Dear EditGrid Users,

I’m excited to announce that we are making some changes to our business that will allow the EditGrid Team to focus on developing new and exciting web apps. As a result, you will see the following changes to the current EditGrid product and service offerings:

• Effective today all EditGrid.com online services will now be available for free, including our premium subscription services. (Click here for more details if you are currently a paying subscriber.)
• Effective today, we are discontinuing sales of our EditGrid Standard and EditGrid Confluence Plugin software licenses. (Click here for more details on support if you are a current licensing customer.)
• Effective 30 days from now on 2009-10-24, the following remote data services and third party applications will no longer be available: (Click here for more details if you currently use one of the below services.)
  • Remote Data:
    • E-Commerce: Amazon and eBay
    • Economic and financial: Yahoo! Finance, StrikeIron Census and StrikeIron Zacks
    • Web analytics: Alexa
    • Others: Yahoo! Maps
  • Third Party Applications:
    • Salesforce.com, AppExchange, EditGrid Facebook App, and EditGrid Labs

We shall continue to keep our current support documentation available at https://wiki.editgrid.com/. However, in order to focus our resources on new R&D efforts, email and forum user support for EditGrid.com shall be discontinued 30 days from now on 2009-10-24.

I would like to take this opportunity to let you know that we appreciate everyone of you - our users - and will continue to do our best to push the envelope of collaborative web applications. Thanks for your support over the past few years and for choosing EditGrid.

David

The EditGrid Team

I’d like to share some of what goes on at EditGrid, as I’m sure some of our readers are interested to know. Last Friday, the team took a day off to celebrate the latest release. With the tons of things you can do in Hong Kong, shopping, hiking, bicycling, fishing, and did I already mention shopping, we chose the great outdoors by hiking the (paved) trails of Tung Chung in Lantau Island. You can’t tell, but we are actually an outdoorsy bunch.

We spent the entire afternoon breathing in the cool crisp air, which usually doesn’t exist in the heart of Hong Kong and it was the perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of the city. Not only did we hike but we found ourselves mixing in with the many tourists there and joined in on the sightseeing as well. We took the 20-minute ride on the Ngong Ping cable car to reach Ngong Ping. Ngong Ping is a tourist attraction with a small shopping center (surprise!), but beyond the restaurants and sovenier shops, you reach sights worth seeing, like the Tian Tan Buddha, Po Lin Monestary and Wisdom Path.

Before the hike down the mountains, we grabbed some grub fit for monks (vegetarian meal) at the Po Lin Monastery. Then we warmed up our hike with a steep 268-step climb to get up close and personal with what was once the world’s tallest bronze Buddha at 34 meters tall, then a stroll down the Wisdom Path so we could all be a little wiser. After running around like tourists, we began our 2.5 hour hike back to our starting point at a shopping mall in Tung Chung.

The hike itself was very much relaxed and together with a bunch of photo enthusiasts snapping left and right (some photos here), the pace was perfect but slower than expected. This resulted in a breakaway group that sped down the mountain in record time and we later rendezvous with them at a coffee shop where they were enjoying their cup of joe (they gotta have their coffee).

All in all, we had a great time being tourists and enjoyed each other’s company while taking in everything mother nature has to offer in Hong Kong. (If you ever find yourselves in Hong Kong, this makes for a good half day itinerary)

Who the heck is Angus Lau anyway? In short, I am the editor of the Hong Kong Web 2.0 blog, 852signal.com.

I will be joining the EditGrid team on a short-term consulting role and will act as the Community Manager. Basically, I’ll be managing communications between EditGrid and their users through different types of medium, blogs, forums, emails, IMs, Facebook and other social mediums. I’d love to meet the users in person as well, so if you are in Hong Kong, just hit me up.

So if you have anything to say about EditGrid, good or bad, you can tell me about it. But I can honestly tell you, the upper management do spend good time of their day rummaging through the blogosphere as well, listening and replying to your feedback and comments. Even the team is active in engaging with their users too in the support forums. Either way, I’m sure your voices will be heard. If not, don’t tell us, yell at us (but refrain from using inappropriate language, keep it G-rated, please)!

By the way, I’ll be in Beijing this weekend, November 2nd to 4th. If you are an EditGrid user in Beijing, get in touch with me! Unfortunately, I’ll be situated near Tsinghua University all weekend, so find me there and let’s talk about the web and online productivity in China and of course, my new favorite topic, spreadsheets! Sorry for the short notice.

EditGrid community and behaving netizens can contact me with any questions, feedback, comments and concerns about EditGrid in the following methods:

email: angus [at] editgrid [dot] com
skype: editgrid.angus
ICQ: 17165336 (oldie, but goodie. IM of choice in the office)
MSN: anguslau_hk [at] hotmail [dot] com
AIM: aylauhk