While Google is competing with Microsoft’s products online, Zoho is competing with Google’s offerings and is raising the ante. Zoho already has Zoho Writer (word processing online) and Zoho Sheets (spreadsheet online).
But Zoho also offers a PowerPoint competitor: Zoho Show and a OneNote competitor: Zoho Notes (coming in March).
Zoho is also increasing the buy in with products such as…a customer relationship management product, a project management program, a “virtual office” solution, a calendar and email program, a wiki and an online database application.
For small business owners, this may be just the ticket to lowering the cost of software. And for those considering the launch of an online business, this may lower the cost for startup. For anyone collaborating across geographic boundaries, this is another way online work can lighten the load.
And isn’t it nice to have options?
An alternate solution to Zoho and Google that focuses more on transcription and less on an online copy/paste board is ayenotes for taking notes line. You can separate the different lists by tags and the site filters and retrieves extremely fast thanks to a near 100% AJAX solution.
Ayenotes claim to fame is absurdly quick, barebones data entry. Its key feature is that it provides clips for frequently used strings. These can be templates you type, terms you use (action items, research, etc.), or it can be programmer-esque things like HTML and Markdown.
The site also autosaves the work and provides keystroke commands. If you have the site remember your login, every time you go to http://www.ayenotes.com to take notes online you are dropped right into the new note screen. To get your data out, you can email or download the note in multimarkdown format.
It’s really slick – I even use it to take meeting notes and find myself creating templates for all sorts.
Thanks for the heads-up, Greg. I’ll have to go check this out.