a look at a product called OfficeZilla to see how well it stacks up against Basecamp and Teamwork, two established leaders in the online project management space. The results may surprise you.

Unlike Basecamp, OfficeZilla is free. That might suggest that it's underpowered when compared to the services that charge, but the differences are so minor you wouldn't find any reason not to use OfficeZilla. In fact, I think it's better-suited for small businesses with smaller projects than Basecamp, thanks to its simpler design.

The core of OfficeZilla revolves around modules. These are specific features of the service that you can custom tailor to match what you're using it for. When setting up your group, you'll be asked which ones you want included. They range from bible search (used primarily for bible study groups) to calendars and chat rooms.

Although OfficeZilla is free, the company charges for premium modules. So far, there are only a handful of them listed, like calendar filtering by groups, admin stats, and an enhanced user activity stream. They're pricey at $10 per month, and after reading about a few that are still being developed, I'm not convinced they're all that useful. I think Basecamp has it right and OfficeZilla should follow suit by charging a standard, basic fee for access to all its services each month.

OfficeZilla modules are useful for projects.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

After picking my modules, I started diving into OfficeZilla, adding a project, finding team members to perform tasks, and monitoring their progress. Adding a project couldn't be any simpler or more intuitive. From the project manager pane you can create a new project, give it a name, and input a description in just a few seconds.

Once created, you get a slew of options to start building out into a workflow. I started adding tasks to the project, and each new one brought me to a special task page which let me add notes and messages to other team members or upload files related to it. I would have liked to be able to track progress and see how far along my team was in completing that task--a feature that's conspicuously lacking from OfficeZilla--but the message platform is the next best thing. It allows other team members to annotate what they've done so far, which can keep you from having to send an e-mail or IM to check in.

One of OfficeZilla's most powerful features is its knowledge base module. It's a simple feature at first glance, but it can be an extremely functional tool if someone at a company spends time inputting relevant information.

But to do so, it's a bit more complicated than it needs to be. When I started creating categories in the Knowledge Base, I was forced to use the admin panel to add them instead of from the knowledge base itself. Once I had created a category from the admin panel, I could then go back to the Knowledge Base module and start adding tutorials and other information with the help of a full text editor, but it would have been nice to do it from within the tool's word processor. It lets you bold or italicize text, as well as increase or decrease font size and change alignment. It's basically like having Zoho Writer built into the module.

Usability
OfficeZilla is all about simplicity and trying to get you to do more with less. When uploading files or creating a to-do list, that's more than welcome, but for a company that has a detailed project with bundles of cash riding on it, that simplicity may prove to be a hindrance.

For example, OfficeZilla's Directory module which is a catalog of all project participant records organized by their name and job title, is useful if you want to quickly send a message to a team member, but it comes up short when you want to get an overview of your team's activity. There's no real-time data to know what they're working on, and you'll need to search through the various modules to see if they've left a message indicating the progress they've made.

"In Progress" is great, but it's not ideal.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET Networks)

Worse, and perhaps the most frustrating feature of OfficeZilla, is its generic status update tags. When a task is created in the Project Manager, it's labeled "Not Started." Once the project manager or someone with access to modify the task starts working on it, they'll need to click on the current status pane and check a special box to note to others that work has begun. Until it's complete, the project status is listed as "In Progress." Once again, there's no indication given about how far along the project is, and simply saying "In Progress" doesn't help any project manager know, for sure, how close to complete it really is. Is it 20 minutes from completion or 20 days? "In Progress" says nothing.

Where OfficeZilla gets it right is in team communication. As I noted above, the site allows users to send messages in the Project Manager screen, but it also includes chat rooms, forums, and the option to send private messages to authorized employees. All of the options were superb, and I found that communicating with other team members couldn't have been easier. In fact, I'd say that OfficeZilla's communication platform is easily the best I've ever used in a collaboration service.

The final verdict

There are times when I'm in desperate need of a project management tool and using a service like Basecamp, one of the most powerful tools on the Web, is overkill. For those times, I would turn to OfficeZilla because it's simple to add a project and get down to the business of completing it.

But if I was running an organization that had a variety of projects that are not only time-sensitive, but complex and need to be monitored at every level, I wouldn't recommend OfficeZilla. The collaboration tool doesn't provide enough real-time information or tracking data to make it usable for mission critical projects.

This is the new Dropio interface with a chat pop-up at the bottom.

(Credit: Dropio)

When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.

Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.

There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and other collaboration tools, which lets all members looking at a given "drop" chat with one another. Dropio has also turned on access to drops from third-party chat clients with Jabber support, like Adium and Pidgin.

But founder and CEO Sam Lessin said that he doesn't see the collaboration-focused new development as bringing Dropio, which turned on Twitter support last summer, in competition with the Web's numerous productivity-suite applications.

"We're still not interested in, and we're not competing in the 'let's open up a document and edit it together in real time' space," Lessin said to CNET News. "I've yet to see...a normal workflow where you want to do that. The workflow for us is much more along the lines of opening up a pipe between 15 people who are collaborating or 100 people who are in a conference audience and let them collaborate around the event."

A more direct competitor, he said, would be the 37Signals product Campfire.

Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features.

The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.

MenuTab is a curious design, but it does work. And users who grow accustomed to using the system in one mode likely won't see much of, or be bothered by, the parallel other mode.

Zoho Writer 2 is really easy to use in spite of a redundant interface.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)

Zoho is said to offer simultaneous collaborative editing, as Google Docs does, but when I tested the app I found it far too easy to over-write another user's edits. I do hope this gets fixed very soon. The service also offers a text chat window for collaborating editors. And there's full revision and change tracking in each document, should you ever want to undo the changes someone has made to your doc.

The new version has good sharing options for documents. You post directly to a few different blogging services from Zoho Writer, which is a very nice feature for bloggers. You can also edit in a print view, which shows you page breaks an margins. It's a good working display; even if you never plan to print the document you're working on, you may find the extra white space and page breaks help you focus on your text.

Zoho Writer users Google Gears to give users offline access to their files. Users can sign in using Google or Yahoo credentials. Real geeks may like the embedded LaTeX equation editor.

I find Zoho Writer 2.0 to be a strong word processor that's incredibly easy to learn and use, even more so than Google Docs. The dangerous collaboration function means I can't recommend this product, yet, as a workgroup app. But I wrote this review solo in Zoho, and it didn't give me a minute of confusion or trouble.

Online storage service Box.net has a new tool for internal collaboration. Multiple Box users can now work on a shared Web document, using a built-in editor the company has made from scratch.

While there is no option to work on a single document at the same time, like you can with Google Docs and Zoho Writer, it features all the things you'd want for putting together a sturdy document. You can pick from various fonts, format to your heart's content, and drop in photos--either from your hard drive or a URL. All the while it saves what you're doing and even lets you roll back to an earlier version if someone has gone in and botched something. You cannot, however, see what was added or replaced without first opening up the file.

Box.net's new Web document creator is simple and easy to use. It's lacking real-time collaboration though, meaning only one person can edit at a time.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Permissions have also been handled with some convenience in mind, although there are definitely some rough edges. If you start a document in a folder you're already sharing with other people they are automatically chosen as collaborators. You can then go in and choose whether you want them to be able to edit the document, or simply view it.

Oddly enough though, you can't send collaboration invites from a virgin document; something I'm assuming will be fixed in short order. In the meantime you need to do this from the folder where the document resides. Here you're given the option to send an invite either as a viewer, or an editor.

If you're sending the document to someone who is not a registered Box.net user, they'll need to sign up for the service to edit it. This is where I found it to be a little buggy, since the service doesn't even give them an option to skip registration and begin editing as a registered guest, or simply see a read-only version of the document. In its current iteration they either need to sign-up, or get you to re-send the invite to view only before they can even lay eyes on it.

Despite this niggle, this feature is off to a good start, and a smart way to extend the recently pumped-up collaborative features. I would have been happier to see it replaced with third-party services that let you do the same thing via Box's OpenBox service, but in this case, these documents can be a great natural extension for the service's built-in discussion tools.

Online app provider Zoho announced Tuesday that it has added single sign-on support for Zoho CRM, its on-demand customer relationship management app for organizations that run businesses online. According to the company, Zoho CRM users will be able to access all of Zoho's services and won't be prompted to re-authenticate when they switch between applications. Zoho CRM is the last of the company's applications to add single sign-on.

Mio.tv, a company that offers music videos and other entertainment clips for Latin Americans, announced Tuesday that it has acquired Spanish social network Wamba for approximately $5.1 million. According to the company, it acquired Wamba to extend its reach and influence in the Latin American community.

Online domain name marketplace Sedo acquired RevenueDirect, a domain parking service, the company announced Tuesday. According to Sedo's executives, it's trying to attain more market share in the U.S., and its acquisition of RevenueDirect is a key component in that strategy. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

myYearbook.com announced Tuesday that its "Causes" application and its users have removed more than 1 million pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere through donations. A portion of the funds received by myYearbook through its social network and applications was donated to charities like Carbonfund.org, which fights against global warming and climate change. So far, the company has donated over $250,000.

The Web-based app development and hosting company Coghead announced Wednesday that it was shutting down (TechCrunch: Coghead grinds to a halt). Citing general economic pressures (the excuse du jour for layoffs and shutdowns), it told its customers they'd have until April 30 of this year to use their apps. They won't be charged for the service until then, but they won't get any support, either. So the rush is now on for Coghead's users to find a new home for their apps.

At least two companies are hoping to win converts to their competing service platforms: Caspio is offering two months free access to its Caspio Bridge, as well as free support and training. The pitch to Coghead customers: "Caspio offers a more scalable, robust and dependable platform-as-a-service than your previous solution, and our unique unlimited-user pricing is the most business-friendly option anywhere." See Caspio's offer page.

Intuit is offering six months of free service on its QuickBase hosted app platform, as well as two hours of personal consulting, unlimited standard support, and classes specifically for Coghead customers. See Intuit's offer page.

Update: Via the comments to this story, we learn that there are other offers for Coghead customers from TeamDesk, TrackVia, Zoho, and Qrimp (see Data-Driven Web Apps blog for links), and from Iceberg.

After being left high and dry by one cloud-based platform, I can't imagine any Coghead customers making a quick move to another. Even the true believers need more than righteousness to go on. They need to know their hosting companies will survive. A realistic alternative: Do your development on your own servers and host your apps inside your firewall. (For more, see "The firewall vs. the cloud".)

Minus its users, Coghead's technology is moving over to SAP. According to a memo sent to Coghead customers today, "SAP did not assume any of Coghead's customer relationships or obligations," thus paving the way for Caspio and Intuit to open their Coghead refugee camps.

Paul McNamara, Coghead's CEO, told me in an e-mail that "It was a wrenching decision because of the customer impact." And while he is obviously a booster for the platform-in-the-sky model ("It's clear that the benefits of Web-based applications are significant," he says), he also realizes that this situation is not good. He thinks there could eventually be a way to mitigate it: "I'd like to see the development of standards for declarative applications that are represented as XML documents. I think this is the logical evolution for cloud computing. As the industry evolves, we need to address portability and interoperability."

McNamara will not be making the move to SAP.

Significantly increasing the utility and competitiveness of its Web-based e-mail service, Google is enabling an experimental ability to read, write, and search Gmail messages even while not connected to the network.

Google believes almost religiously in cloud computing, the idea that computer applications and data live on the Internet rather than on PCs. But there are times when the network is inaccessible, and generally Web-based applications like today's Gmail effectively seize up under those circumstances.

Offline sidesteps that problem, the classic example being a busy executive traveling on a plane. And offline Gmail access begins a new chapter for Google's ambition to appeal to business customers for services such as Google Apps, of which Gmail is a component.

"This is a feature we've heard loud and clear the enterprise wants," said Todd Jackson, Gmail's product manager.

In coming days, Google will let Gmail users test the Web-based e-mail service even when there's no network.

(Credit: Google)

Trying to sign up business customers generally means wooing them away from the dominant e-mail products, Microsoft's Exchange server software and Outlook PC software. Google and Microsoft began in separate spheres, but are ever-closer competitive rivals, each with a strong cash-generating business that can be used to subsidize forays into other markets.

There's more, too. Google Apps customers will get another major offline option "soon," too: Google Calendar access, though not initially the ability to create new entries. If the organization's administrator enables the "New Features" option, each person within that organization will get access to the calendar, Google said.

New features help make Gmail more compelling for business customers, but for many, a bigger problem is the fact that Gmail still sports its beta tag, said Gartner analyst David Smith.

"That's one of the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses," Smith said. "You're hard-pressed to find any businesses who decide to go into production with anything that a vendor calls beta, no matter how good it is." Google promises customers will get 99.9 percent availability through a service level agreement for Google Apps, which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

Cloud vs. PC
And Microsoft, while not turning on a dime, isn't counting on a future that consists exclusively of PC-based Office. It already has a product, Office Live Workspace that lets users share and view--but not edit--Office documents online, and the next version of Office will run in a browser.

Philosophically, though, Microsoft remains firmly tethered to the PC, while Google wants to move as fast as possible to Web-based applications.

"We think the browser is the ideal platform for deploying all kinds of applications. That's where Google is placing its bet," Jackson said. "But people are traditionally limited by the speed and connectivity of the Internet. We want to fill in those gaps."

Google already developed open-source technology called Gears that helps further this cloud computing agenda by storing Web data on PC, and Gmail, used by millions, could help coax more people to install Gears. That, in turn, could help solve the chicken-and-egg problem that currently means it's not worthwhile for most Web application programmers to build in Gears support.

Greater Gears support could help other cloud-computing companies, including Zoho, which already has offline access for its Web-based e-mail application.

It's not as if offline Gmail were completely impossible. People can set up software such as Outlook or Thunderbird to read and write e-mails, for example. But offline Gmail means people won't have to learn a new interface.

Offline Gmail has been in testing for months, though Jackson wouldn't share specifics about exactly how long.

What can offline Gmail do?
"We wanted the user experience to be almost identical to the experience you get when you're online," Jackson said.

Offline Gmail stores a copy of a user's inbox on a personal computer. Most people will have to install it, a process Google walks you through, but it's built into Google's Chrome browser.

Once Gears is installed and offline access is enabled, the software automatically detects when a person's network connection is working. If the network is good, Gmail works as usual. If it's bad, it goes into offline mode, sending unsent messages and retrieving new ones when the connection is restored.

And if the network is dodgy, a person can use the intermediate "flaky connection mode," which for example queues a message to be sent immediately by storing it to the hard drive then actually sends it as soon as it can. Google positions this as useful for coffee shops and poaching a neighbor's weak-signal wireless network, but I think of this as "tech conference mode."

When enabled, offline Gmail begins by downloading, in the background, a copy of a user's archive to the user's personal computer. But the software stores about 10,000 e-mails, so heavy users won't get a complete archive.

Gmail automatically updates the local cache of messages with new and recently read items and with messages associated with a particular label on which a person has clicked, Jackson said.

Imperfect
Not everything works, though.

One big missing piece is the ability to add attachments to new messages, though attachments are visible with existing messages.

Another is the contacts tab, so forget about managing e-mail lists or adding new addresses while offline. The autocomplete option works, though, so there's no need to start remembering e-mail addresses.

English-speaking Gmail users will be able to enable offline access as Google gradually adds the ability over the next "couple" of days, said Gmail engineer Andy Palay in a blog post. "Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don't be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven't been completely ironed out yet," Palay said.

What kinds of problems occur?

"We've seen issues with the local cache getting out of sync. You have to refresh the browser, and that gets you going again," Jackson said. "In some rare circumstance, it has to be fully flushed, so we ask to disable and re-enable the feature."

But these should be unusual problems, he said: "It's been in testing for awhile on all 20,000 Googlers, so it's gotten some good testing."