Fleet-footed Zoho — and other office productivity companies

Zoho is a notable company because it keeps offering new, cheap office software at a breakneck pace. Owned by AdventNet, of Pleasanton, the company keeps firing off software updates, at a stubbornness that suggests this company is going somewhere.

Like Techcrunch, VentureBeat finds it challenging to cover this company’s machine gun-like bursts (coming every two weeks or so) of releases. See Zoho blog.

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This is not a Web 2.0 era company. The company started in 1996, before the first bubble, and bootstrapped itself, as we’ve mentioned.

To begin with, there is Zoho Show, which became the first AJAX-based office suite online, according to Zoho’s Arvind. It lets you create Powerpoint-like presentations online, and you can open up your Microsoft Powerpoint and Open Office documents with it. It has the latest Web 2.0 features, for example letting you pull in pictures from Flickr. There’s also Zoho Writer, a word processor (a competitor to Google’s Writely) and Zoho Sheet, an online spreadsheet, and many more (Zoho Planner, Zoho CRM, Zoho Chat, Zoho Projects, etc). Where relevant, they have tagging, export-to-blog and sharing features you’d expect with Web 2.0. Finally, they’ve just introduced a single sign-on for these products.

Speaking of online presentation products, we should mention a Mountain View start-up called Uzanto, which has released a similar product called Slideshare — that lets you upload PowerPoint or Open Office files, and play your slides in a YouTube-like interface. Techcrunch has a discussion of this, including of the challenges online services have with AJAX and Flash.

It mentions other services in this area, including Tonicpoint, by San Francisco’s Tonic Systems.