I’m sure you noticed that ReadWriteWeb recently named Zoho the Best LittleCo of 2008.

And I’m sure you also noticed that the world is going through… um, less-that-optimal financial times.

How are the two related? Well, ReadWriteWeb yesterday posted a very interesting interview with Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s CEO, about running a startup in the current financial environment. The founders of BrightKite (a location-based social network) also recently recognized by ReadWriteWeb were also there.

If you’re reading this you already missed the live show, but you can still listen to the recorded interview.

Rodrigo

Last year, Zoho won the Best Enterprise Start-up in the first Crunchies Awards. We have been selected as a finalist for this year’s Crunchies too. Thanks to all of you who nominated us for this year as well! Do vote for Zoho in the Best Enterprise category by clicking on the badge below.

Thanks in advance!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zoho Wins the ‘Best Enterprise Start-up’ at Crunchies 2007!
• Zoho in PCWorld’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008″
• Zoho : Webware 100 2008 Winner!

Here’s wishing you all Happy Holidays and A Prosperous New Year!

Celebrate your holidays with some wallpapers from our UI designer, Kabilan. Clicking on the images (dimensions 600×375) below will open wallpapers of dimension 1280×800

With love,
The Zoho Team

Sridhar got interviewed by Kamla Bhatt of LiveMint Radio. You can listen to the interview or read the transcripts here - Part I and Part II. Excerpts from the interview :

Kamla: Describe to us the different products that you have. What are the new products that you are going to be introducing by the end of the year?

Sridhar: We have just this year, for example, we completed the office suite with a really good e-mail solution and we have a CRM, and project management. And one of our most interesting products is called Zoho Creator that allows anyone to develop applications on it. Alongside we launched Zoho marketplace. So that is really what we have done this year. Our next year’s priority is going to be around integrating all of these applications. That is the top request for our users is to integrate seamlessly. Mostly for example CRM with e-mail and office documents with CRM and those kinds of integration. We still have new products but those will all be for example CRM adding support modules those are the new things that are coming up. Really a lot of the focus is going to be on integrating these applications and to make a coherent integrated suite. So that is the part of the vision.

Kamla: You described Zoho as an Indian company with a skeletal staff here in the US. What were some of the early pitfalls and problems that you encountered working on Zoho because we know about the success but what about the pitfalls?

Sridhar: Sometimes in anything new you do, you simply have to figure out a lot of things like how to write software efficiently to run as a web service on the internet. All of these we have to figure out and those are the engineering challenges, then the market challenges so figure out what for example in CRM market is. But I didn’t come from a CRM background, we came from a different background so figuring that out. So those are the challenges but we have smart people that we have developed internally a cadre of managers and engineers who are come up in the system and they are really smart and they observe a lot of companies. Basically we are also a business school and so they learn and they put their lessons to work, the next generation. So that is how we are. It’s very much an organic process its not like day one when we think of doing something and we get that right. Its like we launched something and then we learned a lesson, sometimes it’s a failure and then we analyse why we failed, go back do it again. We have done that with even our CRM for example; our first ten ships were in 2004 as a product we didn’t ship it as a web service. The whole CRM was a product. And then we decided no that is not the right way to talk in this market so we actually reloaded as a web service. So that is the ability to learn from your mistakes and adapt. That is what I think is the key to success.

Kamla: Here is a question that I often encounter from start up folks in India. They say that there is no big exit of an Indian start up in India so they are looking for role models and stories-successful stories. You have been very vehement against an exit strategy. You want to keep your company private. How would you answer this question if an entrepreneur from India came and asked you we don’t have good role models so we don’t have companies that have exited? How would you answer that question?

Sridhar: Well I don’t, each person has to decide for themselves what they want in this life and I am not interested in exit because I like working in this company and I like coming to work everyday why would I want to exit or would I want to sell and get out? I am not interested in it. So that is the reason it is not because I am philosophical opposed to it but I just personally don’t like to do it. Exit is something which is not in your control. Whether Google is going to acquire or yahoo is going to acquire or some Indian company is going to acquire that is not in the control of a person starting the company. So my advice would be to forget that as a plan, focus on serving the customer and making money. Then may be exit will happen or may not happen. In our case we are not interested in an exit so it is not part of our strategy at all. But even if you want an exit may be it is a better idea to just forget about it and build a real company, serving real customer and making money. In that case then the exit is a bonus if it happens and if its not its not. So that is what my advice would be.

Thanks Kamla, for the excellent & elaborate interview!

Related articles by Zemanta

• “Zoho, stop churning out products, start integrating them!”
• Surviving the Financial Crisis
• WSJ Op-Ed: For Most People College is a Waste of Time

We brought in more control over whether you want your wiki pages to be crawled by search engines. Click on Settings -> Robots and you can specify your robots.txt configuration options here.

By default, your public wiki pages will *not* be crawled by search engines. You will have to change the Disallow: /* to Allow: /* for making search engine bots visit your Zoho Wiki. You can become a little more imaginative here and specify which pages need to be crawled and which ones not to be crawled. Refer to this help page for more info about the robots file configuration.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Reasons Why Zoho Wiki should be your Help Authoring Tool
• Improved Customizable Options in Zoho Wiki
• Use Zoho Wiki as your Business Portal

I have been in Japan for the past week, working out of our office here in Yokohoma, meeting with customers and partners. The first thing you notice when you spend any time here is just how hard the Japanese work, even compared to the famously hard-charging work culture in silicon valley.  That’s what kept coming to my mind when I read Arrington’s post comparing silicon valley to France.

Here is the schedule of my colleagues in Japan, and this is entirely typical in Japan: come in to work at 9 AM, on the dot, after a standing-room-only commute on a very crowded train lasting an  hour or more, often changing 2-3 trains along the way.  Lunch around 12:30 to 1 - usually a quick affair, often at their desk, so it is not even much of a break.  Work till at 8 to 9 PM, with many folks staying in the office as late as mid-night, catching the last train, another hour spent commuting (trains are crowded even at 11 pm on week days!). If it is an important customer, you go out to dinner with them (add 3 hours!), and that means last-train-if-you-are-lucky and the last train is usually even more crowded. Yet, they are back at 9 AM next morning, impeccably dressed. I estimated that most of my colleagues cannot be getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night, and that’s assuming they do nothing at home after work other than sleep - which is what I did most of last week. I was so exhausted every day, all I could do was get to my apartment and just sleep.

I had joint meetings and a press conference with Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi, who also runs the Office 2.0 conference. Ismael and I were in violent agreement that life in silicon valley is a walk in the park compared to Japan.  I also have a colleague from India staying with me, and he tells me he can’t keep up with the Japanese, and work life in India is easy compared to Japan. We have bad commutes, and lousy roads in India, but at least the work hours are not nearly so long or so strenuous.

Here is what was shocking to me: I got off at my station one day at 11 PM, and there were 3 kids, who looked about 12, still on the train, returning home from their after-school study session. My Japanese colleague told me that was not unusual, and these kids would get up and go to school next morning at 8 AM. Well, at least Japan is very, very safe: one of my female colleagues walks the last 20 minutes home well after midnight, because by the time she gets off the train station, the last bus would have departed.

I am married to work myself, so it felt all the more weird for me telling my Japanese colleagues to cut down their insane hours. I am technically the CEO, and they are very polite, but when I hear “Sridhar-san, this is Japan” - the all-purpose “explanation”, I know they are not going to listen.

In Zoho Reports (Zoho DB & Reports service to be renamed as Zoho Reports soon…), we have rolled out Folders support to organize the reports you create in a better way. Also, to enable better navigation we now have ‘Explorer’ (Windows Explorer like) tab, which provides a detailed view of each report and tables present in a database. Explorer tab will be the default tab that would be shown when you open a database. 

Highlighting features of Folders include:

• Support for creating Folders by the database owner. Folders can also be created by users who are present in the DB Group of that database
• ‘Tables & Reports’ will be the default folder created. This cannot be currently deleted or renamed
• You can move reports across any folder using the ‘Move Folder’ option (Drag and Drop to be supported soon…)
• When you share a report under a folder, the folder will also appear to the shared user. Within the folder only the reports shared to the user will appear
• Apart from folder based organization, we also support ‘Group By Related Views’ and ‘Group by Report Type’

Hope you find this useful to organize your reports better. Give it a try and let us know your feedbacks.

Clarence
Zoho Reports - Online Reporting and Business Intelligence

Zoho offers the most comprehensive and growing set of web applications for both personal and business needs. With so many applications around, it can become a little difficult on your part to access the different Zoho apps, as Zoho has multiple entry (login) points. Let’s see if we can make this a bit easy for you by listing out ways of how to easily access the various apps.

1.  If you login at http://zoho.com, you will either land up inside Zoho Personal or Zoho Business depending on the type of your Zoho account. Zoho Personal & Business follow the same approach, having a navigation tree at the left. And you can keep switching to the specific app you want.

There are a couple of benefits that Zoho Personal/Business offers. You can re-arrange the left hand panel so that the most used apps by you are always at the top (click on Settings -> Applications & drag-drop the apps as per the order you like them). And you can add other Zoho apps too to the list (say Zoho Planner, Projects or CRM). What’s more, you can add third-party apps too that you frequently use (say, Google Reader or Bloglines for reading your feeds).

2.  Let’s say you are a data aficionado and use Zoho Sheet a lot. You probably login to Zoho Sheet directly at http://sheet.zoho.com. And while working with a spreadsheet there, you want to embed a chart in a Zoho Show slide show that you are preparing to show to your management. Easy way is to click on the Switch To at the top and choose Zoho Show in the drop-down menu that appears. Look for the ‘Switch To’ menu in other Zoho apps as well.

3. Supposing you are a heavy user of the office type of applications alone - Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show (for word processing, spreadsheets & presentations respectively), you will mostly be comfortable living inside Zoho Docs (http://docs.zoho.com), only visiting the respective service URLs for a few specific uses occassionally.

4. You can put to good use the browser bookmarks. For example, I have Zoho Mail, Zoho Writer & Zoho CRM, the apps that I most frequent on my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar.

5. One of Zoho Personal/Business ’s left panel listing is the Desktop. You can make this as your landing page (the default setting is Mail) once you login to Zoho. This will give you an overall view of your calendar, to-dos, office files, notes etc.

6. Login to your Zoho account. Now open http://zoho.com in a new tab. You have links to all the Zoho apps. Except Zoho CRM and a few utilities, you can directly login to the app you want as Zoho supports single sign-on.

7. Hit https://accounts.zoho.com. It has all the Zoho apps under single sign-on listed there. Right-click and choose ‘Open Link in New Tab’ for each of the apps you want to work on.

8. You can create desktop shortcuts for the Zoho apps you frequently use if you are on Google Chrome or Mozilla Prism. I use Prism at times to access Zoho Writer when the whole screen real estate with minimum distractions is the need of the hour. Haven’t tried this out for Chrome yet.

9. Want to access Zoho on your mobile phone? Currently optimized for the iPhone and Windows Mobile, apps available are Zoho Mail, Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator.

10. Many of Zoho’s apps have a rich set of APIs. You can access data stored in Zoho (Data API) or use Zoho’s functional interface (Remote API) from within your web application.

Now, the above’s not a comprehensive list and you should be having your own way of accessing Zoho everyday. What are your favorite Zoho apps? How do you access them regularly and what’s your favorite way of doing it? Let us hear it in the comments.

ps : We are coming up with yet another way to make the accessibility easier. Wanna take a guess of what we are going to come up with?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zoho Docs Organizes Your Writer/Sheet/Show Files [Online Documents]
• Prioritizing your To-Dos using Zoho Planner
• Zoho Mail Launches with Offline Support