This is a late post. We’ve had some busy days, thanks to the Taiwan earthquake. Anyway, late is better then never.

Much happened in 2006. It was when EditGrid was launched. When Google joined and brought lots of attention to this market. When Google acquired Jotspot and hired iRows founders - taking away two players in the trade. It was also when Num Sum, the first online spreadsheet in market, ceased developing and Numbler went open-sourced.

Now the online spreadsheet offerings that remain are (in no particular order): Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of Zoho Office Suite), WikiCalc (as part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office) and, of course, EditGrid. It seems that we are the only standalone offering here.

Cool, we are lonely now. I think it is good to be focused, for 2 reasons:

1. As an start-up, we never want to be everything to compete with everybody.
2. We still have lots to work to do in this technology domain. The basics are not good enough. We want to make EditGrid faster, capable to load larger spreadsheet, etc. It is too early to diversify.

“Nice, but… you are not a complete solution!” Oh, yes, may be. We have a growing community of loyal users who use EditGrid everyday. I don’t know whether they see us as a complete solution. There may be customers on the street who would come in and say, “Hey, I need a wiki, too!” I can’t tell him/her to open a spreadsheet and put all their wiki article in one cell, can I?

Besides serving our users at the EditGrid.com, we are serving as the technology provider of online spreadsheets, too. Say, if a wiki service come to us and would like to integrate with EditGrid, we’ll work our socks off to support them to make a seamless integration. With partnership, we make EditGrid available to a wider audience, and in the process make both us and our partner a more complete solution. Some active integrations are under way, and don’t be surprised if you find EditGrid available in other online services soon.

By forming partnership, we are making lots of friends. We can focus to deliver a better technology and make it easier to be integrated. If you want EditGrid power in your site, the entry point is this integration guide. I will be waiting for you at my email/IM/skype/phone…

All the best in 2007!

Public Beta 17.5 (rev 5852)

• Limited tag to 32 characters of length
• [#6069] Fixed chart properties toolbox malfunction

Taiwan earthquake on 26th December 2006 broke 6 major undersea communication cables - making EditGrid, which is run on servers in Hongkong, unreachable by most of our users in North America and Europe.

We’ve taken swift action to tackle the catastrophe. The first step we took was to identify a location with good sufficient bandwidth to both Hongkong and overseas such that we can set up a VPS there to route overseas traffic to our Hong Kong servers. This was completed on 27th December. Special thanks go to our partner Central Desktop who kindly lent us access to their spare facilities in US, which helped us quickly verify the speed of the routing we’ve set up.

However, the performance of the alternate routing deteriorated quickly over the next couple of days. The alternative route soon became very congested, and we receive users’ complaints about the slow access from all channels.

Then we made a critical decision - to migrate our service to US immediately. We’ve been planning to migrate our service to data centres with better international bandwidth for a while. The earthquake catalysed it. On 29th December 2006 we confirmed the migration and, in about 24 hours, our partner CCT Technologies had already had the servers set up at co-location data centre and ready for service. What an impressive efficiency! By 2nd January, everything was ready and we’ve made the migration!

In the process we’ve also upgraded to more powerful servers. Depending on your location, you may actually experience EditGrid faster than before the earthquake.

Our sincere thanks again to Arnulf from Central Desktop and to Luke, KT and Scott from CCT Technologies. Without your support, we cannot make it.

Our apologies go to users from Hong Kong and Mainland China as EditGrid may run a bit slower than before due to network latency. The solution we are employing is not yet optimal. We aim for a distributed architecture where user data are stored in a location closest to the user’s location to reduce network latency - and we are working hard to reach that point.

In the next release, we will launch EditGrid on a new architecture with better scalability and a data transfer model that can load large spreadsheet faster.

We keep our eyes on one goal - making EditGrid the best online spreadsheet.

Public Beta 17.4 (rev 5761)

• [#6042] Fixed toolbox dragging malfunction
• [#5765] Advanced colour picker
• [#5327] Advanced function selector
• [#5994] Fixed find empty string malfunction

EditGrid migrated to North America. Resumed normal traffic to the level before the Boxing Day earthquake and the subsequent interruption of Internet connectivity. Users may experience faster access to EditGrid than before, depending on location.