Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheet is the Excel competitor of Google. That’s a good idea and shows that contrarily what Schmidt said just after they acquired Writely, Google is really in the web office arena. And that’s a good move I think. People say things like Google Spreadsheets look bad, they’re 10 years behind Microsoft etc.. But this is just the beginning and the visible part of the iceberg. We should wait and see what Google’s web office dream is becoming.

But they should really work hard; because it’s much easier for MS to make a web version of their Office suite. I know that they already started to work on it; and converting their current product to a web based one should be much easier than creating a whole new one.

I expect Yahoo to enter in this competition too. In that case their primary preference would be Zoho I believe. This was a prediction of mine in my previous entries.

We’ll see; the market is getting hot and I’m happy to see this.

GNOOS a new blog search engine

Gnoos is an Australia based new blog search engine. So this market getting overcrowded again. And these ventures come into the place before any acquisition occured in the market. So here’s my listing for blog seach engines:

>> Interface & Usability
GNOOS > Sphere > Technorati

>> Crawling
Technorati > GNOOS > Sphere

>> Innovations
GNOOS > Technorati > Sphere

>> Public Relations
Technorati ~= Sphere > GNOOS

PageFlakes gets funding

According to Techcrunch, Germany based PageFlakes got funding. I’m sure this will make PageFlakes services much better. As I said before, I believe they are much superior than their competitors, and they deserved this much before. Go PageFlakes..

Rollyo & Snap

These are 2 new ideas in search engine market. Rollyo lets you create customized personal search engines. They’re using the Yahoo Search technology. So I think it works like del.icio.us; you select your favourite web sites for a topic. Then you can make inside them using the Yahoo’s power via Rollyo.. Is it a good idea? Well not exactly.. Because it’s basically no different than del.icio.us; you could do the same with an advanced search functionality in del.icio.us (you would specify keywords to search in pages with specific tags…..) However I still see a chance of being widely adopted and even being acquired in Rollyo.

Snap.. just a marketing wonder.. Nothing new.. They just put screenshots.. the other features do already exist in major search engines under beta/alpha programs.. And seems like there’s too much money in it.. I don’t think they can survive for long.

No More Startups?

What’s the definition of startups? I’d define it like “a (generally high-tech) company founded by 1-3 talented people with scarce resources but high motivation of work and creativity”. However the companies I mentioned earlier and all the so-called startups do no more fit into this definition. They immediately get large fundings and they become no different than a division of existing large companies. Examples are Technorati, Snap, Riya and YouTube.. They don’t exist alone, the founders do 1% of the total product but the investors do 99%.. Then the founders become the public face of the company. As a result their shares in the company remain very low in the company but they still make quite good wealth and reputation.