While Google receives lots of attention for its suite of Web applications, and Microsoft waits on the sidelines, Zoho continues to add new components to its Web suite.
The latest addition to the suite, which already includes modules for everything from documents and spreadsheets to CRM and wikis, is Zoho People, a human resource management application.
Zoho People, currently in beta, includes the usual HR functions for administrators and employees, with modules for organization, recruitment, forms, and checklists (work flow). In addition, Zoho Creator has been integrated within Zoho People, allowing users to customize the application.
Zoho People joins Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects, and Zoho DB as part of the Zoho business applications suite.
Zoho is targeting businesses with more than 50 employees for the new product. Pricing is expected to be around $50 per month for administrators and $50 per year for employees, according to Raju Vegesna of Zoho.
Zoho could bump up against more established software-as-a-service HR offerings from well funded companies such as Workday, Taleo, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, and others.
But Zoho is likely to focus more on smaller businesses with its comprehensive set of browser-based productivity and business applications and viral marketing approach. In fact, Zoho is most concerned about setting itself apart from Google, which lacks the business applications. Google, as well as Microsoft, will be watching Zoho closely to see if it gains any traction with customers. If so, either one would be a candidate to acquire the Zoho, which is a subsidiary India-based of AdventNet.
See also a video about Zoho People, Zoli Erdos' post on Zoho People, and Larry Dignan's take.
Radar Networks is prepping for a March public beta of Twine, a Web application that organizes information into a "semantic graph," connecting people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, and photos, and turning it into Semantic Web content.
Nova Spivack
(Credit: Radar Networks)Twine has been in private beta with a few hundred users since November 2007. "We have 30,000 users on a wait list, and we will let them in 1,000 at a time in our first week in the market," Spivack said. "The next phase will give us tons of feedback, and we will continue to fix things and add new features, but a lot of it is there already and you can get a feel for where it is headed."
"Twine is a new service for knowledge networking, sharing, organizing and in finding information from people you trust," Spivack explained when the application was first introduced in October 2007. "Unlike a social network that is about who you know, Twine is more about what you know."
He also describes Twine as "Web 2.0 with a brain," and as a milestone in making the Semantic Web useful to end users. (See my earlier post on Twine.)
Twine is similar in concept to Facebook and other services that aggregate relevant feeds and notifications. Twine categorizes people, places, organizations, and other concepts.
(Credit: Radar Networks)Twine will be ad-supported, with limits on storage and the number of advanced features for the free version. A subscription-based, premium-content service is also planned.
Twine isn't the first application to apply Semantic Web principles, extracting meaning, and classifying and relating data with or without using Semantic Web standards such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL (the query language for RDF).
AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer, for example, knows about thinks like music, books, wine and travel destinations, but doesn't use RDF or other Semantic Web standards. Metaweb Technologies' Freebase is a like an open public almanac that includes structured information on topics such as movies, music, people and locations./p>
See also Paul Miller's ZDNet take on Radar Networks' news.
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