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.

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.

Since joining EditGrid last week, I’ve been busy on the look out of new buzz and catching up on past buzz.. There’s been three podcasts this month that mentions EditGrid and it’s exciting that people are talking and using our service and with such positive reviews.

MacBreak Weekly 60 (begins at ~58:30), hosted by Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Scott Bourne, Andy Ihnatko, and Chris Breen. Andy Ihnatko talks about EditGrid and more specifically about our really cool iPhone version.

SMARTBoard Lesson Podcast #96 (begins at ~4:10), hosted by Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger. Joan introduces EditGrid to her listeners and Ben dives in with a brief comparison between us and Google Docs and iPhone version.

On The Pod (begins at ~37:20), hosted by Duncan Riley. Duncan talks with Nick Hodge of Microsoft and Nick admits his personal use of EditGrid. To correct Duncan, we are actually based out of Hong Kong and not Singapore.

Great podcasts and thanks MacBreak@Twit.tv, SMARTBoard and Nick for their positive feedback of our service. If you haven’t tried EditGrid yet, definitely go check it out for yourselves!

Now that I’m all caught up, we’ll be on top of things.