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Some users like managing their portfolio using a simple spreadsheet like this one (it uses our recently launched VB Macros, BTW).

While a spreadsheet is good one for such use, research is a different story. Apps like Zoho Notebook comes in handy in such cases. Good news about Zoho Notebook is, you can even include such spreadsheets inside your notebook.

Mike Hogan from Barron’s talks about using Zoho Notebook (and Google Notebook) for your Stock Research.

BOTH NOTEBOOK SYSTEMS make it easy to sort out the HTML-bound text, pictures and videos you want to keep from those you want to lose. Yes, popular desktop applications accept hyperlinks, graphics and other HTML gingerbread, but not with anything approaching predictability. Web elements can change a receiving file’s formatting; and, if your mouse stumbles over an embedded link, you can find yourself transported to an image or video application or some other Web page.

Google Notebook is better at selectively stripping out Web links and other formatting, or turning a big note into plain text with the click of an icon. Zoho Notebook is more oriented toward page-building than text conversion. It has standing menu options that let you create multimedia notebooks by mixing images, RSS feeds, spreadsheets, presentations and other non-text elements, or even record audio and video directly to a notebook. In addition to text- editing tools, it has a drawing toolbar for page layout and object manipulation — and a truly impressive ability to deal with disparate Web-page elements.

Google Notebook’s strength is in on-the-fly research, where the fewer mouse clicks, the better. But Zoho’s multimedia elements make for greater comprehension, and facilitate sharing. In this age of social media, being able to bounce your research and ideas off other market speculators is an important part of investing.

Both services let you create public folders online — including password-protected ones accessible only to approved collaborators. But Zoho Notebook has more version-control and collaborative features for group projects, as well as chat access via Skype’s (www.skype.com) instant-messaging and phone service. Both can be included as toolbars in Mozilla’s Firefox browser (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com). With a right mouse click, you have the option to capture a Web page’s URL to Google Notebook or the entire Web page to Zoho Notebook.

Full article here.

Research is obviously the core usage of Zoho Notebook. We have been making some good progress towards it for the next version to further simplify the research process with a better plug-in etc. More on that later.

In the last few weeks we made several useful enhancements to Zoho Notebook. Here are few highlights…

Web Clipping

We made a simple but useful enhancement to the web clipping feature in Zoho Notebook. When you collect information using the ‘Add to Zoho Notebook’ option in the Firefox plug-in, the content will now be arranged one below the other. Previously, the content overlapped where you had to manually arrange them.

Editing Option for Objects

We now added editing option for the objects. The ‘Edit’ icon () lets you edit the HTML code in the ‘Add HTML’ object, Feed URL in ‘Add RSS’ object and URL in ‘Add HTML’ Object.

New Shapes

We noticed that several users use the drawing tools for drawing flowcharts. We now added more shapes that are useful for flowcharts.

RSS Object

The ‘Add RSS’ Object now supports feed from different RSS verions. This object currently support versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 & 2.0.

In the last few weeks we made several useful enhancements to Zoho Notebook. Here are few highlights…

Web Clipping

We made a simple but useful enhancement to the web clipping feature in Zoho Notebook. When you collect information using the ‘Add to Zoho Notebook’ option in the Firefox plug-in, the content will now be arranged one below the other. Previously, the content overlapped where you had to manually arrange them.

Editing Option for Objects

We now added editing option for the objects. The ‘Edit’ icon () lets you edit the HTML code in the ‘Add HTML’ object, Feed URL in ‘Add RSS’ object and URL in ‘Add HTML’ Object.

New Shapes

We noticed that several users use the drawing tools for drawing flowcharts. We now added more shapes that are useful for flowcharts.

RSS Object

The ‘Add RSS’ Object now supports feed from different RSS verions. This object currently support versions 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 & 2.0.

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PC World announced a list of 25 most innovative products for 2007 and we are honored to see Zoho Notebook included. The list includes both software and hardware products.

PC World Says…

Innovation: Web-only app stores just about any kind of content and allows you to share it with anyone.

Benefit: More full-featured than competing online tools.

AdventNet’s Zoho tools include everything from wiki software to customer relations management and project management applications, many of them free. Zoho Notebook (free, in public beta) continues the winning streak. You can enter text, graphics, audio, video, and embedded content from other sites onto your notebook’s pages–or use the page as a single word processing document or spreadsheet. Put together everything on a certain subject, and you’re ready to share your work with online compatriots.

As some of you may recall, Zoho Notebook was announced in Jan at DEMO conference and was open to public in May. Over the last seven months the application has been maturing rapidly with several updates and lots of regular users. Over the next few months you’ll see several updates enhancing the functionality of the application further.

We will be talking about Zoho Notebook and other Zoho applications at the Show Stoppers event in Vegas.

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We’ve scheduled a maintenance for Zoho Notebook on Sunday, November 18, 2007 between 9.00PM and 11.00PM PST. Hence, access to Zoho Notebook service will not be available during this period.

We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause.

Collaboration and Web Apps: The Big Picture

Previously, I talked about Collaboration being one of the key features of web applications. In this post, I want expand more on that point.

I am sure all of us agree that the key advantage of web based applications is Collaboration. There are other advantages like mobility etc. But thats for another post. Lets look at how collaboration is evolving in online applications. Before that let us look at communication applications first and later we shall talk about their role in collaboration.

Communication Apps:

Today we use different types of communication tools on a daily basis. These tools include Discussion Forums, Email, IM, Audio Conferencing, Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing etc. Some of these tools are used along with others for better/effective communication. Each of these communication tools are intrusive than the other. Forums are less intrusive than Email which is less intrusive than IM which is less intrusive than Audio Conf etc.

Collaboration Tools:

With the advent of web applications we have seen a different type of collaboration with ‘Collaborative Editing’ on content where multiple users can work on the same application/content at the same time seeing each other’s changes immediately. In this case, all users are (literally) on the same page working on the content making collaboration effective with out the hassle of emailing attachments and managing versions.

These ‘Collaborative Editing’ and ‘Virtual Whiteboard’ type of functionalities in web applications is just the stepping stone for more broader and deeper integration. These features mark a significant change in the way we work. Instead of emailing attachments, we email a link (Remember, Document is a URL). The communication tools like Email, IM etc are used for the right purpose - to communicate the changes and not for pushing the content.

Collaboration + Communication Tools

What we will see next is a combination of collaboration and communication tools. Each of the communication tools I mentioned will be integrated into web applications that focus on collaboration. A user might prefer one type of communication than the other. So it is important for web apps to provide different types of communication tools for effective collaboration.

In fact we already see this happening in our own applications. Email is integrated into Zoho Writer where you can email a document (selecting a format) directly from the application.

Similarly, Zoho Chat is integrated into Writer/Sheet/Show/Notebook etc enabling instant communication.

With the recent addition of Comments feature in Zoho Writer, a mini discussion forum is integrated to discuss the comments…and then in Zoho Notebook, we have integrated Skype for audio and video communication. You’ll see other communication tools eventually integrate into such web applications.

We certainly see this as the direction web applications will evolve integrating different types of communications in multiple ways. Instead of content revolving around communication tools, the communication tools will now revolve the content.

We rolled out an update to Zoho Notebook with some good enhancements in Collaborative Editing along with Export functionality.

Enhanced Collaborative Editing

We made several enhancements in collaborative editing. Here are some of them

• Collaborative editing now works more smoothly than ever
• In collaborative editing mode, if you reorder the pages, the pages will also be reordered for all the users working on the book immediately
• Also, if any user adds a new page and saves the book, all users working on the notebook will be notified about the page addition and will see the changes immediately at their end

Page Export

We added our first version of Export functionality in Notebook. You can now export Notebook Pages and Books in MHTML format (works in IE only). We have plans to support other export formats as well.

You’ll notice that the current export functionality is supported for Text, Images and drawing objects. We don’t include other types of content as these are web specific functions.

Apart from these two key enhancements, we also added several minor enhancements like a ‘Switch to’ option on the top to help easily navigate to other Zoho applications.

Do give these features a try and let us know what you think.

We rolled out couple of useful updates in Zoho Notebook with some of the most requested features. These include Page Reordering, Undo/Redo, Menu at the Book level, Safari support and more.

Page Reordering

This is one of the most requested feature and we now have it available. You can now reorder your pages by simple drag and drop. Just drag the page tab (on the right) and drop it on top of the other page and the pages get reordered.

Undo/Redo

Another added functionality is multiple Undo/Redos. Even if you deleted an object, if you are on the same page, you can retrieve it by simply undoing that action.

Book level Menu

We discussed earlier on this design and we now have this implemented. We added a small menu for the book tab on the top. This menu has book level options like Rename, Publish, Share and Delete. We plan to provide similar menu options for page level too.

Apart from these, we made several other minor enhancements (like more formatting options in Text Object) and fixed some bugs. These include Safari related bug fixes. Notebook should work fine on the latest version of Safari (3.0.2).

Do give these a try and let us know what you think. Also, if you have any immediate pain points with Notebook, please do let us know and we’ll try to address them soon.

Earlier this month Sridhar Vembu and I had a brief discussion with Robert Scoble on various Zoho related topics. Scoble posted these videos (Discussion with Sridhar and Notebook Demo) in PodTech. Also, check out his blog post ‘Zoho: the office disrupters‘. Below are the videos.

With nothing much to do this weekend due to rain, I decided to play with my Wii. After enabling wireless access on Wii, I installed ‘Internet Channel (Trail Version)’ as another channel (This basically is a customized Opera Browser for Wii). What surprised me is that this is a fully functional web browser (unlike other mini versions). Why do I say this?

Well, you know that the Zoho applications are JavaScript/AJAX intensive. These Zoho apps (I tested Writer, Sheet & Show) worked perfect including dragging and dropping of charts in Sheet.

Zoho Notebook is another JavaScript intensive application. When I try Notebook in Opera on WinXP, I cant draw lines or move content around. But surprisingly, even drawing lines (and dragging objects) worked perfectly on Opera for Wii. Below are some screenshots.

Of course, I do not expect people using Zoho or other web apps on their TV/Wii or iPods…but as I said earlier, this is fun.

The announcement of the Private Alpha of Zoho Notebook during DEMO ‘07 had a high impact among bloggers and journalists alike. Here’s some choicest quotes from around the net :

Harry McCracken at PC World :

Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web :

Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch :

Marc Orchant at ZDNet:

Barbara Krasnoff at InfomartionWeek :

Rafe Needleman at c|net Webware :

And our advisors, Ismael Ghalimi

and Zoli Erdos :

Keith Shaw at InfoWorld :

We got some very good feedback from Dennis Howlett

and Stowe Boyd

The limitations of the pre-beta — I got invited — are pretty steep: I crashed Safari, and there are several types of pages I can’t seem to create at all.

But I excited about the bottom-up model of sharing: bits of content can be shared from pages and books independently.

And Robert Scoble mentioned it twice, here and here.

Thanks a lot to all you folks and every blogger, journalist & Zoho fan out there who tested Zoho Notebook, took note of the launch, blogged about it! Watch out for more from Zoho

Update : Jack Schofield at Guardian Unlimited declares Zoho as the ‘winner’ at DEMO 07.

Update : Michael J. Miller at PC Magazine lists Zoho among his Top 5 products at DEMO ‘07.