Right after David wrote that EditGrid is no longer under-the-radar, we have received another accolade. EditGrid is selected by Rafe Needleman et al as one of the Webware 100 Finalists. We are in the Productivity category among many other great webwares.And that’s not the end of story – voting has just commenced. Voting closes on 11th June, and on 18th June the top 10 webwares in the 10 categories will be announced as winners of the Webware 100 contest. Let’s all vote for your favourite productivity webware now!

David and I will be attending the upcoming Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters conference on 23rd March (that’s this Friday!) in Mountain View, CA. We are excited by the prospect of meeting new partners and customers in the one-day conference.

Drop me a note if you are attending the conference as well! We’d be thrilled to meet you out there.

Nielson//NetRatings released a report (PDF) on 20th February which concluded that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has dominated the online productivity tool market. According to the report, Google D&S attracted 445,762 unique visitors in October 2006, which amounts to 92% of unique visitors in the market. The remaining 8% market share is shared by other players in the market, EditGrid included. The news was quickly picked up by the blogosphere at large on the eve of the official announcement of Google Apps + Google D&S integration and its subsequent spins.

Our internal statistics, however, paint a rather different picture. As you can see in the following chart…

… EditGrid was visited by 56,944 — 70,092 unique visitors over the same period, amounting to around 1/6 of Google D&S’s figure in December 2006. That alone makes up 14% of a market comprising only EditGrid and Google D&S — and needless to say there are a few more out there. Furthermore, while Google D&S’s market share has largely flattened out, EditGrid’s market share has been on the rise in 2006 Q4. It’s also of note that EditGrid’s trend of growth in December 2006 was in fact cut short by the Taiwan earthquake aftermaths.

Other stats show that we do lose out to Google D&S on average visit duration. EditGrid’s 2006 average…

… of 586 s (or roughly 9.76 min) per visit falls slightly behind Google D&S’s October 2006 figure at 10 minutes. Having said that, both figures are still far from impressive — an average productivity tool user would stay on the application for far longer than 10 or even 20 minutes. This is something that both Google D&S and EditGrid will have to work on.

I’m not suggesting that the Nielson//NetRatings figures are unreliable — the two sets of statistics may be compiled on different basis that makes it difficult to compare likes with likes and, after all, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics — but am merely providing some perspective on this piece of news. It is good news to the whole market that online productivity applications are gaining traction. It is, however, pre-mature to jump to the conclusion that Google D&S is the undisputed champion in a sure and settled contest. It’s still early stage and everyone is playing catch up to the desktop giant(s). The race is on — and wide open.

In this spirit we are making available more stats from EditGrid for public inspection. In a typical “eat our dogfood” move I’ve compiled selected statistics onto an online spreadsheet (some of which courtesy of Alexa and Quantcast). I hereby call for our partners and competitors in this field to do the same and publish comparable statistics. Google D&S’s statistics, if available, may still dwarf our statistics combined — yet I’m confident that the competition is nowhere near as one-sided as has been depicted elsewhere.

And, lastly… a belated Kung Hei Fat Choy to you all!

Update (2007-03-02): Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux apparently got my message and published comparable statistics from the ThinkFree and Zoho online office suites. These re-enforced our message — the market is still wide open and up for grabs.

More Update (2007-03-06): With kind permission from Ismael I’ve updated the statistics comparison spreadsheet to include the ThinkFree and Zoho figures.

Quoting ecmanaut:

“EditGrid does lots of things right, and in great style. They even care about making your URLs look good. Their developer interfaces are paid equal amounts of love and attention as are their user interfaces, which in this case is great praise for both.”

This is where work satisfaction comes from! We are so pleased to hear users’ response like that. Especially when this highlights a lot of our efforts that may have gone unnoticed.

We have spent lots of efforts in making EditGrid developer-friendly. We are no big brand - not yet anyway - and therefore the only way to get developers’ attention is to make good stuffs for them. And that’s why it’s particularly pleasing to get some praise on this front. Thank you. Thank you so much.

At the same time we feel ashamed. We remember our long to-do list with many more interesting and useful features in store but not yet put into reality. We are not there yet. There’s still a lot to do. Thanks ecmanaut for his compliments and reminder.

Re: full support of JSONP as recommended by ecmanaut. It is issue #6170 on our issue list. We’ll get that done soon.

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.

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!

Yesterday the founders of iRows announced that they’ll be joining Google and that the iRows site will be shut down on 31st December, confirming the Techcrunch story two days ago. Here’s the related story on Techcrunch.

iRows was launched in February 2006, two months before EditGrid’s first Public Beta, and has been a strong player in the new-and-emerging arena of online spreadsheets. It’s the first one to support sorting, charting among other features that have since become a must for all online spreadsheets. Many of our features were planned and developed with a strong if subconscious driving force in our mind: we have to better iRows in this. It’s a tough race, intense but dignified — we have never badmouthed them in private and, as far as we are concerned, neither have they. And it’s a race that we’ve been gaining the upper hand lately, according to this comparison spreadsheet by our user siulung. We believe that competition is good to users and will drive everyone forward, and so it’s proved.

We feel deeply about iRows’ termination at the frontline. Where will this leave EditGrid? We’ll continue to stay our course — becoming the best online spreadsheet around while being inter-operable with other great applications on the web and extensible by the world’s developers. We do not fear competition because EditGrid grows better with it.

Salute to iRows (2006 - 2006). Best of luck to Itai and Yoah.

P.S. If you used to be an iRows user, you can switch to EditGrid by exporting your iRows spreadsheets into .xls format and then uploading them into your EditGrid account. Unfortunately the charts on iRows aren’t preserved in the exporting step.

Tonight was so excited. I think I don’t have to write too much. See below a screen capture from the development version I’m currently working on:

But we can’t be TOO excited at the moment, coz we still have quite a lot of functions to build before the feature is of production grade.

Trust me, we’ll work very very hard on it.