Google, Writely and Web 2.0 Applications

The Web search giant last Thursday confirmed it had bought Upstartle, which produces the hosted word-processing service Writely.

Though a small purchase--Upstartle employed only a handful of people--Google's move is significant because it further highlights the company's interest in Web-based productivity applications, which could be considered an online alternative to Microsoft's dominant Office desktop software.

Yet from this blog, we have a set of Web 2.0 applications:

• Online Calendars: One of the more active areas, with offerings from 30 Boxes, CalendarHub, Trumba, Joyent, Kiko, Planzo and Spongecell.

• Productivity application suites: Full-blown applications bundles offered by the likes of HyperOffice, gOffice and ThinkFree.

• E-mail and collaboration: Examples include Goowy, Zimbra, Meebo (Web-based instant messaging) and Jotspot (hosted Wikis).

• Project management and personal organizers: AirSet, 37Signals.com, Zohoplanner and Stikipad.

• Multimedia social software: Includes sites like the popular Flickr photo sharing service, Riya (photo search), You Tube (video sharing) and Podbop (music podcasting).

Architecture of a Dashboard

Dashboard means more than the simply integration of a myriad of reports, graphics, performance ratio etc, it is a very complicated process. Mr. Britton Manasco in his excellent blog Intelligence Economy.com presents us a Architecture of a Performance DashBoard. It's an interesting point of view that he got from Wayne Eckerson, director of Research and Services for the Data Warehousing Institute. Let me point out some of his thoughts:

...multiple layers in a performance management system:

• Monitoring layer -- uses dashboards, scorecards or alerts to notify users of material changes in the performance of processes and activities.

• Analysis layer -- lets users drill down into exception conditions and explore a problem's root cause using multidimensional analysis.

• Reporting layer -- provides users with detailed operational data (such as a list of defective parts and the customers who received them) so they can take prompt action.

• Planning layer -- lets managers employ the output of their analyses to create plans, models and scenarios, which are then fed back into the monitoring layer and encoded as targets and thresholds