Dan Farber (Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Between the Lines blogger) and I have a new video show: Working Webware. Each episode, we're going to pick on one hapless Web CEO, interview him or her, and then analyze their prospects.
For our first show, we sat down with AdventNet's CEO Sridhar Vembu to find out about Zoho's office productivity suite and how the company plans to compete against Microsoft and Google. We analyzed the company's business model and argued about Zoho's chance for success in the emerging Web 2.0 office software market. Running time is 9 minutes.
Recently, Zoho improved the offline functionality in Zoho Word, bringing it a small step closer to competing directly with Microsoft's Office Suite.
After watching the video, Vembu replied in an e-mail:
I agree we face a massive challenge. Here is why I feel optimistic: at AdventNet, we get about 1.5 million downloads of our IT Management & Security products (they range from network/systems/app management to help desk and a lot in between). These products target SMBs directly. We count in excess of 25,000 organizations as customers. We have relationships with nearly a thousand resellers world-wide, and we are establishing tiered distribution partnerships around the world. That business is growing at a really fast clip.
I believe there is a huge untapped opportunity in the SMB segment for Zoho. That is why we are investing heavily (Zoho division alone has now 200+ people in engineering). Fortunately, our AdventNet business is doing extremely well to be able to afford the investment.
Of course no one can predict the future, but based on the response we are seeing for Zoho, I am really optimistic. I believe just as the desktop software industry had room for players like Adobe and Intuit to thrive in the face of Microsoft, we will carve out a space for ourselves in the online application business, assuming a Google-dominated world. Execution is the key, as always.
I'm at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo kick-off, called Ignite--which is what most speakers are doing to the microphone. The premise is simple, you've got 20 slides, and each one automatically advances every 15 seconds.The result? Speakers sound like they're running a live auction.
Notably, ZDNet's Ryan Stewart gave us a brief overview of his blog, Advancing User Experience with Rich Internet Applications, and told the audience we should keep our eyes on Adobe's Apollo (previous coverage).
Christy Canida of Instructables talked about how user-submitted designs for toys have been so successful for the site dedicated to do-it-yourself instructions. If you've never visited it before, it has all sorts of design instructions to help you turn anything into a Skype phone (among other neat projects).
Salim Ismail of Confabb discussed its new service, which is like a Yelp for conferences (business or otherwise). Conference goers can review their conference experiences, add media from attended events, and network with others.
Session two is just around the corner with Justin of Justin.tv and Nik Cubrilovic from Omnidrive, among others. Stick around!
FineTune is a music discovery service that launched last year and is focused on letting its users build sharable playlists of popular music. You're able to browse and search through a fairly large directory of popular artists and pick out full versions of their songs based on 30-second previews. There's also a really simple music discovery system that automatically builds playlists for you based on your artist picks (see Pandora). The whole package is wrapped up in a slick, user-friendly interface. There are also some basic social networking features. You can add and subscribe to your friends' playlists, and pass back and forth music recommendations.
Below is a playlist I created using the I'm Lazy button on the playlist builder:
Ryan Stewart over at ZDnet has a nice little hands-on review of FineTune worth checking out.
[via ZDnet]
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