Zoho Virtual Office

Let us all repeat the new mantra: Integration.

Zoho Virtual Office integrates all the scattered Zoho services into one free service for individuals: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Planner, Zoho Creator and Zoho Chat.

Google Office lurks in the background, but Zoho has hit first. Albeit in a beta stage, the demo promises a good fight for giants Google and Microsoft. It really looks and feel like a desktop.

Pageflakes 2.0

The battle of the start pages enters a new stage with the announcement of Pageflakes 2.0. It seems that the site will undergo a complete redesign and pages might be shared and edited among certain users. It was the next logical step. The possibilities of this concept are endless, but pages can get quite messy and confusing after a while.

Widgets for start-pages are an innovative way to promote sites. See the useful Bittybrowser, for instance and the myriad of integration option it offers.

Jajah

Jajah is VOIP service that has pretty much nailed it. It has got ridden of the only thing that prevented VOIP to turning massive in previous services like Skype: talking trough a headset.

With Jajah you just activate the call through the web and use your ordinary phone or mobile to inititate the conversation.

It has cheap rates and even free calls between active European and US users. How cool can it be? Enough typing SMS in the tiny keyboard, with Jajah you just type in the computer and send it at a competitive rate.

My abroad friends, here I come. You will have to bear my conversation from now on.

Itunes hits the Movies

It seems that Itunes hit the right spot with its switch to movies. Disney alone made 1 million $ out of movie sales in the first week alone.

"Clearly customers are saying to us they want content in multiple ways," said Disney chief executive Robert Iger.

How could anyone watch a movie in such tiny screen is beyond my wits. Cool-factor? Better say, Eye-strain factor.

Zune

Microsoft dash at the Ipod is taking shape. They have an appetizer web up and now they promise "music sharing". Of course it will be sharing a la Microsoft, which means DRM and perishable songs.

It will have 30GB storage and wireless functionality for Zune-to-Zune sharing of music, pictures and home recordings; and a built-in FM tuner (The one thing apple didn't get right).

I'm not sure it will succeed. Microsoft is not associated with cool rhythms, but rather the beeps of Windows alerts and help windows.

Facebook open

It was only for U.S. college students, but now it's opening up to other milieus. High School students and employees of certain corporations are allowed to join. Facebook also allows users to complement their their high school, college or corporate network with a geographic network.

What will succeed in social networking? Geographic networks or social-class networks? It's an old debate: extraction Vs education, local allegiances Vs global identities.

Google Books in PDF

Wow this will blow some minds, especially over at the British Library. Google offers pdf download of out-of-copyright books.

Some concerns, though. The pdf format chosen is far from standard and it consists of a bunch of scanned images. This disallows format conversion or text extraction without advanced OCR.

One more effort, google.