Here is what we have to kick start 2008. We name this the Crunchies Special release to celebrate EditGrid being nominated as one of the finalist of the Crunchies Best Enterprise Startup Award.

We’ve 2 new features in this release.

Mashup Function: Image(). Online spreadsheet is interesting because it has more flexibilities to interact with the world of web services. The “Image()” function fetches live images/charts from other web services into a spreadsheet cell. The function can be used to fetch charts dynamically based on values stored in cells, I’ve made a template for you to try it now!

Charts from Alexa, Compete, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, etc. etc. can be fetched dynamically into cells, providing an easy way for user to aggegrate and interact with these content. With this function, users can also create in-cell charts with Google Chart’s API.

Merge Cells! That’s right! It’s finally here. In our first release of 2008, the long awaited Merge Cell feature is out the development doors and into our users’ hands. It’s been a long time coming and we are estatic that we are able to offer this feature as we know this what you all have been looking for. So, why did it take so long? We already have a text overflow feature that serves 80% of the purpose, also we are committed to quality and do our very best to separate ourselves from others.

This release also include the 2 new integrations:

EditGrid Plugin for Confluence. EditGrid partners with Atlassian to offer EditGrid as the default plugin for Confluence hosted customers.

EditGrid App for Facebook. If you are using both EditGrid and Facebook. I highly recommend you to use EditGrid App on facebook to enjoy the integrated sharing and collaboration experience.

These represents EditGrid’s continous effort to reach out more users through integrating with enterprise and social platforms. Details of these integrations will be covered in seperate blog posts.

As with any updates or releases, we’d love to hear what you think and if you have encountered any issues or pesky bugs with this month’s release or with our service in general, please send an email to us, with the issues you are having or report them at our support forums.

For the complete list and details of the new features, enhancements and bug fixes, head over to our Change Log or better yet, sign in and give them a try.

Look for more to come in 2008!

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!

Well, almost. Thanks to Compete and subsequent coverage from TechCrunch we are able, for the first time, to perform apple-to-apple usage comparison with Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheet. This was not possible in our previous attempt because traffic breakdowns on docs.google.com and zoho.com were not available to the general public.

So, how does EditGrid stand among Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheet, the three major player in this sector to date?

Not bad, though still lots of room for improvement. In a typical eat-our-own-dogfood fashion I have, once again, plotted the statistics on an online spreadsheet on EditGrid. One of the most important findings is that EditGrid stands way above Zoho Sheet in terms of unique visitors, and actually outscores Zoho Sheet in terms of pageviews by more than twofold. EditGrid also compares favourably with its partner ThinkFree Office, doing better in all three metrics despite ThinkFree having the complete suite. Surely there’s still some way to go before EditGrid can catch up on Google Spreadsheets, given its platform strategy with its Gmail integration, yet the statistics have also shown that EditGrid has cemented its place as the second most popular online spreadsheet in the market.

How accurate is this picture, though? As with the last publicly available statistics on Google Docs from Nielson//NetRatings (link to PDF here), the Compete statistics have serious limitations — most importantly it covers only the US market, where Google is the strongest. EditGrid (and, to a certain extent, Zoho and ThinkFree) targets a worldwide market and do indeed have a broad user base from all over the world, having seen the first million-view financial spreadsheet from Hongkong. Our own statistics on Google Analytics back up this claim: in terms of both unique visitors and pageviews, we boast a much better figure than those on Compete.

(NB: the November 2007 statistics are not complete as data from 2007-11-01 to 2007-11-13 are not counted. See the “Notes” sheet for details.)

Being second in market is not something that we are proud of. We will continue to improve the product and drive real use-cases to make EditGrid the most popular online spreadsheet despite Google’s platform effect. It’s hard, but doable. And we’d be interested to know if we remove “Google” from Google Spreadsheets, and let user choose purely from the product quality standpoint, what would these figures have become.

We at the EditGrid Team believe that by keep delivering more power to our users, we are making our technology potentially disruptive.

When people think of compatibility across spreadsheet applications, people tend to think of fidelity — whether the spreadsheet file exported from one application can be imported into another application without loss of quality or detail. While EditGrid has been doing pretty well in this arena, we are not satisfied with this — exporting spreadsheet data from EditGrid into a file means that the data have become “offline”. It means that the user loses something — the ability to get real-time updated data and collaborate with each other online — that the user is entitled to on EditGrid.

With this vision in mind we are pleased to announce the launch of EditGrid Excel Plus, a plugin for Microsoft Excel™ that brings the power of EditGrid to the most popular desktop spreadsheet application, in private beta. After installing EditGrid Excel Plus onto your copy of Microsoft Excel, you’ll be able to retrieve data from an EditGrid spreadsheet into your Excel workbook — with RTU — as well as to publish data from your Excel workbook to your EditGrid spreadsheet with one click. You can sign up for the private beta programme now.

This plugin opens up infinite possibilities not available to Excel users before. Combined with EditGrid’s remote data and capability to write data into an EditGrid spreadsheet through the EditGrid API, EditGrid Excel Plus brings live data from the Internet to your desktop. EditGrid powers up Excel.

“The capability to push data from EditGrid to Excel in real-time is amazing,” said Stefan Reichenbach, head of Environmental Markets at Reuters. “We can already see a number of real-life applications in the industry. EditGrid continues to lead the way forward on how online spreadsheets can be useful in our day-to-day operations.”

The development of EditGrid Excel Plus is sponsored by Reuters and ICAP and we are grateful for their sponsorship.

Next up: Excel-to-Excel RTU.

Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

After a busy week of launching our new website and showcasing iPhone edition beta at the Office 2.0 Conference, here comes our September release. In this release, we introduce the enhanced HTML Export.

Some of our users make use of EditGrid’s HTML Export to publish charts, tables, or schedules on the web. In September release, we have brought you an enhanced HTML Export to impress your visitors.

New posting options : Sorting and Filtering

When you are publishing a large spreadsheet with numerous rows of data to the web, it would be helpful to sort and filter the information to locate what you are looking for. For example, if you have a list containing contacts of all offices, you can now enable the filtering function (Publish > Post to Blog / Webpage > Posting option > Enable filtering) to further trim down the contact list by location (New York) and departments:

Posting Options : “Enable filtering” and “Enable sorting by column”

You can also sort the spreadsheet alphabetically, by using the sorting function (Publish > Post to Blog / Webpage > Posting option > Enable sorting by column):

You can now publish a multi-page spreadsheet by Posting Option > click the box next to “all sheet”. You can freely switch between different spreadsheets by tabs, like this:

Alternatively, you may choose to add “.html” at the end of the spreadsheet permalink to perform HTML export.

There is a Print-friendly button locates right on the black bar, you can preview and print all the spreadsheets in order, so as your blog readers!

iPhone Edition beta

We welcome you to visit our iPhone page to read about the features, screenshots and get some spreadsheet templates. Pocket your spreadsheets now!

The new-look EditGrid Website

If you come here through our home page, you will notice something is different - The EditGrid website is redesigned! To make our website more enterprise-focus and informative, we add many new sections for new and existing users : You can take a feature tour to get the most out of EditGrid, invite your friends to the tutorial to try our product, and take away any business templates for your inspirations.

What do you think about our new home page? Feel free to tell us here!

With Multi-Touch support, full-fledged RTU and ultra-cool iPhone-style look-and-feel, the EditGrid iPhone Edition beta brings spreadsheets to your pocket and make them native to your iPhone and iPod touch user interface. We believe that the iPhone is taking mobile productivity to the next level, and we are proud to be leading the way in the spreadsheet domain.

Learn more about the iPhone Edition now, or launch the iPhone Edition on your iPhone right away.

We are glad to be one of the winners of this year’s Red Herring 100 Asia Awards. The award recognises our outstanding performance in terms of product innovation, quality of management, business strategy as well as financial performance.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Red Herring, it is a prestigious investor-oriented technology magazine. Each year, its editorial team award the top 100 new and innovative technology companies in Asia, selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants based in 16 countries/regions including China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam. Click here for the complete list of winners.

On another note, we have some really exciting news for you next week during the Office 2.0 Conference. Stay tuned!