
Office Applications, Cloud Office Applications: An Open Letter
Alright, there are a dozen office suites out there that sit in various places on one’s computer, in the cloud, can do X, Y, and Z and the list goes on. However, I don’t want to talk about any of those suites. I want to talk about the suite we all want, the suite that […]

Can Office 365 Help Microsoft’s Future?
Microsoft today took the wrappers off their Office 365 offering and allowed any business to try out the beta version. The general availability is scheduled for sometime later in the year. Office 365 is Microsoft’s answer to other online Office Suites such as Google Apps and Zoho Office Suite. After dilly dallying for a long […]

Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out […]

Motorola Takes Us a Step Closer to Personal Computing Nirvana–and it’s Not Even a Computer
It took five years, but the personal computing nirvana vision I first heard from Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu is becoming reality. The concept that I discussed in The Cell-Phone Aware PC May Be a PC-less PC, and other posts is simple. Instead of a plethora of situational devices with redundant computing capacity, carry around just […]

The Master of Guerilla Marketing Turns Microsoft’s Prank Around
CloudAve readers know I am a fan of edgy marketing. Now it’s time to update my recently compiled inventory of software marketing pranks. A major show like Salesforce.com’s DreamForce would not even be real without some guerilla marketing activity – except the players seemed to have traded places this year. Guerilla Marketing is normally David’s […]

Zoho Support: A Step Towards A More Integrated Suite
Zoho (CloudAve sponsor since beginning. See past CloudAve coverage of Zoho related news here) last week announced that they are releasing Zoho Support, a customer care solution integrated with their existing business suite. This is one of the applications long sought out by Zoho customers (Accounting app is another one I could think off) and […]

Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!
In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their […]

Did 37Signals Increase BaseCamp Price or Not? The Backdoor Experiment.
There’s a debate going on about 37Signal’s “hidden” “unannounced” price increase of their popular Basecamp service. Apparently most of the uproar wasn’t so much due to the price hike itself, but the fact that it happened without any announcement. Cinovate Cinovate Cloud Inn. Why did 37 Signal’s Basecamp price double unannounced? http://bit.ly/bLan2a Contact Cinovate for […]

Software Marketing Pranks
I envy software marketing types. They get to stay kids forever: pull pranks and even get paid for it.:-) Today’s example comes courtesy of TechCrunch: PayPal competitor WePay dropped a 600lbs ice block at the entrance of the Paypal developer conference. They got chased away and Moscone security removed the ice block. My question: who […]

India’s First Full Fledged Cloud Infrastructure Offering
Tata Communications, India’s leading service provider, announced an expansion of their cloud offerings, making it the first comprehensive India based cloud solution available for customers. Today, they announced the addition of Instacompute and Instaoffice to their list of offerings. The launch marks the company’s expansion in the cloud space to deliver self-service, pay-as-you-use IT application […]

GOutlook. Gmail Back to Earth… in Search of Revenue.
I’ve been long-time Gmail fan, having used it from the very early days, for almost 5 years now. The key reasons why I switched and have stuck with the service ever since were the productivity boosters, first of all: Threaded conversations Labels Search Google did to email what all new product teams should: throw away […]

CloudAve is on WordPress Now
We’ve moved. No, we’re still moving. You can see the evidence all over, we’re still in the middle of a platform move, combined with a facelift, most of which is yet to come. You may have read about our crowdsourced logo-redesign effort, which is still ongoing, but has not produced the WOW-effect I expected (feel […]

Box.Net Adds Offline Support But How Many Really Use It?
Box.Net, the cloud storage provider turned cloud content management platform for businesses, yesterday announced a new feature for their mobile apps which will let users store documents offline. In a blog post today, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net, wrote about the new feature. Today’s workplace has exploded beyond the office walls and into coffee shops, […]

Atlassian: Fully Funded. By Customer Revenue. Oh, and the $60M T-shirt
It was 2006, the first Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and I just met Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian. I had followed the company for a while (OK, I admit, had been a fan), met Mike, but this was the first time with Jeffrey, so we took our box lunch to a cozy little […]

Know When Your Server Will Fail Before it Actually Happens
When your server goes down, it’s bad enough –even worse if you have to keep on trying to reach support in vain, then if you finally get through, you’ll have to convince them there’s trouble. If you have such a host, run! (and I can even tell you where to). So whenever I ran into […]