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

We have made some improvements in this month’s release that will definitely be helpful to our users. You can read about what other features, enhancements and bug fixes were released in our changelog.

The most visible change is the dashboard view upon logging into EditGrid. The dashboard allows you to do more than accessing your spreadsheets. It adds a level of social interaction to your spreadsheet experience and encourages users to explore and share their work with others. Yet, users can still quickly access their most recent spreadsheets and their workspace.

Explore a new dimension of EditGrid with these new features found in the new dashboard:

• User profiles - Create your own profile and get to know other EditGrid users and view their public spreadsheets.
• Spreadsheet tags - tags allows visitors to find your public spreadsheets easily by user specified keywords.
• Search - search all publicly available spreadsheets in EditGrid.
• Popular spreadsheets - See which spreadsheets are popular with users and which are picked and featured by EditGrid team.



We’ve got few more features to introduce this month. Features that most spreadsheet users can’t live without.

Auto Filter
Yes, this is the auto filter you guys have longed for. Our auto filter is more complete than the competitors and functions the same way a desktop spreadsheet does.





Show/Hide Sheets
We have added another feature that allows users control how the spreadsheet is viewed by other users. Similar to the feature found in the desktop spreadsheet, you now have the option to hide worksheets and display the important data in the spreadsheet.



Macro library
The macro library contains macros created by the EditGrid team and our users. Users can now easily add macros from the library to their spreadsheets. It’s an open platform where users can publish their own macros and share with other EditGrid users.

We released our October 2008 release late last week with only enhancements and bug fixes. We have implemented a unique email address system whereby new and old users will be require to have a single email address for each account they have. Prior to this release, users were allowed to create multiple EditGrid accounts with the same email address. Now, new users who are creating multiple accounts will need to register each one with a different email address.

How will this affect existing users? Those with multiple accounts should have already received an email notifying them of this change. It’s recommended that you update your email addresses for each of the accounts you have, but it’s not required. If you choose not to update/add a new e-mail address, our system will not be able to recover your password in the event you forgot your password.

In both cases, if you haven’t already verified your email address, you will notice the red Verfiy Email link in the top left corner which will remind you that you haven’t verified your email address with us.

Addtionally, we have added a new option in our internal hyperlink toolbox (Insert > Hyperlink) to enable users to easily create links to other worksheets in your workbook, as noted below in the screenshot of the hyperlink toolbox.

As always, go to our change log and have a look at what we added and fixed.

If all your answers are yes (like me). Why don’t you send me a little something telling me your EditGrid experience?

EditGrid’s User Story and Customer Success pages are places to share and inspire the others with your own user experiences; another bonus is, that you get your name/ company name posted on our site - a tiny page exposure credit on the web!

We have received loads of great comments about EditGrid since we launched out of Beta back in 2007 March. I would be thrilled to get more of your submissions about your user story/ customer success.

Gather up your EditGrid power and submit now!

I wish all a Happy Halloween!

It’s been an eventful month for us at EditGrid. We’ve rolled out a key spreadsheet feature this month, the Show/Hide rows and columns. We understand this is useful feature is on every users’ wishlist and now it’s finally here.

Show/Hide Rows and Columns - Right click on any column or row header and choose Hide or Unhide.

There are other enhancements on EditGrid:

Paste Special - Choose from various paste and operation options.

Advanced Color Picker for Background and Text - Specify your own colors for your fonts and backgrounds with a color picker that allows you to input hex values.

Show/Hide Grid Lines
For those who are seeking a bit more performance (when using Firefox) you may hide the grid lines for faster scrolling.

To see the complete list of enhancements and bug fixes for the September 2008 release, please have a look at our Change Log.

Best Young Entrepreneur 2008 Nominations
As you may have already noticed on our main site, we received news from Business Week Asia that our founding team of David Lee, P.K. Chan, Alan Tam, Reggie Chan and Tony Sung were nominated as Asia’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in 2008. Go over to Business Week and see a list of other nominees and don’t forget to cast your vote.

Data availability from Hong Kong Exchange
For those who are already trading in the Hong Kong market or others interested in trading internationally, we are excited to announce the data availability from the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited (HKEx). With our existing Reuters remote data function, you will be able to access both the historical data with REUTERS_HISTORICAL() and company fundamentals with REUTERS_FUNDAMENTALS() from stocks and companies listed in the Hong Kong Exchange.

If you are unfamiliar with the Hong Kong Exchange, you may find more information on their website and their news site.

Yesterday, I was interviewed by TVB Pearl Money Magazine, a local TV program, about startup funding, particularly VC funding. I’m no expert but EditGrid did run through a few stages and was supported by different types of fund including bank loan, angels, government fund and VC.

If you are doing a startup, perhaps the following Q&As may be interesting to you.

1. Background on your business (nature of what you do).

We make online spreadsheet: EditGrid. It runs on a “Software as a Service (SaaS)” business model.

2. Can you take us back to the beginning of your business: How did you start? What was the first thing you had to do? Where did you get funding?

We started the company before we graduate from HKU. We graduated in 2004, one year after the disease SARS hit Hong Kong badly. The opportunity cost of doing a startup cannot be lower.

The first thing we did was to build a team by pooling all the best people I can find at that time. We had some ideas to start with, but honestly it tends to change a lot down the road when we have more knowledge to generate better vision of the world. We always put the team first, thus our company name: Team and Concepts - team is before and more important than concepts.

Then we needed money. Our solution was to borrow. When you do startup, you need to take the risk.

Later, we have angel investors and government funding. But they usually come in after you’ve something more solid.

3. Moving on to VC funding: at what point did you decide to seek venture capital?

The way VC really works is to have money chasing deals. VCs are in the business of funding the best investment opportunities they can find. Probably you will know you are ready when you are tracked by a few VCs who actively approach you and try to know more about you, your company and product.

To reach this point, you need to build traction. That’s buzz around your product, users using your product, customers paying your product, big name partners working with you, etc. VCs want to see where you are now more than where you will be in the future. VCs want visibility of exit. I would say a business plan and a quality team is NOT what they want the most. They want to see some solid execution that has already been done.

4. What was the process like? How do you go about doing that?

A VC approached us and looked at our company, determined we have potential but a bit early stage for them. He made lots of referral to some series A VCs. A few of them found us interesting and send a representative to visit us in our office and watch the demo. Some asked me to make a demo to all their partners in Beijing. (note: VC tends to have all partners in the company endorse a deal before they move forward). The term sheet was signed a few days after the meeting - before I left Beijing. It was fast. From that point to cash in bank took about 2 months.

We didn’t submit any business plan. The key part of the subsequent due diligence was a number calls to our clients and partners.

5. What are the pros and cons of selling stakes of your business to venture capitals or other private equity investors, for that matter?

Acceleration. Taking VC fund accelerate your success or failure. Of course, the VC will also enjoy a big part of your success at pay day.

With more money, we can hire good people and can focus to do what make sense for our business.

6. Has anything changed ever since you got investors on board?

Our series A investor is WI Harper, they are good and entrepreneur friendly. So, they largely leave us alone to take our company forward and always be available to give advice and help when we need them.

If you have chance, try to take money from reputable VCs.

7. For those with an idea to start up their own business, what’s the best route to getting funding? When does private investment come into the picture?

Take risk for your company. Focus to do one thing and one thing only. Do it better than anybody else in the world. The market and the VCs will tell you when you are ready.

August has been a really exciting month for everyone of else with the Olympics and we too, are doing our best to bring some excitement to our users. We have made some large scale improvements and added some much requested features in our latest August release.

Updated backend
We have updated our spreadsheet engine. This include new features, enhancements and improvements that were not available in the earlier version.

• Array Formulas
• Named Range
• Support PDF export

Other features
In addition, we are rolling out a few more useful features:

• Cross hair mode - Go to View > Show Crosshair
  
• Vertical alignment - Go to View > Enable Vertical Alignment and it will then appear in the toolbar
  
• Duplicate Sheet
  

Workspace Enhancement
Following the heels of the last month’s release of the new workspace, we have continued to make enhancements to the workspace. There is now a easy access link to Featured Spreadsheets, Inbox and Pagination.

In addition to viewing our featured spreadsheet from our main site, you can now view and copy them from your workspace. The new Inbox view will notify you of all the latest spreadsheet that has been shared to you by your collaborators. With Pagination, your workspace is slightly more organized.

More Data Packs
We have also squeezed several data packs in this release. By utilizing the Google API, you can now get Weather and Patent data in your spreadsheet, as well as adding dictionary functionality in your spreadsheet. There are also data packs which you can use to grab real estate information from Zillow and Trulia.

We’ve got a lot of changes out this month, so be sure to check out our Change Log for a complete list and details of this month’s release.

37signals has a good post on why we can do away with phone support and I couldn’t agree more. I have had my fair share of bad experiences as well.

As part of the customer support team, I want to briefly share what goes on here at EditGrid. Online support has been very important to us and it’s been working well. Phone support on the other hand, would not work as well, considering our geographic location and our users and being a startup, there’s no need to outsource to some call center in India. I wouldn’t consider putting our users and customers through that even if that was an option.

We offer several channels to help our customers, our support forum, help center and email, with our help center being a one-way street. We also monitor Twitter and trying out Get Satisfaction, so your voices won’t go unanswered.

All these channels may sound like a handful, and it is, but they’re absolutely manageable and extremely efficient. We have had positive feedback from our users and are able to meet our commitment, answering all requests in a timely fashion, meaning within one business day.

Admittedly, there are times where we missed a request or two or take a little longer to reply. If that’s you, kindly remind us, but we’d understand if you want to give us an ear full instead (we just ask that you keep it clean). We’ll continue to look for ways to improve so it won’t happen again.