Cool Lunar Challenge

X Prize Foundation and Google are sponsoring a private race to the Moon. According to their website:

"The Google Lunar X PRIZE seeks to create a global private race to the Moon that excites and involves people around the world and, accelerates space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. The use of space has dramatically enhanced the quality of life and may ultimately lead to solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on earth – energy independence and climate change."

This is a quite interesting challenge. NASA, ESA and all the others space agencies prepare yourselves for private competitors!

Cool Online CRM Webapps

Being a CRM enthusiast I am curious about everything that is CRM related. Nowadays every piece of software is going towards the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach. So it was no surprise for me when Microsoft announced they will directly offer their Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a service (SaaS). As far as I know Salesforce works just like that and now it will be followed by Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I don't know if Siebel is going this way or not. They play in a different league, at least for now.

But what has surprised me the most was these three cool CRM webapps that I have found: Zoho CRM, Highrise and Etelos CRM. From the three I have to say that for me the only one that can be called a true CRM is Zoho CRM because it has a lot of features that one expects to found in a CRM application (Sales & Marketing, Inventory Management, Customer Support & Service, Reports & Dashboards, Outlook Plugin). And guess what? The first three users are free and you only have to pay from the 4th user and up. I think this is a great marketing move from Zoho.

Highrise tracks contacts, communications, tasks and calendar and its design is really very stylish and user friendly (as I see it).

I have to be honest, I didn't explore Etelos CRM but I took a pick at their website and I found the most interesting feature about this wannabe CRM: iGoogle integration. They also integrate it with Windows Live. This is a very cool feature because I'm still expecting for Google to come up with a real contact management tool (perhaps when it integrates Gmail with orkut). Unfortunetly Google hasn't decided to come up with a CRM tool from their own. It would fit the Google Apps portfolio for sure!

Cool Google Earth Easter Egg: Flight Simulator

Yes, it's true that Google introduced a simple flight simulator with Google Earth 4.2 release. You can read about here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-earth-easter-egg-flight.html. Have fun and be careful or you'll crash the plane!

Cool Google Docs & Spreadsheets Alternatives

I have been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets for a while but I think it lacks a lot of features and it's quite slow. I recognize though that it's great for real-time online collaboration. There is still a lot of work to be done so I can forget MS Office or OpenOffice office suites.

One of these days I decided to try Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet and I was very impressed about it. It offers more features than Google Docs & Spreadsheets and it has a MS Office like environment with which I felt very familiarized. Now check this out: they have this Zoho plugin for MSOffice that lets you open your Zoho-online-stored documents inside MSOffice Word and Excel! And the changes you make while using MSOffice are reflected to your Zoho-online-stored documents. That is great and it actually worked because I have tried it!

When I thought I had seen them all I found ThinkFree. Their slogan or perhaps their vision goes like this: "the best online office on earth". It sounded promising and I signed up to try it. I chose to create a new word document and when I realized I thought I was inside MSOffice Word because the webapp interface was just like it! Remarkable stuff! However while using Thinkfree dashboard (folders and files management) I found some glitches which help me remind they are still offering their online office suite under beta stage.