It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on what’s been keeping us busy here at EditGrid. Today we’re excited to announce a new core feature for the EditGrid platform: Data Functions. But first a little background…

The Competitive World of Spreadsheets

EditGrid has some tough competition. In fact, we often hear from friends how impressed they are with EditGrid’s product usually followed by a comment about how incredibly difficult it must be to compete with Microsoft and Google in this market segment. We’re well aware of the challenges we face. Between Microsoft’s dominant desktop productivity suite, Google’s brand and web presence to help it grow its web-based suite, and the incredible pool of resources at both companies, to say that EditGrid is an underdog would definitely be an understatement! Nonetheless, the strength of our competition has forced us to stay focused and relentlessly work on improving our product and user experience. As part of our drive to compete in this market we’ve decided to focus on data as a way to help differentiate us from our competitors and help our users create more and better spreadsheet content.

Data and Spreadsheets On Demand

EditGrid has come a long way in the last year and half. Today we offer a critical mass of spreadsheet features such as functions, formatting, and shortcut keys (sorry, no pivot tables just yet!), which make EditGrid as usable as your desktop spreadsheet. In addition, we’ve added a critical mass of web features such as sharing, collaboration, and publishing, which allow EditGrid to serve new use cases for spreadsheets on the web. Today we are taking our first step towards delivering a critical mass of data as well.

To get things started, we’ve made available stock and news data from Reuters, and partnered with StrikeIron and Xignite to expose some of their API data and services in EditGrid. In total we’re launching with 41 functions in 7 categories - all of which you can use to pull live data directly into your spreadsheet for further analysis or presentation. See the complete list at the bottom.

By delivering both data and spreadsheets on demand, we can significantly enhance the value of our standalone spreadsheet component. Easy access to live and automatic data will help our users create compelling spreadsheet content that will motivate increased sharing and collaboration in EditGrid. With today’s release it’s now possible for our users to create advanced valuation models and summary sheets for stocks, or to analyze trends in web startup funding and traffic, to name just a few of the possibilities. Of course, we’ll continue to add more and more data to EditGrid and are confident that in both the near and long term there will be exciting developments on this front. Be sure to drop by our forum to tell us what data you want as well as to share your work with others.

Here are a few examples:

Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation.

Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors.

Enjoy!

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!

In 2006, we brought EditGrid to life. In 2007, we will continue to innovate in the online spreadsheet domain.

What can you expect from us? Hmm… a lot.

Here’s an outline of our vision for 2007. The following diagram is what we think the current situation of enterprise software market is (Inspired by Rod Boothby).

Large vendors are still dominating a multi-billion market of software spending where the needs are sophisticated and the stake is high. Software-as-a-Service (”SaaS”) is emerging in the form of web apps, grasping a sizable market share. If we telescope into the complete landscape of enterprise software needs, we can see that a large chunk of business needs is still being served by millions of spreadsheets built by the users themselves. A good deal of simple and specific needs are, well, unserved.

What do the vast amount of users in this long tail really need? They need, first of all, simplicity. The conventional paradigm of “application + database” combo is an overkill. In most cases, what is required is simply a user-interface to manipulate structured or semi-structured data — preferrably with primitive programming support.

The other major need in the long tail is collaboration. The collaborative spreadsheet problem, as we name it, is a common phenomenon. Sending spreadsheets by email and then manually merge different sources into the “final version” is too painful a process to go through — but it was a must for multi-user collaboration.

We see high potential in the field of online spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are simple and flexible. A spreadsheet application is almost the simplest way you can get to manage structured data. It is easy to use and learn. It can even manage semi-structured data. What’s more, it supports a good degree of programmability through formula and functions.

And then you add the missing piece, online collaboration. This compliments the traditional spreadsheet’s single biggest failure, its largely single-user mode of operation. With online collaboration features, spreadsheets can easily become the medium of choice for many kinds of data management and manipulation.

This is what we think future landscape will look like.

EditGrid is not there yet. We’re still assembling a few missing pieces. This is our innovation focus in 2007.

Stay tuned.

Many people use web spreadsheets as if using their desktop counterparts: to keep contacts, track progress, book-keeping, etc., with the exception that they’re more accessible. However, with the help of a technology called XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations), web spreadsheets can really be something out of your imagination.

XSLT is a technology dating back to the late 90’s. According to the specification, it is “a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents”. But it has never been limited to generate XML documents only. At least from the examples given, it can be used to generate VRML documents which is non-XML.

So, how is the whole thing related to web spreadsheets?

Spreadsheet is basically a two-dimensional array of data, which can be represented in XML easily (example here: [orig] [XML]). One can create or download an XSLT stylesheet and transform the data into a format that is readable by other computer programs. That could be a mass-mailing engine reading vCal feeds, FireFox reading RSS live bookmarks, or Google Calendar reading iCal files. If you are a GIS zealot, you may be interested plotting spots and paths onto Google Maps. With the multi-user, live editing capability of web spreadsheets, you now have a collaborative, live data backend on the web for many different kinds of services.

Following are some examples can be created by web spreadsheet plus XSLT, can you think more?

1. KML for Google Maps and Google Earth

- It is how GIS zealots using EditGrid!

Valery’s Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/user/valery35/Locations

XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Locations.paths.kml.xsl

KML file: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Locations.paths.kml

Here is what you get on Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/…/Locations.paths.kml

2. iCal for Apple iCal

- Import spreadsheet to calendar programs - besides Apple iCal, it also works with MS Outlook/ Google Calendar and Mozilla Calendar!

Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule

XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics.xsl

ICS file: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics

Result on Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/…/EditGrid_Release_Schedule.ics

3. RSS Live Bookmark for Mozilla FireFox

- With this, together with remote data fetch, all data on web can be read by RSS…

Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Bookmark

XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Bookmark.rss.xsl

Result in Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader/…/Bookmark.rss

4. Music Playlist for different music players

- Which player you’re using?

Playlist spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs

For Winamp, XMMS, Realplayer and Window Media Player - Try this:

XSLT Stylesheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs.m3u.xsl

Result: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Songs.m3u (P.S. M3U also support many other different players)

For other playlist formats, like M3U Ext., PLS, SMIL and XSPF, goes here and you will found all these formats available.

5. FusionCharts

- Well, we never limit your choice to create charts

Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Oil_Production

XSLT Spreadsheet: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Demo_of_My_Data_Format

Result: http://www.editgrid.com/doc/xslt/Oil_Production/World!E1?content-type=text/html

Let see how our users use EditGrid with XSLT, with their expert knowledge + imagination, here are some examples of what happening in EditGrid commuity — showing the unlimited possibility:

http://bbs.keyhole.com/…Number=593848

http://semant.blogspot.com/../adding-triples-using-editgrid.html

http://bbs.keyhole.com/…/Main/609661/

http://www.digitalgeography.co.uk/…the-possibilities-are-endless/

Two weeks ago, Seth Godin asked for a websheet that could take a list of book titles and return the cover art from Amazon. The post also mentioned EditGrid.

Today, I’ve got some free time to re-visit this blog post. Is this possible? I asked one of my colleagues. “Give me an hour”, my colleague replied.

And here is what I have from my colleague. The resulting bookshelf is here:

And the spreadsheet:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf

And the XSL to transform the data in spreadsheet into the bookshelf:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.covers.html.xsl

Right! This is a good showcase of EditGrid’s “My Data Format” (MDF) feature, which has been available since Public Beta 11 released in late August. If you would like to create your own bookshelf, follow these steps:

1. Login with your EditGrid a/c. (Register if you don’t have one.)
2. Click the following link to clone the spreadsheet. The XSL will be copied as well.

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/My_Bookshelf.copy

3. Save it and input your set of information (you’ll need to give the cloned spreadsheet a name).
4. Your bookshelf is now ready via your spreadsheet’s permalink + “.covers.html”.

Yes, that’s how simple it is! You can easily mashup other web services using EditGrid as the data storage and transformation medium. EditGrid’s MDF has allowed a group of expert users to generate KML files for Google Earth.

MDF enables innovation on EditGrid. And there’ll be more!

P.S.

• We use Amazon’s web service to get the book cover image, so we add a link to link to the book in Amazon. Fair deal, right?
• If you would like to use a serious personal bookshelf service, we recommend Anobii, another Hongkong-based Web 2.0 service.

As anticipated, Google released its own spreadsheet. Our target is to do a web spreadsheet better than Google. Google’s size and innovative workforce allows it to do and excel in many things. While we at EditGrid put in all our passion and innovation here, the real competition is about to begin.

Hi, Microsoft, when will you join the party as well?

I posted our URL to Reddit, that is.

After 3 private releases, we launched EditGrid’s Public Beta 1 on 7th April. Our marketing strategy then was to “leak” it to those who just might be interested. We used Technorati to search for some relevant blogs and asked the blog owner to take a look at EditGrid by posting a comment. This is when Omar wrote the first review on EditGrid in the whole blogosphere.

On 21st April, we launched EditGrid Public Beta 2. We have longed for sharing EditGrid onto our favourite sites with a wider audience. We would probably have done it one more release later — but then I saw a good opportunity to do this a bit earlier, probably too good to let it pass by.

I read a post at Reddit titled “The Top “Web 2.0″ Startups: You Decide (Paul Graham)” on 24th April calling for voting of the most admired Web 2.0 startup at a subreddit. At that time, there were less than 25 companies posted. By natural instinct, I immediately posted EditGrid to there. Indeed I was probably too excited by the posting — I even got the URL wrong! Fortunately the beauty of Web 2.0 bailed us out this time — almost immediately after my post and before I realised the error, another redditer, konrad_ has already re-posted our site with the URL corrected. So I simply deleted my entry and gave my vote to konrad_’s post.

Thanks to early mover advantage, our post stayed on the first page of web2.reddit.com for about a day and it has generated a small avalanche effect. During this short period of time, our site was spread to del.icio.us, Emily Chang’s eHub, StumbleUpon.com, diggdot.us, popurls.com, weblinks.ru, bloglines.com, netvibes.com, www.szanalmas.hu, etc..

Within 3 days, we have attracted ~5,000 unique visitors, ~20 blog mentions and ~300 new users. The result may be far from impressive, but to us it is a pretty encouraging first step.

Here, we would like to sincerely thank:

• Reddit for such an excellent product launch platform.
• konrad_ (a redditer) for correcting the link for us.
• Users who helped spreading EditGrid to other sites.
• Omar for his 1st and 2nd review.
• Saul Weiner for his encouraging blog post and all other bloggers who mentioned us.
• Last but definitely not least, users who tried EditGrid and gave us comments.

We promise a better and better EditGrid! You make us work a lot harder.

Why spreadsheets on-the-web? We keep asking ourselves.

Is “Access, Collaborate, Share” a good enough answer already? No, we are not satisfied with this.

We think EditGrid can evolve into 3 major applications:

* A platform for SME applications

When an SME uses and adopts IT in her operation, many a time an spreadsheet application, e.g. MS Excel, would suffice — after all, a spreadsheet is a sufficiently handy and easy-to-learn interface for storing and manipulating data. But desktop applications are rather restrictive due to their handicapped collaboration capability. The more enlightened business owners may then look into webapps for solution, only to find that most of them are rather inflexible. There is also a big gap between MS Excel and webapps in terms of costs and user-friendliness. We believe that an online spreadsheet service is the simpliest and most effective solution to bring the best of both worlds.

* A platform of data democracy

In Wikipedia, users join the rest of the world to tie pieces together into a full picture. But there are many types of data which is not “wikipediable”, from comparing mobile phones to real-time tracking of where avian flu-infected birds are found dead. We believe quality, useful content can evolve. EditGrid can complement Wikipedia is this arena.

* A data market

Data presented in reports are always subject to interpretation. We may doubt why data should be interpreted this way and not the other. We believe we have the right to our own data interpretation. So some of us would like data to be available in its raw format so that we can interpret it ourselves, and compile the statistics and graphs that fits better to our interpretation. EditGrid can become a channel for sales and a platform to transform raw data into information meaningful to us.

The vision is big. We are working.