I’m a fanatic of charts. A week ago, one of my friends in the VC world throw me a use case - He is tracking a bunch of startups which he wants to compare traffic and unique visitors.

Here is the template we come up with:
http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web2Tracker.new

Neat? This template allows tracking of 12 groups of websites, max. 8 in each group. For each site entered, links to its respective Alexa, Compete, Crunchbase, Del.icio.us search, Google Blogsearch and Technorati search are automatically generated with simple spreadsheet function: hyperlink() and concatenate().

Even more interesting, by entering group number in respective cells in sheet “Alexa Charts” and “Compete Charts“, respective Alexa/Compete charts can be loaded into the spreadsheet. You can configure the options to load different type of charts such as: Alexa’s reach, rank and pageviews; Compete’s unique visitors, attention, average stay and page/visit, etc.. This was done with a EditGrid unique feature called dynamic remote image, which load image according to URL stored in a cell. The URL can be dynamically generated with spreadsheet functions such as concatenate().

Here’s a few interesting notes you may like to take away:

1. The Chart URL in websites (including Alexa, Compete, Y! Finance, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc. etc.) can be easily understood. The parameters are usually embedded in the URL, e.g.
http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/www.techcrunch.com_uv_310.png

The above will show the unique visitor (”uv”) chart of Techcrunch (www.techcrunch.com) of width 310px (”310″). You can easily guess it right after playing with the compete site for a few minutes.

2. With understanding of the parameters in URL, you can easily write a concatenate() function to concatenate the “parameters” into the URL. e.g.

=concatenate(”http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/”,A1,”_”,A2,”_310.png”)

This will give the above URL if A1 is storing “www.techcrunch.com”, A2 is storing “uv”. If A1 now change to “www.readwriteweb.com”, the URL will be pointing to the respective chart of Read/Write Web instead.

3. To insert dynamic images, you click “insert” -> “images…”, then input the cell reference of the concatenate() result, e.g. B1. So, whenever A1 change to a new domain or A2 change to a new chart type, the images will be reloaded automatically.

4. Loading images from other websites can be sometimes questionable. The web2.0 world has a nice name for it: mash-up. In EditGrid, we just want to provide a generic features for our users to make those charts work for them. I hope this is ok and there won’t be an “Alexaholic incident” happen to us.

5. To copy the above templates for your own use, just add “.new” at the end of the URL and hit return. Yes, turning an EditGrid spreadsheet into a template is as easy as this.

Have fun with EditGrid.

P.S. Some new features currently in our pipeline can make spreadsheet templates like this a few times more powerful. There will be a lot coming from EditGrid in 2008!

Wow! EditGrid is one of the five finalists of the Crunchies Best Enterprise Start-up! This is really a big big surprise to us. Thanks so much for all your nominations. Voting is now open, you can cast your vote here.

The happiest thing of all is that we are listed side by side with 37signals - a company we truly admire. We talked about them and learn from their products and philosophies since the early days of EditGrid development.

Also congratulations to our friends at Atlassian for being nominated as the best international startup. They and 37signals are setting a high bar for Enterprise 2.0. We at EditGrid are working hard to catch up with them.

Merry Christmas!

Spreadsheets as an investment tool? You bet! You can do exactly that with EditGrid! At CurrencyTrading.net, they agree and we were listed as one of their Next-gen investing tools for amateur and professional traders.

Locally in Hong Kong, stock traders/enthusiasts have already taken EditGrid to another level with their investment spreadsheets, including adr, which reached over a million views. Other popular investment spreadsheets include all in one and Markets Monitor. Those spreadsheets simply provide stock market information for investors to make decisions on but there are users who use EditGrid to manage their investment portfolios as well.

Good stuff? We’d like to think so. But we want you guys to tell us that, so give it a try and see for yourself.

To get started with EditGrid as an investment tool, sign up for an account (if you haven’t already). We have included our stock portfolio template for download to get you started on buidling your investment portfolio and tracking its performance. You’ll need to know a bit about our Remote Data feature to use it.

We’ve got more great uses out of EditGrid, besides the lunch expense and CS log, we take it a bit further and use it for localization. Our localization project (currently rebuilding), has been a big part of EditGrid since we started building EditGrid. We allow our user community or anyone for that matter to translate our site to their local language. To date, with efforts from the community, we have made nine languages available on EditGrid, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and English.

It’s a very simple process, localization spreadsheets are made publicly readable and writable and open to any user or visitor to contribute. Simply add the local translations next to the English definitions and when translations reach at least 60% completion, the language will be added to the EditGrid site.

If you’d like to learn the details of how our localization work, read the Methodology section of our Localization Project page or if you’d like to use a similar localization engine, you’ll need to sign up to our service and dive into our API and you’ll be able to setup the same collaborative translation environment.

If your local language is not available for translation and would like to begin translating EditGrid to your language, let us know by sending an email to cs@editgrid.com.

Aside from the fun with our lunch expense spreadsheet, we do use EditGrid for some actual business work here in the office. One of our business uses is our customer service log, which tracks users and customers feedback, issues and requests. This is the simplest use of the spreadsheet, there aren’t any calculations and it was strictly created for the customer service representatives to collaborate on.

Customer service is important at any onilne services and it’s no different at EditGrid. We collect everything the visitors and users throw at us through emails and our support forum.

Our customer service team, including myself, uses a shared spreadsheet and are able to edit records without affecting one another. Our spreadsheet introduces a different approach to logging user issues compared to using standard web form that majority of customer service department use in their company’s intranet. The team have found this to be very useful and with EditGrid Finder, we are able to search for past issues, requests and feedback as well.

This could be a perfect solution for those who are seeking to log their user feedback but are on a budget or without sufficient resources to develop their own in-house customer log solution.

To start our series of our own use cases, I’d like to introduce a fun way we do things at EditGrid.

After joining EditGrid couple months back, I’ve been having lunch with other the team members almost everyday and have found out they have created a spreadsheet to track everyone’s lunch expenses. It’s quite simple really, one person pays the entire bill and afterwards, back at the office, those who attended will edit the lunch expense spreadsheet with the price of their lunch into a cell under their name for that particular date.

There’s no difference in how much an individual spend, the spreadsheet takes into account the individual cost, so splurge all you want or be frugal as you like and the system will calculate the individual’s cost and ranks them amongst our team. The person having the highest negative balance will be the one responsible for paying the bill. There have been occasions where we use the iPhone on location to check who the responsible person is. There’s really no escaping and no free lunch here!

I’m sure there are similar cases out there but I am guessing it’s through sending emails, modifying the spreadsheet in a shared drive or playing hot potato with the spreadsheet in an email attachment. But, if you have done something similar in EditGrid, we do encourage you to share your story with us!

Sure, this might not seem to be the most productive but it’s fun and convenient and it illustrates a lot of what EditGrid offers, collaboration, calculations and mobility. Now, there’s no more messing around with looking for change and the countless number of IOUs, which sometimes goes forgotten.

Popular tech blogs, Techcrunch, Read/WriteWeb, GigaOM and VentureBeat have organized Crunchies 2007 award, their first annual competition and award ceremony.

Head over to nominate EditGrid for Best International Startup and other categories you see fit, even Best Enterprise Startup. Nomination runs through midnight PST December 12, 2007. So hurry up and click over to nominate!

We’d like to know how our personal and organization users are using our service, no matter how simple, complex, creative or even quirky your spreadsheets are, we’d like to hear about it.

We’ll share with you guys and introduce a series of own company use cases and go into a little details about them. We have got a wide variety of simple, fun and complex uses of our spreadsheets, that works wonders for us.

So, follow us over the next few days to learn how we put EditGrid into good use and how you can do the same. We’ve got some great uses in human resources, customer service and even in our production site.

If you have your own use cases you want to share, please let us know by leaving a comment or if you’d like, email them to me directly, angus AT editgrid DOT com.