Online office suite provider Zoho has announced the launch of Zoho Docs this morning. You can think of Zoho Docs as a set of folders which help keep your documents neatly organized within the Zoho platform. Zoho applications are supported in Zoho Docs and they have also built the ability to upload other documents. Groups are supported which allow multiple people to keep track of documents in folders. Zoho Chat is also available so you can chat with others in your Zoho buddy list directly from Zoho Docs.

This may seem like a small announcement but it could have large implications in Zoho’s ability to cross-promote their applications. Get users using the Zoho tools as a file explorer replacement and it can help cross-sell other Zoho services. This app screams for a desktop where a toolbar could sit on the desktop at all times to allow for super-fast document retrieval.

Check out all of our Zoho coverage, including our interview with Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna.

More CN Coverage:
– FriendFeed
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– Startup Tips

Today marks DreamIt Ventures’ first Funding Day, during which the new startup incubator will introduce a dozen new companies to a collection of founders and venture capitalists. DreamIt is a program in the same vein as Y Combinator and TechStars, offering startups seed funding, guidance, and connections in exchange for equity. We’ve written brief introductions to each of the startups, which you can view below:
Source:TechCrunch
socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the […]Source:TechCrunch

Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.

Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.

Document sharing is actually quite a crowded space, with several serious competitors; Scribd and Docstoc come to mind, but I’m sure there are many others. However, Zoho has been so thorough with their online office suite that it’s only logical they created a document sharing service of their own.

Their vision of how document sharing should look is called Zoho Share, and unlike most competitors, who still feel they need to explain what their service is about, they really take the youtube route, with the homepage immediately hitting you with recent and featured document, as well as most prolific and recent users of the service.

Surprisingly, the official FAQ doesn’t work, but the service is so easy to use I’m sure everyone will get around without problems. It supports all Zoho’s formats, PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, and other popular formats, sans the much hated new Office formats (.docx and others). Users can grade, flag and comment all shared documents. Whatever you share, you can embed in a viewer which works quite well, although a zoom function would be nice (or necessary, in case of certain formats like PDFs). Scribd’s iPaper is much better with this regard, and although I’m used to Zoho releasing products which are well ahead of the curve when it comes to features, this time they’ve chosen a barebone approach which probably won’t be enough for some users.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Zoho Meeting Live for Web ConferencingZoho Business Launching At Office 2.0 ConferenceZoho Reaches 300,000 MembersZoho Releases Creator 2.0Zoho Notebook to Launch TonightZoho Launches Zoho Start: Netvibes for DocumentsZoho Writer Gets More Professional

For those of you who have been following along, my mom was seduced by Steve Jobs’ iPhone. This was and is an astonishing thing, since my mom is very far away from being a techie.

On the day of the iPhone launch, she waited in line at an AT&T store (and I waited with her) to get her new phone.

My mom loves her phone, but one issue came up which triggered an interesting thought.  She had a hard time using the phone initially because of her fingernails.

My mom does not have big garish fingernails, but they were longer than any man’s fingernails, extending perhaps a quarter or a half inch beyond her fingertips. The problem is that the iPhone screen requires touch by skin. the tip of a fingernail will not work. This is a problem because it means that the angle that your finger touches the screen at is such that the you end up making contact with the screen with a very large imprecise area of your finger. In short, my mom kept missing the intended screen  buttons.

Now in reality, my mom clipped her nails and everything was fine. But I guess my question is whether that is a reasonable expectation in the product design. Were there any women on the product team? We’re there any *girly* women on the product team — women that like the idea of painted fingernails that extend a bit beyond the fingertip?

I am sure many of you will say that is the price of technology. But I myself wonder if there were some equivalent male focused impediment if it would have been considered acceptable.

I am not sure that this is the perfect example, but this whole episode just got me thinking about design issues for men vs women. How many other, perhaps more subtle issues like this are there that I and other product designers/developers don’t think about? It is indeed striking that such a basic issue for the iPhone, as far as I can tell, really has not been discussed at all. Will most of my male readers, or readers in general, argue that such issues are irrelevant?

Editor’s note: In addition to Hank’s findings, last winter we wrote about the inability to use the iPhone with gloves on.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

More CN Coverage:
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Source:CenterNetworks

Office suite provider Zoho is announcing the launch of recordable macros in their Zoho Sheet application today. Basically creating a macro is as easy as clicking the start button, completing the actions you desire, and then clicking the stop button. Zoho then creates the Visual Basic code which you can pick up and modify as you like. The macro can then be applied to other spreadsheets.

Here’s a video overview showing how to create a macro in Zoho Sheet:

In a chat with Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna, he said outside of Microsoft Excel, Zoho Sheet is the only product to auto-generate Visual Basic code based on user actions. Earlier this year Zoho Sheet added support for pivot tables. And check out our interview with Raju to learn more about Zoho.

Project management software provider Wrike has announced the launch of their enterprise version today. The biggest update in this new version is the ability to reschedule tasks easily by using task dependencies. This allows you to change a top task and all sub-tasks will follow suit. If you’ve worked with project management software, rescheduling can be a real pain.

Wrike’s enterprise version offers exporting and importing options into Microsoft Office applications. Wrike is priced at $15 per user with unlimited projects.

While Wrike compares themselves to Microsoft Office, I’d suggest a more accurate comparison is with other SaaS/hosted project management tools including Zoho Projects. Zoho Projects is capped at $80/month for unlimited projects and unlimited users. With Zoho offering a full office suite of tools, my initial take is based on looking at the suite and pricing, Zoho seems like a better choice. Though both tools offer robust solutions that appear more attractive than Microsoft Project.

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Userplane has been on a roll with their distribution deals recently. Userplane has created widgets for a variety of content management systems and most recently partnered with ConVerdge on chat and IM integration.

Today NY-based KickApps and AOL-subsidiary Userplane are announcing a partnership which will bring live chat, IM and presence functionality into the KickApps social networking platform. Both the Userplane Webchat and Userplane Webmessenger tools will carry advertising and publishers can also use a buyout option to remove or control the ads within the widgets.

Check out our exclusive interviews with Userplane CEO Michael Jones and KickApps CEO Alex Blum.

On a side note, KickApps is now referring to their service as the, "World’s First Social Graph Engine". I wonder if they paid a marketing firm to come up with that tagline!

Partner Links
– Free Online Budgeting Software

Source:CenterNetworks

Office suite provider Zoho has signed a 6-month trial partnership with Swiss telco provider Swisscom. The partnership will bring Zoho products Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting to a custom version of the Zoho Business suite. The tools will be available within the Swisscom Teamnet portal. Swisscom currently has over 300,000 business customers.

Zoho reports that their userbase is 50% US, 25% European and 25% in the rest of the world. This past April, Zoho partnered with Badhui in China. Back in March, the Telegraph newspaper out of the U.K. voted Zoho as one of the 101 websites they couldn’t live without.