AllThingsD » Excel

Big Data's Usability Problem

Bill Wise — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:44:56 +0000

Sen. Lindsay Graham just told Fox News that the reason the FBI never realized that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev went to Russia in 2011 is that “when he got on the Aeroflot plane, they misspelled his name, so it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia.” Meanwhile, the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that has been a catalyst for government austerity policies worldwide since 2010 has, in fact, accidentally left out several countries’ worth of critical data in Excel.

As one blogger sums up scathingly: “One of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”

Taken together, these factors offer a critical lesson here about the power and limits of Big Data today. In both scenarios, data management tools (i.e., the FBI’s systems and Excel) were undone by fairly simple errors: In one situation, a misspelling; in another, a failure to code a spreadsheet properly. And in both scenarios, the results were dire — an awful tragedy, and a potentially misdirected government economic policy in the midst of a recession.

As someone who spends day and night thinking through data management and workflow, these two stories lead me to three observations:

As a society, we’re hugely reliant on data management platforms for our most critical information.
Our core data platforms often aren’t set up to handle human error, from basic coding flaws to spelling mistakes.
The wealth of data in our data tools can mask that human error. Consider: The Reinhart-Rogoff study examined “new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years” with “over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems, institutions, exchange rate arrangements, and historic circumstances.”

In such a wide sea of data, a few lines of code can be very easy to overlook, even if they have strong ramifications for analysis.

There are lots of things to take away from these three points, but I’ll just focus on one: The promise of Big Data is that it can make everyday processes — from critical analyses to mundane tasks — work smarter through data intelligence. Ultimately, all that data management translates into an economy and society that lets machines handle the minutiae as humans think through the larger picture.

To a large extent, that vision is already here. But at the same time, more human/data interaction means a lot more room for error (and inefficiency) around increasingly critical data sets — which, as we’ve seen, can have very serious results. Which means that, if we want to make the reality of Big Data match the dream, we need to spend serious time around providing usability that guides human users in the best way to engage with the data, and automation that takes human interaction (and human error) out of the picture for a lot of the basic calculations and tasks — and for some of the complicated ones, too.

If Big Data can’t fit hand-in-glove with usability and workflow, a lot of the promise of big data will be empty data crunching. That’s not just a problem for getting where we want to be in the evolution of computing. It’s a situation that can lead to bad data management — which translates into bad economics and, sometimes, far worse.

Bill Wise is CEO of Mediaocean. You can follow him on twitter at @billwise.

A Fresh New Office Finds a Place in the Cloud

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:02:33 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Tablets and smartphones may have taken over people’s lives, but Microsoft has managed to maintain a hold on the way many people use their PCs with one product: Trusty Microsoft Office.

Microsoft’s newest version of Office, available starting Tuesday, is a radical change from the past. For starters, Office 365 has a surprising new price model: It is available as a subscription that can automatically renew each year, if you choose. This new system constantly updates program features year round. Every time you open a program in Office, you will be running the latest version.

With Office 365, any PC can be activated or deactivated in one step.

It’s also more closely tied to the cloud, saving documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive storage system by default, so your documents and personal settings are remotely accessible. With that, Microsoft aims to stave off Office challengers like Google Drive, which gives people a way to create and store documents online, as well as share documents and edit with multiple people.

What’s more, Office 365 gives people a centralized spot online where they can manage their account, showing them where they have Office installed so they can deactivate unused computers with one click or completely cancel subscriptions. And files are still accessible to download even if subscriptions expire.

Along with these broader features, there are significant changes to Office 365’s programs, which include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher and Access. It does a nice job of bringing to the surface some features that were too far buried in menus for people to use. It also packs in many new features, some of which were made for touchscreens and new devices designed to run the touch-centric Windows 8. And Microsoft has updated its Office Web Apps, stripped-down programs that offer free editing, via a Web browser, of files stored online.

I tested Office 365 Home Premium, which costs $99 a year and can be installed on up to five computers, including Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs as well as Macs running Apple’s OS X version 10.5.8 or later. Office 365 University, which costs $80 for a four-year subscription, is available for college students, faculty and staff. Office 365 for businesses will be released on Feb. 27; subscription rates will range from $4 to $20 monthly.

Traditional, non-subscription versions of Office are available for one-time fees, including Office Home and Student 2013 ($140), Office Home and Business 2013 ($220) and Office Professional 2013 ($400). These new suites still receive security patches, as they always have, and can only be installed on one machine and upgrades require installing whole new versions. Like Office 365, these versions of Office also now save to SkyDrive by default, tying them into the cloud.

I installed Office 365 Home Premium on two devices: A Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, which had a touchscreen and was running Windows 8 Pro, and a MacBook Pro, which was running OS X version 10.8.2. I also looked at and edited documents on computers that didn’t have Office 365 installed by using Microsoft Web Apps. And I set up Office 365 on a Windows Phone to access and edit documents on the go.

The new version of Microsoft Word lets people have integrated conversations in editing comments.

To install on the Windows 8 PC, I used a product key given to me by Microsoft for pre-release testing, otherwise you would have to go to Office.com to buy a subscription and get a product key. (A free 30-day trial is available.) The Windows 8 PC install took about 20 minutes, and a helpful introduction walked me through key points of Office 365. One screen asked me, “How would you like your Office to look?” And I scrolled through a handful of patterns and chose a background that looked like rings on a tree stump.

When I installed Office 365 on the Mac, I just went online to office.com/myaccount, selected an option to sign into an existing subscription and entered my username and password. The download on the Mac took about 30 minutes and then I saw on my Mac the familiar tree-ring background. The version was Office: Mac 2011 because the new Office for Mac typically ships after the new Office for Windows.

The My Account Web page is a big plus for people who have had computers die and take copies of Office with them. Now, in one step on My Account, any PC can be deactivated and a new PC can be activated.

The cloud-based structure of Office 365 takes some adjustment, but users can still save files to the PC. In Word, when I wasn’t connected to the Internet and opened a document, I saw a notification reminding me that the version of the document I was reading was an offline copy. This notification also told me when the document was last updated and saved online. Each Office 365 account comes with 20 gigabytes of free storage, but all SkyDrive users get seven gigabytes each, so a person using Office 365 could potentially have 27GB of storage.

I enjoyed using new touch features, like five small squares on the far right of the Inbox screen in Outlook that made it a cinch to quickly sort through my inbox. These small icons enabled replying, moving, deleting, marking as unread and flagging for follow-up. I wrote this column in the new version of Word, automatically saving it to SkyDrive and easily opening and editing it on other computers and a Windows Phone.

Excel spreadsheets are now smarter than ever thanks to auto-fill features. I tested one that felt like it was reading my mind as it filled in names of people who had appeared in an earlier column because it detected the same name pattern. PowerPoint presentations now include special CliffsNotes-like tools that only the presenter can see.

Office 365 feels grown up and ready for the fast pace of the Web. It’s custom made for people who use many devices, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. If potential users can wrap their brains around its new subscription system, Microsoft has a winning program on its hands.

Email Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Interview: C.W. Anderson and Emily Bell Discuss the Future of "Post-Industrial Journalism"

Eric Johnson — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:00:41 +0000

Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

The Storage Games

Mark Davis — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:03:05 +0000

Most of the computerized data you interact with is stored in a corporate data center or the cloud, on a class of device known as enterprise storage. Their capacity is measured in petabytes, or millions of gigabytes. The number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) generated by applications from Excel to Facebook would boggle your mind.

In response, the once-lethargic $20+ billion enterprise storage industry is exhibiting unprecedented innovation. Giants like EMC and Dell are vying with, partnering with and acquiring start-ups for supremacy in a morphing landscape.

It’s a serious game. More than $3.5 billion was pumped into VC-backed storage start-ups between 2007 and 2011, with more than $1 billion in 2011 alone. And $10 billion more has been poured into M&A, with the most recent example being EMC’s $430 million purchase of a company that hasn’t finished developing an initial product. Tectonic shifts come from collisions of forces. There are three major force vectors here.

First is the demand for more scalable, instantly provisionable, faster and higher-capacity storage. Even in an anemic economy, demand for data storage grows more than 50 percent per year.

Storage in a Flash

The second driver is the widespread proliferation of flash memory. Remember when you could feel the hard drive spinning inside your iPod? Today, practically every consumer carries flash memory in his or her pocket or purse.

Flash has been around for years, but was too expensive for broad adoption. Thanks to companies like Apple, which consume enormous amounts of flash, the cost is dropping like an apple from a tree. It’s still much more expensive than rotating hard drives, but its notable physics are compelling. Solid-state flash is faster than mechanical drives, and doesn’t forget everything when the power is turned off. Perfect, right?

Flash in the Pan?

Actually, not so perfect for corporate, governmental or cloud environments. In addition to high cost, flash has some unfortunate features. For example, it wears out in the same way your favorite pair of jeans will become threadbare with use. You’ll never wear out your phone from too much texting. But in an enterprise application, the number of IOPS can be so staggering that flash has to be treated almost like a printer cartridge, a consumable.

Many companies are developing techniques to deal with flash’s inherent limitations to make it suitable for data centers. It’s a gold rush, with vast sums of capital chasing big markets. That $430 million acquisition by EMC? Yup, flash.

Why pay so much for a pre-product company? There were multiple bidders. NetApp made a rich offer, which Dell topped by a lot, which EMC topped by an equally wide margin. There will be more M&A.

Interestingly, this activity is driving breakneck commoditization. This is great for customers, but not for vendors, who will not long enjoy rapacious (oops, I meant healthy) margins on proprietary technology. Ironically, the value in flash-based systems is really in the software that wrests the value from the hardware. Everyone in the industry knows that the days of differentiated flash hardware are numbered.

When Is Storage Not Real? When It’s Virtual.

As if hot, high demand and cool flash aren’t enough, the storage games are impacted by a third force called virtualization. Virtualization has transformed computing. The leading vendor, VMware (not coincidentally, owned by storage company EMC), has built a market capitalization of roughly $40 billion. All by making fake computers.

We call them virtual machines. Your iPhone may be talking to one right now over the Internet. Their magic allows the creation of what looks like a physical computer server. A virtual machine, or VM, appears to embody central processing units, memory and communication networks like physical computers. But it’s a software abstraction. Through this prestidigitation, data centers run scores of VMs on a single server box.

Enterprises can deploy vastly more applications because virtualization from Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat and VMware saves enormously on capital and operating expenses. And provisioning is so much faster. Just a few clicks and, voila, you have a new server. By the way, you can buy server hardware from anyone. That freedom makes vendors compete harder, which you like if you run an information technology department.

What does this have to do with data storage?

Enterprise and cloud storage still live in the physical age. That is, storage system features are embedded in proprietary hardware. Want a cool software feature? You have to buy hardware to get it. Before virtualization, this was how the server industry worked. But virtualization is stressing traditional modes of delivering storage to applications. Performance problems, high costs and inflexibility cause VM users great pain on a daily basis.

Hello, Storage Hypervisor

The key enabling technology in compute virtualization is called a hypervisor. This core magic remade the server industry for the benefit of all. Until recently, there was no storage equivalent.

Now the storage industry is beginning to buzz about the concept of a storage hypervisor — the analog of the server hypervisor, but for storage. Storage hypervisors promise to increase the effective performance of hardware by an order of magnitude. By virtualizing resources to provide the administrative paradigm needed in virtualized environments — VM-centric management — they provide unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. Naturally, the ideal storage hypervisor leverages flash, just as server hypervisors unleash the power of Intel-based silicon.

Giant publicly-traded storage vendors and ambitious start-ups alike are talking up their offerings. All have differing approaches, but share the goal of giving data-center storage buyers the benefits already bestowed on server customers.

A Serious Game

Today we observe a convergence of forces transforming a multi-billion dollar market. The unending pressure for more data increases demand for high-performance flash-based storage hardware. This in turn is driving the essential requirement for virtualization of storage hardware resources. This confluence will enable vastly larger amounts of storage to be applied to every imaginable use case, all while making the economics not only affordable, but also compelling.

The winners in this game? Corporate and cloud data centers and their users. In other words, you.

Before co-founding Virsto, Mark Davis was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath, where he engineered its acquisition by Opsware (now HP).

A PC Virus on a Mac

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:23:17 +0000

I’ve just downloaded the Parallels 8 software (trying to migrate some Windows software from our family PC to my MacBook Pro). Because I am now running PC applications via Parallels 8, will I need to install and maintain antivirus software as if my MacBook Pro was a PC?

Yes, definitely, and it’s included in Parallels. Since Parallels creates a virtual Windows PC on your Mac, it can run Windows software and that includes malicious software, which is almost always written to run in Windows. So, as with any Windows PC, I strongly recommend you run security software inside the faux PC created by Parallels. This software only operates when Parallels and Windows are running.

I have a desktop and laptop, both running Windows XP and Excel 2003. I use a USB stick to move spreadsheets between the PCs so I can work on them at either computer. But now I want to purchase a new laptop running Windows 7 and Excel 2010. Will I still be able to go back and forth between my new laptop and old desktop, updating an Excel spreadsheet?

Yes. Excel 2010 can handle files created in the 2003 version. But, for the older version to handle files created in the newer one, you’ll have to install a free “compatibility pack” on your desktop. It’s available at: http://bit.ly/P8iiHG. Also, there are some steps that may be needed in Excel 2010 to properly handle files created in the 2003 version. These are outlined by Microsoft here: http://bit.ly/QxeyTr.

In your review of Parallels 8, you said it ran Windows 8 very well on your MacBook Air. What are the basic specs on that computer?

It’s the latest and greatest edition of the 13″ Air that Apple offers, but doesn’t pack the power of some other Macs, like most of the MacBook Pros. It uses the midrange Intel i5 processor, not the more potent i7. It lacks a dedicated graphics card. Though my machine has 8 gigabytes of memory, the default is 4 GB, which is what Parallels recommends, though the minimum required is 2 GB.

Google Acquires Quickoffice for Mobile Productivity Apps

Mike Isaac — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:36:49 +0000

Google on Tuesday announced that it had acquired Quickoffice, the mobile productivity software suite most popularly known for its Android and iOS document-editing applications.

“Quickoffice has a strong base of users, and we look forward to supporting them while we work on an even more seamless, intuitive and integrated experience,” Google engineering director Alan Warren wrote in a company blog post.

The software is most often seen touted on Android and iOS devices as an easy way to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents from their mobile phones. It’s unclear how Google will integrate Quickoffice into its product portfolio, but Google’s blog post hints at further Google app integration: “We’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite,” Warren wrote.

The assumption is, then, that we could see Google’s native productivity applications make their way to mobile.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Writing on the Tablet

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:03:03 +0000

I’d like to purchase a tablet for use in the classroom and group meetings. I’d like a tablet that can take written notes in PDF and PowerPoint files, has a Web-browsing experience similar to that on a laptop, and can at least open Word and Excel files. With the iPad 3’s impending release, I’m tempted to jump in but I’ve also heard there are some interesting Windows 8 and Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablets coming out later this year. What do you recommend?

I can’t make a recommendation now, since none of these tablets is out. However, I can make a few observations. Even on the current iPad, you can annotate files and take written notes in various apps. But the iPad isn’t designed at heart for freehand note-taking and annotation, and you’d have to buy an add-on stylus. Some Android devices—even without Ice Cream Sandwich—have integrated note-taking and the stylus as a core feature. The latest is the Samsung Galaxy Note, a ginormous phone that is really a small tablet. As for Windows 8, it is designed to run the full version of Office. And the preview device Microsoft has supports handwriting and has a stylus in the box.

I use Adobe Connect for online training, and want to use the iPad. I’ve been using the Adobe Connect iPad app. I find it okay but not great. I had high hopes for Online Live Desktop. I purchased the subscription and entered the Adobe Connect Meeting room without incident. When I attempted to activate the iPad camera and microphone, I couldn’t. Why?

OnLive doesn’t interact with the iPad’s native features—even the virtual keyboard. I hadn’t tried the camera or microphone, but I am not surprised you couldn’t make them work. OnLive essentially uses the iPad as a terminal for a copy of Windows that is running on a remote server. The company is working on tapping the iPhone’s native features.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

eBay Is the Most Recent Bay Area Transplant to Seek Access to Seattle's Talent Pool

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:00:23 +0000

EBay has opened up an office in the suburbs of Seattle, where it has aggressive plans to double the number the employees it has there, to 150.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance.

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

Working in Word, Excel, PowerPoint on an iPad

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:04:34 +0000

Although Apple’s popular iPad tablet has been able to replace laptops for many tasks, it isn’t a big hit with folks who’d like to use it to create or edit long Microsoft Office documents.

[ See post to watch video ]

While Microsoft has released a number of apps for the iPad, it hasn’t yet released an iPad version of Office. There are a number of valuable apps that can create or edit Office documents, such as Quickoffice Pro, Documents To Go and the iPad version of Apple’s own iWork suite. But their fidelity with Office documents created on a Windows PC or a Mac isn’t perfect.

This week, OnLive Inc., in Palo Alto, Calif., is releasing an app that brings the full, genuine Windows versions of the key Office productivity apps—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—to the iPad. And it’s free. These are the real programs. They look and work just like they do on a real Windows PC. They let you create or edit genuine Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

I’ve been testing a pre-release version of this new app, called OnLive Desktop, which the company says will be available in the next few days in Apple’s app store. More information is at desktop.onlive.com.

The OnLive Desktop app stores documents in a cloud-based repository.

My verdict is that it works, but with some caveats, limitations and rough edges. Some of these downsides are inherent in the product, while others have to do with the mismatch between the iPad’s touch interface and the fact that Office for Windows was primarily designed for a physical keyboard and mouse.

Creating or editing long documents on a tablet with a virtual on-screen keyboard is a chore, no matter what Office-type app you choose. So, although it isn’t a requirement, I strongly recommend that users of OnLive Desktop employ one of the many add-on wireless keyboards for the iPad.

OnLive Desktop is a cloud-based app. That means it doesn’t actually install Office on your iPad. It acts as a gateway to a remote server where Windows 7, and the three Office apps, are actually running. You create an account, sign in, and Windows pops up on your iPad, with icons allowing you to launch Word, Excel or PowerPoint. (There are also a few other, minor Windows programs included, like Notepad, Calculator and Paint.)

In my tests, the Office apps launched and worked smoothly and quickly, without any noticeable lag, despite the fact that they were operating remotely. Although this worked better for me on my fast home Internet connection, it also worked pretty well on a much slower hotel connection.

Like Office itself, the documents you create or modify don’t live on the iPad. Instead, they go to a cloud-based repository, a sort of virtual hard disk. When you sign into OnLive Desktop, you see your documents in the standard Windows documents folder, which is actually on the remote server. The company says that this document storage won’t be available until a few days after the app becomes available.

To get files into and out of OnLive Desktop, you log in to a Web site on your PC or Mac, where you see all the documents you’ve saved to your cloud repository. You can use this Web site to upload and download files to your OnLive Desktop account. Any changes made will be automatically synced, the company says, though I wasn’t able to test that capability in my pre-release version.

Because it’s a cloud-based service, OnLive Desktop won’t work offline, such as in planes without Wi-Fi. And it can be finicky about network speeds. It requires a wireless network with at least 1 megabit per second of download speed, and works best with at least 1.5 to 2.0 megabits. Many hotels have trouble delivering those speeds, and, in my tests, the app refused to start in a hotel twice, claiming insufficient network speed when the hotel Wi-Fi was overloaded.

The free version of the app has some other limitations. You get just 2 gigabytes of file storage, there’s no Web browser or email program like Outlook included, and you can’t install additional software. If many users are trying to log onto the OnLive Desktop servers at once, you may have to wait your turn to use Office.

In the coming weeks, the company plans to launch a Pro version, which will cost $10 a month. It will offer 50 GB of cloud document storage, “priority” access to the servers, a Web browser, and the ability to install some added programs. It will also allow you to collaborate on documents with other users, or even to chat with, and present material to, groups of other OnLive Desktop users.

The company also plans to offer OnLive Desktop on Android tablets, PCs and Macs, and iPhones.

In my tests, I was able to create documents on an iPad in each of the three cloud-based Office programs. I was able to download them to a computer, and alter them on both the iPad and computer. I was also able to upload files from the computer for use in OnLive Desktop.

OnLive Desktop can’t use the iPad’s built-in virtual keyboard, but it can use the virtual keyboard built into Windows 7 and Windows’ limited touch features and handwriting recognition. As noted above, I recommend using a wireless physical keyboard. But even these aren’t a perfect solution, because the ones that work with the iPad can’t send common Windows keyboard commands to OnLive Desktop, so you wind up moving between the keyboard and the touch screen, which can be frustrating. And you can’t use a mouse.

Another drawback is that OnLive Desktop is entirely isolated from the rest of the iPad. Unlike Office-compatible apps that install directly on the tablet, this cloud-based service can’t, for instance, be used to open Office documents you receive via email on the iPad. And, at least at first, the only way you can get files into and out of OnLive Desktop is through its Web-accessible cloud-storage service. The free version has no email capability, and the app doesn’t support common file-transfer services like Dropbox or SugarSync. The company says it hopes to add those.

OnLive Desktop competes not only with the iPad’s Office clones, but with iPad apps that let you remotely access and control your own PCs and Macs, and thus use Office and other computer software on those.

But, in my tests, I have found those tricky to use. They require you to leave your computers running and either install special software or learn to use certain settings.

Overall, I found OnLive Desktop to be a notable technical achievement, but it has so many caveats that it’s best for folks who absolutely, positively need to use the full, genuine versions of the three big Office productivity programs on their iPads. For everyone else, the locally installed Office clones are probably good enough, and simpler to use.

Write to Walt at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

Microsoft Office on iPad

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:37:09 +0000

Which app do you recommend for using on the iPad 2 for opening Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint?)

If you literally just want to open the documents to read them, you don’t need any apps. The iPad comes with built-in viewers for Microsoft Office files. However, for opening, storing and editing the files, I like two products. One is called Quickoffice Pro HD, which costs $20 and handles all three types of files you cite, and more. The other is the tablet version of Apple’s iWork suite, which is sold as three separate apps for $10 each—Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations.

This also would be a good place to note that there are reports, unconfirmed by the company, that Microsoft is considering releasing an iPad version of Office itself. I have no evidence this will happen.

Do any of your recommended Ultrabooks run Office?

All Ultrabooks run Microsoft Office. While Ultrabooks are thin and light, they are full-blown Windows laptops running the latest Intel processors, and in my tests, they ran Office very well, just as well as many heavier, thicker laptops I’ve reviewed.

My son was told by an Apple phone representative that the iCloud service cannot handle our full iTunes library of 6,000 songs, and it will only sync with your hand-held, wireless devices.

That’s inaccurate. ITunes Match handles 25,000 songs and syncs with Macs, PCs (if they’re running iTunes), the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Walt is on vacation and his Personal Technology column will return Jan. 5. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Microsoft: The $71 Billion Cloud Underdog

Nick Mehta — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:31:52 +0000

If I say “cloud computing,” what companies come to mind? Amazon’s innovative Amazon Web Services Cloud? Google’s cloud-based collaboration tools, Google Apps? Salesforce.com, the pioneer in moving business applications to the Web? Facebook because, well, it’s Facebook? How about Microsoft? Before you laugh and close your Chrome browser, hear me out. While perhaps lacking the sex appeal (and stock price appreciation) of the other companies I mentioned, Microsoft is the dark horse that will bring the benefits of the cloud to mainstream businesses. How can I make that claim? Well, if it pleases this jury, Microsoft has the motive, means and opportunity to win the enterprise cloud.

Motive

As the saying goes, people are motivated by either greed or fear. I think for many big companies, it’s more the latter. And Microsoft has a lot to be scared about.

If you poke behind its $71 billion in revenue and 39 percent operating margins, 30 percent of the goldmine comes from multiyear volume licensing agreements, which Microsoft calls Enterprise Agreements (EAs). According to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, “these profitable agreements bring in the kind of regular revenue preferred by financial-market analysts that monitor Microsoft’s performance.”

What motivates a customer to sign up for an Enterprise Agreement instead of simply buying Microsoft products, like Office, off the shelf? Well, historically, Microsoft pitched EAs as a way to ensure you can cover your workforce with Microsoft products at a discounted price level.

With companies investing in post-PC devices like smartphones and tablets, and evaluating alternatives to Microsoft productivity solutions, such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com, CIOs are starting to wonder whether renewing their EA is still a top priority.

In response to this threat, Microsoft is now pushing its Software Assurance (SA) licensing model, which allows customers to upgrade to newer products and also use its cloud services. The reason for the possible shift, Forrester says, is that “the twin revolutions of client mobility and cloud servers will kill device-based licensing, which is Microsoft’s existing model.”

So if Microsoft doesn’t embrace the cloud in a big way, the EA gravy train could come to an end.

Means

Apple is cool. Facebook is friendly. And Google isn’t evil. Yet look across a sea of computers in a typical company, and you’ll still see Microsoft everywhere.

And I’m not just talking about Windows. Microsoft has two key assets that will help it win the enterprise cloud:

Office: While the Web and Web-based apps are fabulous for consuming content and even collaborating around it, Microsoft Office is still the standard in productivity to create corporate content. Love or hate those PowerPoint presentations, but they are still how most companies run. And for flexible analysis, Excel is unmatched. Heck, the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (which is primarily Office for Mac) is a $350 million business on its own.
Outlook/Exchange: For many workers, Microsoft Outlook (with Microsoft Exchange Server on the backend) is the first thing they boot up to start their workday, and the program they remain in all day long. According to industry analyst firm Radicati, 301 million corporate mailboxes used Outlook in 2010. Indeed, some companies have switched from Microsoft Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps and back, because users are too addicted to the interface and functionality of Microsoft Outlook.

So Microsoft still owns two of the key ways “knowledge workers” work with knowledge.

Opportunity

Microsoft isn’t working from a standing start. It actually jumped into the cloud relatively early in 2008 with its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a hosted platform for collaboration. While BPOS suffered from many challenges, mainly because it was based on a platform that wasn’t designed for the cloud, Microsoft made it clear several years ago that they are “all in” as a company in the cloud.

This year, after many delays and much anticipation, Microsoft finally announced its first platform built for the cloud, Office 365. The new version of Exchange is finally on par with its on-premise alternative. Microsoft SharePoint Online is now flexible enough to meet many enterprise use cases. And Microsoft Lync Online, a real-time chat and videoconferencing system, could be a game changer for company productivity.

In parallel, Microsoft is working away on Windows 8, its big bet on the tablet revolution. With all of Microsoft’s failed past attempts at mobility and tablets, some level of cynicism is expected. But some believe Microsoft’s conviction is real. If Microsoft even gets it 80 percent right on tablets, they will likely win in enterprises that are used to the manageability of Windows, and will be attracted to the inevitably deeper Office integration.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong: The innovation in the cloud is coming from all over, mainly from start-ups. For many of these start-ups and other non-enterprise organizations, a non-Microsoft approach will likely be the winner. But for the millions of you working in corporate America, Microsoft is probably the one bringing the cloud to a desktop near you.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

Exclusive: Microsoft Strategy Exec Hank Vigil to Depart, Will Remain Advisor

Kara Swisher — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:31:44 +0000

Microsoft’s SVP of Strategy and Partnership Hank Vigil will be leaving the software giant to focus on investing in and advising for early-stage start-up companies, according to an internal email from CEO Steve Ballmer.

But the 25-year company veteran, who will departs Microsoft in the fall, will also become a “strategic advisor” to Microsoft.
That’s probably a good idea, since Vigil is one of the company’s most visible and well-liked execs in the tech community, especially in Silicon Valley.

He also is Microsoft’s best-dressed exec, if I might be so bold to say.

Vigil has had wide-ranging jobs all over Microsoft in his many years there.

He has most recently been working directly with Ballmer, according to his company bio, “developing and managing strategic relationships, mergers, acquisitions and investment partnerships with media, consumer electronics, telecommunications, software and Internet companies.”

In that role, Vigil has worked on a range of deals, including with Facebook, Nokia, News Corp. and many others.

Previously, he worked on Microsoft’s digital TV strategy, including the acquisition of WebTV. Vigil also did marketing and business strategy for Office, Word and Excel.

In other words, Vigil knows where all the bodies are buried up at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ! And, presumably, he’ll be keeping that to himself.

Here’s the internal email from Ballmer about Vigil’s departure:

After 25 years at Microsoft, Hank Vigil has decided it’s time to open a new chapter in his life.

Hank has covered a lot of ground, from launching Excel 3 and Office 95, to our early investments in ITV, to helping restructure our relationships with Sun, Time Warner, and Real Networks, to his more recent work helping to drive new investments and partnerships with companies like Yahoo!, Facebook, and Nokia. He’s been a critical strategic advisor and bridge-builder on some of the biggest industry opportunities we’ve dealt with in recent years.

He’ll be staying on until the fall, then he intends to do some early stage investing and advising start-up companies.

While Hank is leaving the company, he’s not going too far. I’m pleased to say that Hank will continue to provide his industry insight and strategic counsel going forward as an advisor to the company.

Please join me in congratulating Hank on a quarter-century of great work, and wishing him the best of luck in his new adventure.

RSA Explains How It Was Hacked

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:00:07 +0000

In the end, even computer security companies suffer from the kind of human failings that make securing computers such a challenge. That’s at least one lesson to draw from the explanation from RSA, the company which makes the widely used security tokens like the ones in the picture. It disclosed last month that it had come under an “extremely sophisticated attack,” and that some information concerning the tokens has been taken by unknown attackers.

Initially, it released no details about how the attack was carried out. Now, RSA–which is a unit of storage giant EMC–has gone into some detail concerning how its systems were breached, in a blog post by Uri Rivner, whose title is Head of New Technologies, Identity Protection and Verification. It all started with phishing emails. Over the course of two days, two groups of emails were sent to a small group of employees, none of them high profile, nor apparently especially senior. Though RSA doesn’t spell out who received them, the emails may well have gone to the human resources department or some other quiet corner of the company. The emails contained an Excel spreadsheet attachment entitled “2011 Recruitment Plans.” Naturally it was created to look just believable enough that one of the employees who received it fished it out of the spam folder to which it was initially directed and opened it. You can probably fill in most of the blanks from here.

The spreadsheet contained a Zero-day exploit that took advantage of a weakness in Adobe Flash, which has since been patched. Through that hole, attackers were able to install anything they wanted on the target machine. They chose a version of a program called Poison Ivy RAT, and in this case RAT stands for “remote administration tool,” a program that is used to control one computer from another in a different location.

Armed with remote access to the target machine, the attackers then set about gaining deeper access to RSA’s corporate network. Like a person masquerading as a real employee searching a company’s building for a set of master keys, these attackers carried out a series of attacks designed to escalate the level of access they had to the system. They gathered login credentials from the relatively low-level accounts they compromised at first, including usernames, passwords, and domain information, then went after higher-value accounts with more access.

Once that was done, they started working on the real job: Finding the data they wanted to steal, and then extracting it from RSA’s systems. They gathered what they wanted, collected it in a “staging area,” compressed it, and then downloaded via FTP.

Still unexplained at this point: What information was taken, and does it in any way affect the integrity of its own security products? When the attack was first disclosed, the company said that some information about its SecureID products was taken by the attackers. This has led to a lot of questions and speculation by security pros who naturally have to think about the worst-case scenario, and frankly, there are many for which the adjective “worst” would apply.

The big looming question is whether or not the attacker gained access to the seeds–the random keys embedded in each token–that are used to generate the constantly changing numeric codes that appear on the device’s display. For instance, in one scenario described by David Scheutz of the Intrepidus Group, the attackers might have found a list of seeds and token serial numbers. Once you have the serial number of an individual token, you can then create your own token that would allow you to impersonate that user on whatever systems they use.

That scenario, which is only one of four on Scheutz’s list, is potentially pretty scary. As of 2009, some 40 million RSA tokens were in use securing networks at companies large and small and at numerous government agencies. And aside from the hardware tokens, software that mimics them runs on some 250 million smart phones.

When it first revealed the attack, RSA said it was “confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers,” though it did say it thought the information taken would make attack easier. Hopefully RSA has more to say about all this in the coming days.

Separately, EMC said today it has acquired privately held NetWitness, which specializes in network security analysis. NetWitness provides “precise and pervasive network visibility” which gives companies the ability to detect and cope with “advanced threats” while automating the investigation process. NetWitness will operate within RSA. Financial terms have not been disclosed, but judging by the description of this attack, it seems like a timely acquisition.

DocVerse–Now Google Cloud Connect–Head Shan Sinha Talks About Web-Based Biz Apps

Kara Swisher — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:22 +0000

Earlier this week, I motored the Mini down to the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneur Shan Sinha.

He headed the start-up DocVerse, which was acquired by the search giant in March for a reported $25 million to $30 million.

Since then, Sinha has been ferreting away on scaling up DocVerse’s product, which allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web.

Its new name: Google Cloud Connect.

About 4,000 companies quickly signed up to be early testers in the preview program, and Google said it had thousands of requests to be notified when it becomes available, which will be in a few weeks.

DocVerse was founded in 2008 by Sinha and Alex DeNeui, who both used to work at Microsoft. It raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

Google’s acquisition of it was yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow, along with a range of mashups of cloud computing and productivity applications.

For example, Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs to compete against the Office juggernaut.

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is the future of Office.

Clearly, the race for productivity applications is in the cloud.

So–along with Cloud Connect –Sinha has been put in charge of deploying a $50 a person package of them, including Sites, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video, to millions of business users.

Here is Sinha talking about all of that and more in the video interview I did with him:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Using Phones Globally

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:40:27 +0000

My Motorola Android phone does not work outside of the U.S. Does the Samsung Galaxy have the same problem? Will the forthcoming Verizon iPhone work in Europe?

I combined two reader questions here, because they both touch on a common source of confusion. I presume that the Motorola Android phone that only works in the U.S. is sold by either Verizon or Sprint, because they use network technology that is primarily found in the U.S., and not, say, in Europe. Thus, phone makers like Motorola and Samsung tailor their Verizon and Sprint models to this U.S.-centric technology, called CDMA.

However, both Motorola and Samsung also make Android phones for AT&T and T-Mobile, which use a network technology called GSM that is standard in most of the rest of the world. These models should work outside of the U.S. There are a few “world phones” sold by Verizon and Sprint, which include both network technologies. For instance, Verizon sells two Android phones, the Droid Pro and the Droid 2 Global, which fall into that category.

As for the reported forthcoming Verizon iPhone, I don’t know if it will be limited to CDMA, which would make it essentially a U.S.-only device, or whether it will also be compatible with GSM, which would make it a world phone.

I live in South Africa, and want to buy the Samsung Tab to make my job easier, but to do that I must be able to work with Microsoft Excel documents. Editing and using dropdown boxes is essential. Can this be done?

The Tab, and other Android devices, can view and edit Excel documents using either a built-in mobile office suite (ThinkFree was pre-installed on the Tab I tested) or one you can obtain through the Android Market, like Quickoffice. You can also use online spreadsheet apps.

However, as with the same or similar apps for the iPad, these are limited compared to using Excel on a PC or Mac, and I cannot say whether they’d have the features and two-way document fidelity you personally might require. I didn’t test editing Excel documents on the Tab.

I am considering purchasing the iPad but have learned that it does not allow users to create folders in which documents can be stored. This would be incredibly useful for me for business purposes while I travel (i.e., separate client folders with client-specific documents in each). I have heard that Apple’s new operating system upgrade might make this possible, but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Do you happen to know whether that is the case?

The new folder feature coming to the iPad is meant for grouping apps, not documents. Apple’s operating system for its mobile devices, called iOS, doesn’t have a global document folder capability.

However, individual iPad apps, such as the very powerful GoodReader, do allow you to create folders that can hold all manner of documents, and you can name and organize these folders as you wish. But these folders are only accessible from within the app that creates them.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

New Nook Brings a Little Color to E-Reading

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:44:47 +0000

Book lovers nowadays fall into one of two camps: They either eschew e-readers altogether, preferring the look and feel of print books; or they dive wholeheartedly into e-books, instantly downloading and racing through more titles by the handfuls. If you count yourself in the latter category, you’re in luck.

[ See post to watch video ]

Starting this week, Barnes & Noble will ship its $249 Nook Color (nookcolor.com), a luxury model in the e-reader world currently dominated by the $139 monochrome Amazon.com Kindle. While the original Nook offered a gray-scale reading screen and a thin, color touch strip for browsing the bookstore, this model is one big color touch screen. It connects to the Web using only Wi-Fi and costs $100 more than last year’s comparable Wi-Fi Nook, but a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said that preorders online and in stores are far exceeding company expectations, with over twice as many as for last year’s Nook.

I’ve been testing the Nook Color over the past week and I like its book-size build and stylish design. Its user interface is inviting and its digital bookstore is redesigned to make shopping for books enjoyable. Nook Color is aimed at people who are primarily focused on reading but crave the iPad’s color and some of its versatility.

Like the Kindle, the Nook Color has a Web browser and some apps but no dedicated email program or way to access an app store. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble says a full email program and app store are expected early next year.

The Nook Color is unapologetically focused on reading. It accesses Barnes & Noble’s library of two million downloadable books and over 100 magazines and newspapers (fewer were available during my pre-release testing). The reader has a feature called ArticleView that displays magazine articles in a clear, readable format. You can highlight passages from books and then share them with friends through Facebook, Twitter or a limited, in-book email system. A LendMe feature gives users an easy way to digitally lend their books to friends for 14 days. And for kids, there’s a feature where popular stories are read aloud by people rather than a computer voice.

The Nook Color is more than just a bright, color screen: It’s built on the Android 2.1 operating system—the same mobile OS used to run many smartphones. This gives the device access to a full Web browser for tasks like reading favorite sites or checking Facebook, which I did easily. Early next year Nook Color will upgrade to Android 2.2, allowing it to play Flash videos.

The Nook Color

Eight apps found in a section called Extras come loaded on the device including apps for Pandora Internet Radio, chess and Sudoku. I logged into my Pandora account, quickly retrieved my saved list of stations and played a QuickMix of music. I was able to work on a crossword puzzle or read a book or magazine on the Nook Color while still listening to Rihanna on the music app. Quickoffice software for Word, Excel and PowerPoint comes built into the Nook Color so users can view—but not edit—documents in these programs if they’re loaded onto the device with a MicroSD card. Until the Nook Color’s app store launches early next year, there’s no way to download free or paid apps.

Navigating around the Nook Color is a cinch. A tiny “n” just below the screen returns you to the home screen, which can be customized with photos loaded via a MicroSD card. The Daily Shelf is a dedicated horizontal section at the bottom of the home screen that updates whenever possible with new versions of newspapers (daily), magazines (weekly or monthly, if you subscribe) or books lent to you by friends. Anything on the Daily Shelf can be dragged out onto the home screen, placed anywhere and resized by pinching two fingers out or together. A Quick Nav button displays the Nook Color’s six sections: Library, Shop, Search, Extras, Web and Settings. A helpful “Keep Reading” prompt at the top of the home screen shows the last thing you were reading; selecting it sends you to right where you left off.

Nook Color weighs just under a pound, or twice as much as the Kindle but still a half-pound lighter than Apple’s larger iPad. It felt a bit heavy in my hands as I read from it for a long period of time, but I solved that by leaning it against a desk or pillow.

While reading Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” I found a particularly interesting tidbit about first-century B.C. marriage contracts requiring wives to vow not to add love potions to their husbands’ food or drink. I highlighted this passage by tapping once on the screen and dragging highlighter handles around it, and then sent it to friends via email with a built-in shortcut for sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter. I selected another passage and posted it on my Facebook wall for friends to read. All these posts had links to buy books from Barnes & Noble.

I really enjoyed reading magazines on the Nook Color because these appeared much as they do in print. Brightly colored pages appeared one at a time when I held the device vertically, or two pages at a time in horizontal view. Magazines can be bought per issue or via subscriptions; a single current issue of House Beautiful was $4.50 or $1.99 with a subscription. The Quick Nav button works in magazines, too, so you can flick a finger right or left to skip ahead to specific sections or articles.

If you love reading and want to share your books with friends or reading updates with social networks, the Nook Color has you covered. It will also give you a taste of tablet computing with functions like browsing the Web, using some apps and eventually, full emailing. Just remember that Nook Color is laser-focused on e-reading.

A correction was made to this column on 11/17/2010 to reflect that Quickoffice is not owned by Microsoft.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Live from Facebook's Email Messages Launch

Liz Gannes — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:04:49 +0000

Facebook has called the press to yet another launch event, this time in San Francisco for a new Facebook email system. Luckily, they brought their own cafeteria chairs so our butts will feel right at home after a long summer of launches at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., office.

At the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg says young people say email is too slow. They prefer Facebook or SMS.

Zuck: IM or SMS are much simpler, and people want lighter-weight things that they can use all over the place. So we need…a modern messaging system.

350 million people actively use messaging on Facebook, in part because it’s really simple. Four billion messages are sent per day. This is “private, private sharing.”

Next-generation messaging would be: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short. (Those are a lot of synonyms, no?)

“This is not email. Email is one way that people will use this system, but it’s not even the primary way we think they will use it.”

Now a three-panel slide is up showing the key topics of the announcement–”seamless messaging,” “conversation history” and “social inbox.” Zuckerberg promises, “We can do some really good filtering for you to make sure you only see messages you really care about.”

Zuck brings on Andrew Bosworth to demo the product.

So this is actually a relaunch of the “Messages” tool. Not email-specific. Takes all correspondence between two friends and puts them in one place.

Everyone gets an @facebook.com email address with their username. “As much as we’re providing an email address, the system’s not email,” says Boz–more like instant messaging.

Boz uses convo about dinner plans as an example, with messaging across different platforms, including IM on Facebook, email, iPhone notifications, etc. The example restaurant is Piccino in San Francisco, where, fun fact, I was for a short time the Foursquare mayor. No longer though.

Integrates with Jabber, IMAP and one more I missed. (Sorry, first time liveblogging with this tool!)

Boz shows the history of Facebook messages with his girlfriend of the last four years. But doesn’t include their instant messages and other communication. Individual messages may not be profound, but collectively they provide a narrative about someone I care about, says Boz.

Facebook rebuilt infrastructure for this project, because it’s especially important that messages don’t get lost.

Instead of Cassandra (which FB created for email search and then open sourced), the company chose something new: HBase. They also used Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper and memcache.

This is the biggest engineering team Facebook has ever put together for a launch–15 people, Boz says.

Users have three categories: 1) Messages: Conversations with actual people. 2) Other: Email lists and the like. And 3) Junk.

The big idea is “picking up where you left off” no matter what device or medium.

This project has been in the works for the last 15 months.

Zuck: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging system that includes email as a part of it. We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say, I’m going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch to Facebook.”

(Read: You silly press, we’re not competing with Gmail, we’re bigger than Gmail!)

Rolling out slowly over the next few months, starting with an invite system (ha! how Gmail!).

Oh, about IMAP: No support yet, so users can’t synch with other email systems. But Facebook wants to add later.

Interesting: Facebook messages won’t have subject lines. You just have a single messaging history with each person.

If you have been interacting with someone through email, then we’ll send replies back to email. You can indicate that you want a message to go directly to their phone. If you’re online, you get a message as an IM.

Boz: This is the end of “BRB” or “GTG.” Follows you wherever you go. (Sounds ominous when you say it like that.)

Question from audience: Will you add voice or video?

Zuck: For now only SMS, IM, email and FB messages–all are text. “We think this is a pretty big step by itself, and one we just wanted to take before we get started on the next set of things.”

Question from audience: Will you have contextual ads?

Zuck: Yes, ads work the same as on the rest of Facebook, but not targeted specific to content in a message.

Zuck on Gmail competition: “They have a great product. Email is still really important to a lot of people. If we build a great product that people want to use, then people will use it.”

Question from audience: Can users go off the record like in Gmail?

Boz: Users can delete any message.

Zuck: Off the record like in IM doesn’t make sense because users may be receiving messages in a different way than you send them. If someone gets something in email instead of IM it would be unnatural to have it off the record.

Question: How will this treat communication with people who are not on Facebook?

Boz: You can communicate with whoever you want to, and will have access to all that history of the conversation.

Zuck: If you’re not a part of the FB system and outside the social graph, your emails to FB users will go into “Other” folder to start off with, rather than the main. Once the recipient says you’re an important person, you’ll go into the main folder.

Question: What about silly joke emails from your mom? Can you filter those?

Zuck: There’s only one thread with every person.

Question: What about Facebook employee email addresses?

Zuck: “After a long discussion, the Farm Bureau has agreed to give us fb.com. And in the terms of that we have agreed not to sell farm subsidies.”

Facebook hasn’t mentioned this, but Microsoft just emailed to make sure people know they’re involved.

“As part of Facebook’s new messaging system: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/ –Microsoft is integrating the Office experience. Over the coming months, customers will be able to access and share Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as attachments to their Facebook messages. Sharing new ideas, key points of inspiration and important information just got easier–even when the need to access or share that content strikes in the middle of your latest status update.”

Question: Can you fill in the blanks of associating email addresses with Facebook friends?

Boz: Not yet, but it’s imaginable.

(Uh-oh–how is this going to work when people have multiple contacts for themselves?)

Question: Storage?

“If you’re a good user, you have no concern. For people who try to find limits, they will find them.” Another ominous comment from Boz.

Okay, they’re cutting us off.

Here’s the Facebook blog post on the announcement.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Mac Users Are Getting New Outlook From Rival

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 02:03:34 +0000

A new, faster, better version of Microsoft Office is coming out Oct. 26. But it isn’t for Microsoft’s own Windows operating system. It is for the Macintosh computers made by the software giant’s archrival, Apple. And, among other things, it will bestow upon the Mac a benefit heretofore available only on Windows: Outlook. The popular email, calendar and contacts program is finally arriving on the Mac in a version that looks and works very much like the Windows version.

[ See post to watch video ]

The advent of a robust, full-featured Outlook for the Mac isn’t all that’s new in Office for Mac 2011, but it’s a big deal, especially for Mac users, or those wishing to switch to the Mac, who work in companies where Outlook is the standard. These folks already have been able to use the Windows version of Outlook on their machines, using special software that lets the Mac run Windows. But now, they can use a native Mac version of the program that can import data directly from Windows Outlook.

I’ve been testing this new version of Mac Office—in fact, I’m writing this column in its new edition of Word—and I like it a lot. While it isn’t an exact clone of Office for Windows, I found in my tests that each of its key components—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—has been significantly improved and made more compatible with its Windows sibling.

So, even Mac Office users who don’t use Outlook will be pleased by the changes. And, while there are some features in the Windows version still missing in the Mac edition, there are also some new Mac-only features. In general, there’s now more parity between the two.

Like the prior Mac version, Office 2008, released nearly three years ago, the new Office 2011 uses the same file formats as the Windows version. It can read and write Office files without any conversion or translation, so a document produced in, say, Word for the Mac, can be read by a user of Windows Word without the latter even knowing it was created on a Mac—and vice versa.

Unlike the 2008 version, the new Mac Office can seamlessly interact with Microsoft’s new stripped-down, free, online version of Office, called Office Web Apps. And it can save to, and open documents from, Microsoft’s free online SkyDrive file repository, or its SharePoint online service for businesses.

The first thing Mac Office users will notice about the new 2011 version is its speed. While the 2008 version was faster than its predecessors, this latest version is dramatically snappier. In my tests, all the components launched much, much faster than their 2008 counterparts, and opened even large documents much more quickly.

A new full screen view in Word shows just a single line of minimal tools.

High Fidelity

Another big plus is fidelity with Windows documents. Because the Windows and Mac operating systems are different, fidelity isn’t perfect, but, in my tests, it was much better in this new version. For instance, some fancy Word layouts and font treatments created in Windows that formerly looked wrong when opened on a Mac now look the same. This is especially noticeable in Excel, where charts and layouts on complex spreadsheets sometimes didn’t carry over. In my tests, I found that many of these incompatibles have been banished.

These fidelity improvements, however, are much better with documents created in the latest Windows version, called Office 2010, and are weaker with those created in older Windows versions. Also, the new Mac version has restored the same macro system present in the Windows version, so automated actions created by power users and companies in Windows documents can now be used in the Mac version.

There still are some things the Windows version does that the Mac version doesn’t. These include pivot charts in Excel, full video editing in PowerPoint, and the new “backstage” feature that presents printing and other options in a large, easier-to-use mode. But there also are some Mac-only features, including the ability to dynamically reorder PowerPoint slides in a 3-D view, plus a new Full Screen view in Word that allows reading and editing documents with no toolbars, or with just a single line of minimal tools.

The radically different Ribbon toolbar that appeared in Windows Office several years ago—a series of tabs organized by function—is also in this new Mac version. But, unlike in the Windows version, the new Mac Office retains the familiar menus and toolbar icons, and the Ribbon can be turned off completely, except in Outlook. However, unlike in the latest Windows version, you can’t add custom tabs to the Ribbon.

Outlook replaces a Microsoft (MSFT) email, contacts and calendar program in Mac Office called Entourage, which itself succeeded an old, very limited version of Outlook for the Mac produced years ago. Many users found Entourage clunky and complicated, and it couldn’t directly import data from Outlook on Windows.

Microsoft strove hard to make the new Outlook look and work like the one on Windows. There still are some Windows Outlook features the Mac version lacks, such as side-by-side calendars and task status reports, but, overall, I found it worked well.

Microsoft strove hard to make the new Outlook look and work very much like the one on Windows.

The Sync Situation

I was able to import a nearly 3-gigabyte Windows Outlook data file with no problems. And I was able to easily and perfectly import all my messages and settings from Apple’s own built-in Mail program and to sync with Apple’s (AAPL) built-in Mac address book. But Microsoft is still working on syncing with Apple’s iCal calendar program, and the Outlook calendar can’t sync with Google Calendar. Also, while the new Mac Outlook can import Windows Outlook data, it can’t export its data to Windows yet. Microsoft says it is also working on that.

In general, Outlook on the Mac proved fast and capable in my tests. It doesn’t work exactly like its Windows counterpart, but Windows users will find it very similar. And it has some Mac-specific features. For instance, its contents can be easily searched by the Mac’s built-in universal search feature, Spotlight, and can be backed up by the Mac’s Time Machine backup system.

Office for Mac 2011 will be available in two versions for average consumers: a $199 Home and Business edition, and a Home and Student version, which costs $119, but lacks Outlook, whereas Entourage was included in the $149 similarly named 2008 package. Prices on both new editions are higher if you want to install them on multiple machines. There is also a $99 special academic edition, mostly aimed at college stores, that includes Outlook, but has no option for multiple installations.

Microsoft’s new Mac Office is by far the best Mac version of the suite I’ve used, and I can recommend it.

Find Walt’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

Windows Phone 7: There's an App for Some of That

John Paczkowski — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:15:36 +0000

How many Windows Phone 7 apps will be available when the first devices running the OS ship? Microsoft refuses to say (“Thousands that people are developing right now” seems to be the closest it’s gotten to a hard number), but I’m told it will be plenty.

Or, as one exec told me, “enough.”

Obviously, that’s tough to quantify. That said, the list of apps announced today is a good start, even if it does seem pretty short. On the mobile A/V front, there are Netflix (NFLX), IMDB, Slacker, I Heart Radio and MusixMatch. T-Mobile users will get T-Mobile TV, while AT&T (T) users will get U-verse. For the moment, WP7′s big social media app will be Twitter, though I imagine there’s a Facebook app on the way. For e-commerce, there’s eBay (EBAY), Fandango and Travelocity. And finally, there’s a growing list of games (60+ at last count) that includes Monopoly, Need for Speed Undercover, Tetris, The Sims 3, Star Wars, Bejeweled, Assassin’s Creed, Fast & Furious 7, Guitar Hero 5 and Halo Waypoint.

Add to that Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine and an Office Hub that provides mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as SharePoint integration, and you’ve got the beginnings of a decent ecosystem. Remember, when Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store first launched it had about 500 third-party applications. Today it boasts more than 250,000.

Which is not to say that the development of the WP7 app ecosystem will be as quick or tremendous. Clearly, there’s much ramping-up yet to be done. But there will be enough marquee apps available at launch that the device certainly won’t seem lacking, as some other mobile operating systems did when they debuted. Netflix, Twitter, eBay, a groaning board of games and a mobile office productivity suite is enough to get anyone started, particularly if they’ve only just decided to trade up from a feature phone to a smartphone.

FURTHER COVERAGE:

“Delightful” Windows Phone 7 Coming November 8

Windows Phone 7: It’s Now or Never

Microsoft Office Simplified For the Web

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:03:00 +0000

I am writing this in Microsoft Word, hardly an unusual way to author a document. But I’m not using Word as you know it—part of the large, complex Microsoft Office suite installed on your computer’s hard drive. Instead, I am using a new, streamlined version of Word that for the first time resides on remote servers you reach through the Internet.

[ See post to watch video ]

This new version of Word is used inside a Web browser. It works on both Windows PCs and Macs, and via the newer versions of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. It’s free and it doesn’t require you to have regular Office on your computer.

Word isn’t the only Office component that’s now available in a free online version. Microsoft (MSFT) has created similar simplified versions of Excel, PowerPoint and its OneNote note-taking program as part of the free online suite called Office Web Apps, which is available at office.live.com. To use the new online Office, you’ll need a free account for the company’s broader Windows Live online service.

Microsoft is also releasing a new version of its traditional desktop Office for Windows next week, called Office 2010. But in my view, the online edition is the most interesting new development for consumers in this round of updates. It’s part of the broader trend toward cloud computing—doing tasks online rather than with desktop programs. And it’s meant to help the software giant compete with rival online office suites from competitors like Google (GOOG) and Zoho.

I’ve been testing Office Web Apps on both Windows and Mac computers, and in all four major browsers, and I like it. It has some downsides and is still a work in progress. It lacks many of the more sophisticated features of the local, desktop version of Office. In fact, Microsoft—apparently trying to protect its profitable desktop suite—refers to Office Web Apps as a “companion” to desktop Office, for “light” work.

The Office Web Apps version of Word is used inside a Web browser.

But these are capable, if simpler, programs that look and feel like their desktop counterparts and they will likely meet the needs of many consumers who produce basic documents, even if they don’t own desktop Office. Also, the new Web Apps are connected to a generous 25 gigabytes of free online storage for your documents, via a companion Microsoft online storage system called SkyDrive.

Another big benefit: Microsoft boasts its Office Web Apps produce documents that use the same file formats as the desktop programs and thus, look fully accurate when opened in desktop Office. The company calls this “fidelity.” In my tests, this claim held true, at least on my Windows PC. (A revised version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, tuned to work with Web Apps, is in the works.)

The new version of the desktop Office suite also has many new features, but a lot of these are for power users or corporate users, and, overall, it isn’t nearly as big a change as its predecessor, Office 2007. Among the new desktop features consumers will notice and use are the extension of the consolidated top tool bar called the “Ribbon,” introduced in the 2007 version in most Office programs, to Outlook; a new unified view for printing, sharing and previewing documents, called “Backstage”; and richer graphics. You can also now customize the Ribbon.

In my tests of the streamlined Office Web Apps, I was able to use a variety of fonts and styles, insert and resize photos, and create tables. And I was able to view my documents, though not edit them, on an iPhone and iPad. This also works with other mobile devices.

One glitch I ran into in the Word Web App was that, if you use a tab to start a paragraph, it changes the left margin of each subsequent line. Microsoft says this is a bug and it is working to fix it.

Another downside for some users may be that the Web Apps only directly open documents from, and save them to, your online SkyDrive storage, not your hard disk. So you have to upload files from your hard disk to SkyDrive to edit them in the Web Apps. And, like most cloud-based programs, they can only be used when you’re online.

There are numerous things you may be used to doing in desktop Office that can’t be done in the online version. For instance, you can’t drag photos by the corners to resize them, embed videos, create slide transitions or add new spreadsheet charts.

You can, with one click, open a Web version of your document in the full desktop program, to take advantage of richer editing. However, this only works with certain combinations of browsers and desktop Office versions.

Two of the Web apps, Excel and OneNote, allow multiple users to log on and work on the same document together. The others don’t yet. In fact, in my tests, I couldn’t open a Word document locally until I had closed it online, and vice versa. Microsoft says it is working on expanding simultaneous use to all the apps.

Office Web Apps are a good start for Microsoft at bringing its productivity expertise to the Web, and may be all many consumers need for creating simple documents.

Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos, free, at walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Making Hotmail Hot Again

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:07:27 +0000

Like it or not, your personal email address says something about you. Gmail tends to be considered the cool email to have today. Apple’s (AAPL) .Mac addresses (now .Me) identify users who own Macs and don’t mind paying $100 a year for email and related services. AOL (AOL) emails are tied to adults who haven’t changed their address since the dial-up days. And Hotmail is seen as old school.

[ See post to watch video ]

Since its debut in 1996, Hotmail has soared to 400 million users world-wide. But it also lost users along the way—particularly in 2008—due in part to a general perception that Hotmail wasn’t as modern as other email services.

Starting this week, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) will try to change the way Hotmail is perceived by rolling out a revamped version. The company, which bought the program in 1998, has scrapped its attempts to get people to use its site for social networking, acknowledging that companies like Facebook and Twitter are already doing the job. And it has cleaned up its once confusing nomenclature: Hotmail is the sole name for Microsoft’s Web email program.

To spread the word, Microsoft recently launched a massive marketing campaign, involving online, radio and outdoor ads running through the end of the year, that will cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft general manager, Brian Hall. Mr. Hall says that “The New Busy” campaign is intended to demonstrate how Hotmail’s organizational features help busy people with full lives. Part of the campaign will focus on reintroducing current Hotmail users to new features.

But should you really consider reviving your old Hotmail account or opening a new one? I’ve been using this new version of Hotmail for the past few weeks and I’ve found it handled large files with ease, performed browser-like tasks within the inbox and integrated third-party social networks and email accounts. Though the Hotmail name still conjures up frustrating memories of too much spam and the belief that storage was restricted, Microsoft has revamped its old email service into one that’s smart, robust and reliable. It deserves a second look.

The new Hotmail displays more on one screen, including photos.

Hotmail is still big on sorting emails according to your existing “Contacts” versus everyone else. This works well if you’ve taken the time to add all of your friends to the Contacts list, a procedure that takes a couple seconds per person and is done as you send emails to people. This prompting can be a bit of a pain, but if you haven’t done it, you might miss emails from people you care about. A Microsoft representative said that by the end of this summer, users will be able to opt out of this sorting.

At first glance, the new Hotmail doesn’t look dramatically different. But a closer look reveals intelligent organizational tools. Shortcut tabs at the top of the inbox display only messages from social networks (think of all those email notifications from Facebook and Twitter), pre-made email groups or contacts. Many other email programs only do this if users manually set up folders.

Another organizational tool is called Quick Views. It automatically sorts four types of emails into folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs and Shipping Updates. These categories come preset and cannot be customized.

Quick Views saved me from digging through my inbox for specific emails and from dragging certain emails into folders for saving. When I ordered gifts online for a friend’s wedding, the shipping notification emails from the delivery service arrived in my inbox and were also viewable in the Shipping Updates folder. Emails with attached Office documents were neatly sorted into the Office Docs folder.

Behind the scenes of the revamped Hotmail, Microsoft is powering all inboxes with Windows Live SkyDrive—an ever-growing, server-based storage repository that guarantees you’ll never be asked to clean out your inbox. (As with many Web-based email programs, Hotmail stores your emails on servers rather than taking up space on your hard drive.)

SkyDrive also gives Hotmail users more freedom when sharing photos: Images can be quickly uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends via a Web link. One message can include up to 200 photos of 50 megabytes each, or 10 gigabytes total. Meanwhile, Gmail limits attachments to about 25 megabytes per message.

When Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents are attached to any message received, they are opened right in the Web browser, without having to open another program. This works thanks to a program called Office Web Apps, which functions regardless of whether or not Office 2010 is installed on the computer. Just as photos are shared from Hotmail using a SkyDrive link, so, too, are Office documents.

Hotmail’s inbox now has a Sweep feature, which lets you move or delete all emails from a particular sender. (A similar option in Microsoft Office 2010 wipes out all emails sent prior to the last message in a thread.) Another option for tidying up your inbox is Conversation View, which sorts all emails sent in the same conversation into one group. Users can opt in or out of this, unlike Gmail, which offers only threaded emails.

Tough spam filters caught every Viagra-related email sent to my Hotmail address. And if you identify a piece of mail in the Junk folder that isn’t actually spam, Hotmail remembers this and sorts differently in the future.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, now plays a role in Hotmail. It’s built into the search box as an option for scouring Web content directly from the inbox. It can be accessed while composing a message: A small “From Bing” drop-down menu in the email you’re writing lets you search for content to add to emails, like maps, videos, images and movie show times. This content appears in a right-side panel and can be embedded in email messages with one click.

To keep people from straying away to different Web pages while using Hotmail, Web functions can be performed from right within its inbox. These functions include watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, or viewing photos from Flickr or SmugMug. I clicked on YouTube links in emails and watched videos in a handsome overlay screen. And if an email includes codes for tracking packages using the U.S. Postal Service, the package’s real-time shipping status appears within the email. A Microsoft representative confirmed that FedEx and UPS are in the works.

I added my Gmail account to my Hotmail account, so I could check several personal email messages on the same Web page. In a similar manner, Hotmail can pull multiple contacts from several networks—like phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn or birthdays from Facebook—into a single Contact list.

Hotmail may have burned you in the past, but this beefed-up new version saves you time and is a pleasure to use.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Online Help for Parents Who Volunteer

Pui-wing Tam — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 01:03:29 +0000

It takes a lot to organize a classroom of 20 children. It can take even more to organize the kids’ busy parents—and that often means turning to technology to get everyone on the same page.

Over the past nine months, my first-grader’s school has seen that in spades. Like many elementary schools, ours relies on parent volunteers to help out with one-on-one reading with students and math exercises. In my 6-year-old’s class, at least two parent volunteers are needed a day. In the past, volunteers were organized the old-fashioned way on paper, with parents signing up for their preferred time slots for the month on a calendar sent home with their children.

But in recent years as more schools and families have gone digital, parents are opting for an online solution to organizing volunteer class time. And a host of volunteering and calendar services have popped up on the Web to oblige them. When I asked our school’s room parent which online sites people were using to organize volunteering, he blasted out an email to poll his network of room parents. The informal survey yielded one conclusion: Each classroom was using different services, each with their own perks and drawbacks. Among the hodge-podge of choices were well-known applications such as Yahoo Inc.’s Yahoo Groups and Google Inc.’s Calendar, as well as less familiar names including VolunteerSpot Inc.’s VolunteerSpot and Doodle AG’s Doodle.com.

All are easily accessible on the Web and are free (though some charge a fee for premium users). All allow a central organizer to set up a master calendar or group online and invite other people to join, thereby getting everyone onto the same technological platform.

VolunteerSpot lets an organizer create a calendar, with tasks parents could volunteer to do.

Each also has limitations. Some make it difficult to print a volunteer schedule. Others don’t have automatic reminders to notify a participant that their volunteer session is coming up, or they make it tough to export the calendar to be integrated with, say, your calendar at work.

Of all the technologies our school’s parents are using, Yahoo’s Groups has been around the longest. Launched in 1999, Yahoo says it now hosts more than 10 million groups that are accessed by some 120 million members. Signing up to create a Yahoo Group is a breeze—with a few clicks, people can name a group and invite others to join. Once set up, parents can post comments, send photos and other attachments to the group, and sign up for spots with an integrated calendar application. Over the years, Yahoo has added new features, including tools to help build an event and to gather RSVPs.

But some parents complain that using a Yahoo Group creates unnecessary spam when some people forget they’re communicating with a group instead of one on one. In addition, Groups’ calendar application is difficult to import and export. Yahoo says that later this year, it will roll out a refresh of Groups that will “enable smaller groups to do things more efficiently.”

Google Calendar, launched in 2007, got a fresh new look for the application last month. The application is also easy to create and to invite people to join. Other parents can share the calendar, see at a glance what volunteer spots are available and fill in the ones they want. Reminders are built in, and Google Calendar can sync with Microsoft Outlook or other calendaring systems.

One of our school’s first-grade classes, though, faced a hurdle when it came to joining their Google Calendar. Some parents said they couldn’t join because they didn’t have a Gmail email account and didn’t want to jump through the hoops of creating one. Google says people don’t have to have a Gmail account but adds there is often confusion between a Gmail account and a plain-vanilla Google account, which only requires people to enter a username and password.

No such puzzlement should exist with Doodle.com, which doesn’t ask users for their email. Launched in 2003 by a developer in Zurich, Doodle.com allows people to quickly get on a calendar, select dates and times for an event, then send out the link so people can fill in when they want to volunteer. But Doodle.com is designed primarily for setting up a business meeting, the company says. Organizing a month’s worth of classroom volunteers thus requires clicking each specific date to create a volunteer spot for it. In other services, you can bring up a month’s calendar. Printing out a Doodle.com calendar also entails someone first exporting the calendar to a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet.

One parent, who is a Doodle.com fan, says she finds the application is better used to organize one-off events such as a school field trip rather than maintaining an ongoing volunteer calendar.

VolunteerSpot was launched early last year by entrepreneur Karen Bantuveris, who says she was aggravated with the lack of tools to solve volunteer-coordinating problems at her child’s preschool. VolunteerSpot allows an organizer to create a calendar, use a tool called the planning wizard to choose tasks they need people to volunteer for, and then send the link out so people can chime in for what slots they can fill.

VolunteerSpot has gotten mixed reviews from our first-grade class. While our parent-volunteer coordinator said the website is very “usable”—with reminders automatically sent two days before a volunteer session, among other things—it was less smooth in some areas.

VolunteerSpot doesn’t allow people to see a month’s worth of volunteers at a glance; people have to click on each day to see who is volunteering, for instance. Printing a calendar isn’t easy. When I clicked on our class calendar, I could print out only my volunteer slots and not the entire class’s since I wasn’t the calendar’s administrator.

My first-grader’s teacher was particularly frustrated by those things since they prevented her from easily seeing who was volunteering when and from printing out a calendar to prompt laggards to volunteer. She says it meant she often had to bug our parent-volunteer coordinator for updates and to make changes to the calendar.

Ms. Bantuveris says the site is constantly adding features and that more than one person can be a calendar’s administrator, which allows them to make changes to a calendar’s settings. She adds that the site in February added an option allowing an administrator print out a master calendar.

Still, there’s one thing these technologies can’t overcome: parental resistance. One of our school’s first-grade classes started the academic year with VolunteerSpot—but quickly abandoned it. Instead, they switched to a paper calendar. “We just couldn’t get anyone to sign up online,” says the room parent for that class. With a paper calendar, she adds, the volunteering has gone much more smoothly.

Walter S. Mossberg will return June 10.

Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com

Confirmed: Google Acquires DocVerse in Office Faceoff With Microsoft [UPDATED]

Kara Swisher — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:12:39 +0000

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

[UPDATE: Google confirmed the deal in a blog post, which you can read below, as well as in interviews BoomTown did today with execs at DocVerse and Google.]

Continuing its acquisition spree, Google has snapped up DocVerse, a start-up that allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web, said several sources.

Sources said the price was in the $25 to $30 million range.

Founded by two ex-Microsoft (MSFT) execs in 2008, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, San Francisco-based DocVerse has raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

It’s yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow by Google (GOOG), along with a range of other digital arenas such as cloud computing and mapping.

Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs, but it struggles against the Office juggernaut. Thus, a link with Office via DocVerse is a smart move.

Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager on the Google Apps team said that while some perceive the search giant as trying to compete directly with Office (a claim I openly scoffed at during the interview), Google did hear from customers that it wanted cloud-based functionality with Office.

“We heard from customers that there is a great need for help in the cloud,” he said. “This acquisition helps users move over the to cloud and expands our product.”

DocVerse CEO Sinha said his small company–under 20 employees, who will be moving down to the Googleplex HQ in Mountain View, Calif., immediately–had been talking to Google for a while.

“We were gaining traction in the product in large enterprises…so, it made sense, because we have a vision of a world of Web-based collaboration,” he said.

While Sinha said he admired what Microsoft had done with Office, he noted there is a need for more, and a hook-up with the powerful Google will help DocVerse do that sooner.

“Microsoft is doing a lot of great things for its customers who use its stack of software,” he said. “But we see a whole other world interested in the Web-based approach that is not being served very well right now.”

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is clearly the future of Office.

In fact, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a significant statement related to cloud computing in a speech, noting, “This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we’re all in.”

In an interesting side note, this is the third company that Harrison Metal has invested in that has been acquired by Google over the last several months. Other sales have included AdMob for $750 million and Aardvark for $50 million.

There had been a post in TechCrunch back in December that the deal was nearly done, but it was apparently not completed until now.

Here is the blog post on the deal from Google:

Google Docs welcomes DocVerse

Friday, March 05, 2010 at 10:48 AM

?The future of productivity applications is in the cloud. We’ve always believed the web is the best platform for creating and sharing information, and Google Docs has already helped millions of people become more productive. But we recognize that many people are still accustomed to desktop software. So as we continue to improve Google Docs and Google Sites as rich collaboration tools, we’re also making it easier for people to transition to the cloud, and interoperate with desktop applications like Microsoft Office.
?
For example, we recently made it possible to use Google Docs to store and share any type of file that you have on your computer, not just the ones you create online. Today we’re excited to announce another step towards seamless interoperability: we have acquired DocVerse.

DocVerse is a small, nimble team of talented developers who share our vision, and they’ve enabled true collaboration right within Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications.

A huge “welcome” to the DocVerse team and their customers! Current DocVerse users can keep using the product as usual, though we’ve suspended new sign-ups until we’re ready to share what’s next. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager, Google Apps team

Almost Famous: Pat Hanrahan of Tableau

Drake Martinet — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:16:20 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We dropped by the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford University for an interview with Pat Hanrahan, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, as well as chief technology officer at Tableau, a business intelligence start-up with Ph.D level chops in data visualization.

Who: Pat Hanrahan

What: Chief Technology Officer

Why: Last Thursday, Tableau launched a public version of the data visualization product it sells to the likes of Microsoft (MSFT), eBay (EBAY) and Google (GOOG). Tableau Public is a free service aimed at journalists, bloggers and academics who want to create original, data-driven graphics similar to those from major news outlets.

Where: tableausoftware.com (Web site); @tableau (Twitter); Seattle and San Francisco (analog places)

Who else: Tableau competes directly with huge enterprise software companies like Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP). Tableau Public, on the other hand, signals its entrance into a new market where the field is wide open.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve had mostly good jobs. I guess the worst was when I worked in a paper mill in college. I’d be on fire duty, which meant standing around with a hose and doing nothing. That said, if you go a week in a paper mill without a fire, you are doing well. All that dust accumulates and practically becomes explosive.

Geek Crush: Francis Crick, the molecular biologist. I got my Ph.D in biophysics, and he was one of the only physicists ever to be successful in biology. He also brought theory to biology at a time when it was unheard of, and I thought that was a really big thing. This was back in the late 1970s when it was basically impossible to be a theoretical biologist. I’m a big fan of the mixing of theory and practice. He kind of brought the two of those together.

Gadget of the Moment: You know, I’m a little bit of a gadget guy, but I’m more of a maker type. I like electronics, mechanics, chemistry–lots of things. My favorite recent project was building a cat wheel. It’s like a hamster wheel, but giant, four feet in diameter. I’ve got a Bengal cat. He’s very energetic.

Secret Fame: Pat has two technical Oscars for his founding work on the RenderMan software at Pixar.

Secret Shame: He can’t sing or dance to save his life.

Bio in 140 Characters

Pat grew up in Green Bay. Wisconsin made him a Ph.D chess champion. A self-taught programmer, now he’s a CS professor and entrepreneur.

The Five Questions

You say Tableau is in business intelligence, but what do you really do?

Well, Tableau’s center is really about answering questions with data. A lot of data visualization research is really about making pretty pictures, but we worked with psychologists and graphic designers to understand how people deal with visual data and process it. Let’s say you could answer a question by making a picture that shows the answer. If you want to know what the maximum selling product is, you make a picture where maximum stands out. If you want to know spatial distribution, you make a map. We create pictures that answer questions, but we do it for businesses that want to know things about their own metrics. It has been termed visual analysis–sort of doing a Q&A with data and images.

Who is using it well?

I’ve been really surprised by how many businesses use the sorts of metrics that work well with Tableau. We sell to category managers at eBay, for instance. Google uses us a lot for managing its data centers. We are not really vertical at all. Tableau is useful for anyone who has data.

A really interesting example is our relationship with Xbox. They record all the game play and then offer data through us to their game developers so that the developers can see what the actual game play experience is like. When are people dying? Are players spending time where the developers think they should? Stuff like that.

It is really everything. Some churches use us to keep track of who is donating what on Sundays. Most of our users are the Excel user; maybe they have data, but not a way to visualize it. It’s amazing to me how quantitative so many people are.

So how does Tableau Public differ from your enterprise product?

Well, the market we’re going after right now is individual content producers who might want to put data online. The New York Times (NYT) is often held up as an example of these good graphics, but an individual blogger doesn’t have a huge graphics department.

We offer the service for free, with some limits on number of views, and if the graphics take off, then maybe we’ve earned a paying customer. Also, on the free version, the data is public. It’s good for us because we get exposure, and it’s good for others because they get free access to the technology.

We aren’t immediately concerned about making money with Tableau Public. We already have a robust business selling to other businesses, so we sort of came to the freemium model backwards of most start-ups.

Can you guys really compete with the likes of IBM, SAP and Oracle?

Well, one big reason we get our customers is the whole visual analysis thing that is at the core of what we do. It’s unique to us. We’re also really well known for being easy to use and easy to deploy. A lot of times, what happens in enterprise software, you get these monolithic, giant systems that can be clunky and painful to add new features to. This can be true especially in the analysis arena.

The Dallas Cowboys are a good example. The sales manager there would go to his data guy and say, “I want to know how many jerseys I sold yesterday.” And they’d start giving all these technical answers about the data cube not being connected to the servers and so on. He was sold on us because he could plug in a complex spreadsheet, and we could tell him that answer in a very concrete way in a reasonable amount of time. It all goes back to having that Q&A with your data.

You are a professor of computer science and electrical engineering; you must have a pretty amazing early technology memory that turned you on to the sciences.

For me, it was just science in general, just being a nerd and a scientist. I remember when I bought my first chemistry set from a company now called Elemental Scientific. I remember that I was about eight or so, and most of the research I did was just so I would know what to buy. I saved up all my money and went to the store with my grandmother and came out with this giant box of retorts and flasks and all kinds of stuff. I had a great time the rest of the summer just doing reactions.

The other big thing with me and science was chess. I was the Wisconsin state chess champion in high school, and that is what taught me to really study things. I’ve always been more interested in ideas than technology I guess.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Touch-Up: Apple's iPad Improves Multitouch and Gesture Capabilities

Beth Callaghan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:19:09 +0000

Apple’s iPad, announced this morning, will definitely make waves in the e-reader market. Undoubtedly, much of its appeal will lie in its color display and ease of use. Much like other OS X applications, the user interface looks intuitive and appealing–very book-like. As seen on the big overhead screens at the presentation in Yerba Buena Center this morning, pages look as if they are written on paper.

“We use the e-pub format, the most popular open-book format in the world,” said Steve Jobs. “We think iPad is going to be a very popular e-reader not just for bestsellers, but for textbooks as well.”

Technology developed for the iPad’s e-reader application has already benefited other Apple programs. A new version of iWork, for example, was developed specifically for the iPad. Keynote, Pages and Numbers have all been optimized for multitouch. Numbers, in particular, has been souped-up; it now boasts a data-entry keyboard along with some 250 built-in functions. The software’s gesture capabilities put Excel to shame.

Apple is going to charge $9.99 for each program, and all three are compatible with their Mac versions.