xcellery

Xcellery for sale--on eBay

Xcellery, a service that lets users collaborate on Microsoft Excel files in near-real-time, is for sale now on eBay. I covered the service in March.

I heard about the sale from the creator of the service, Reto Laemmler. He wrote to me, "There are no plans to shut down Xcellery, and in case of an acquisition [co-founder] Heng-yi and I will try to stay on board." However, the eBay listing says, "Xcellery is for sale because the founder team is focusing on other projects and cannot spend enough time on it anymore."

As of this writing, … Read more

Start-ups in the city: SFBeta mixer

Webware is a media sponsor of the SFBeta mixer that's on tonight. I'm looking forward to finding some new companies there to cover. Most of the official presenting companies are not new to Webware, so I'm hoping that somewhere in the crowd I'll find the CEO of some tiny, unknown, and very cool start-up. Wish me luck.

The official presenters get demo table space, but there's a changeover halfway through the evening since there are more presenters than tables available. With any luck, there will be a CEO stare-down--or worse!--when the first shift of … Read more

Top 5 Under the Radar companies

Thirty-two start-ups and 11 established companies pitched their Web-based business products at the Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters event last Friday. That's a lot of productivity right there. Webware bloggers Josh Lowensohn and Erica Ogg covered all the start-up pitches--click the "UTR" tag beneath this blog to read about them.

From the 31 start-ups, we picked five favorites (see video). They are:

Calgoo has a neat solution for working with schedules from your work and home lives. It's a problem we all have. See previous Webware coverage.

Sandy is the new e-mail assistant … Read more

Zoho adds Google-like collaboration to spreadsheets

Zoho, who was at Under the Radar last week, upgraded their spreadsheet application, called Sheet, on Friday. The team added Zoho Chat integration and the ability for multiple users to work on a spreadsheet at the same time. Users of Google Spreadsheets will be accustomed to this functionality, and with the update, Zoho joins the fray of online collaborative tools (see our Under the Radar roundup of this category.)

Also new with the update is support for OpenDocument Sheet, which allows users of OpenOffice to work on and freely exchange documents.

Zoho Sheet still doesn't have the option to … Read more

Under the Radar: Battle of the collaboration tools, tryptophan

Presenters for the post-lunch session today focused on two challenges. First was how to help people simultaneously collaborate on projects. Equally important was how to keep a room full of sleepy bloggers, analysts, and venture capitalists awake and alert after a lunch of turkey sandwiches. Luckily, we've played with all four of these applications before, and so we stuck with the roast beef.

Editgrid kicked off the round of presentations. Instead of PowerPoint, they used a tabbed spreadsheet in Editgrid to present. One of the really great features of Editgrid, which we've discussed before, is the option to … Read more

The best of both worlds: Xcellery makes Excel collaborative

As I said in a recent post, Webware relies on Google Spreadsheets as our groupware application for tracking which Web services we want to write about. But because it is sorely lacking in the features department, I always have my eye out for alternatives offering more Excel-ish features as well as the killer collaboration function that makes Google's Spreadsheets so useful.

One new alternative: Xcellery, a service that turns ordinary Excel spreadsheets into shareable documents. With Xcellery, multiple people can have the same spreadsheet open at the same time. Everybody's changes get recorded and shared since the system … Read more