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From the News Desk
Friday, 23. November 2007
Sabeer Bhatia Pushes InstaColl to Take On Microsoft
Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia has launched an online office productivity suite software product. Instant Collaboration Software Technologies (InstaColl), a Bangalore based startup company co-founded by Bhatia, has been working on collaborative documentation technology for a couple of years and the latest move marks the next step in its strategy of taking text editing, spreadsheets and presentations onto the Web.
Called Live Documents, the software offers functionalities similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint and allows users to work collaboratively on them online. It also offers enhanced features for working and making changes to documents offline.
The software supports any browser that supports Adobe Flash and runs on any computer operating system, said Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder and chief executive officer of InstaColl.
Live Documents uses Flash and Flex technologies from Adobe to provide users a better user experience than with the online office applications from Google, which are essentially stripped-down versions of Microsoft Office, Raghavendra said.
To use the document offline users will have to download a plug-in, and also have an MS Office suite or any other similar software installed on their machine. However, Bhatia promises even this will change in six months time, when the company comes up its own desktop version of the software that will be operating system agnostic.
In addition to the standard Office-like features, the software will also provide security and access rights to control who can access the documents, giving it an enterprise flavour. “Every document stored online is encrypted. Users have ability to assign digital rights to documents that enable read, write, copy, or print. You can even control how many times a document is viewed. For instance, if you are sharing a business plan document with someone, you can specify how many times the document can be read,” said Bhatia.
The company has already signed up its first corporate customer, Aricent (formerly Flextronics) for 7,000 users. Like Office, users will be charged a licence fee per user. But the licence fee “will be pennies to the dollar” Raghavendra said.
The pricing is around USD 50 per author licence per year or USD 10 a month and The software is free for individual use up to 100 MB. The software is currently available for technology preview at Live Documents’s official website.
With Live Documents Bhatia would hope to take on the Web pioneer Google Documents and the dominant force in the business, Microsoft, in the global market.
Called Live Documents, the software offers functionalities similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint and allows users to work collaboratively on them online. It also offers enhanced features for working and making changes to documents offline.
The software supports any browser that supports Adobe Flash and runs on any computer operating system, said Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder and chief executive officer of InstaColl.
Live Documents uses Flash and Flex technologies from Adobe to provide users a better user experience than with the online office applications from Google, which are essentially stripped-down versions of Microsoft Office, Raghavendra said.
To use the document offline users will have to download a plug-in, and also have an MS Office suite or any other similar software installed on their machine. However, Bhatia promises even this will change in six months time, when the company comes up its own desktop version of the software that will be operating system agnostic.
In addition to the standard Office-like features, the software will also provide security and access rights to control who can access the documents, giving it an enterprise flavour. “Every document stored online is encrypted. Users have ability to assign digital rights to documents that enable read, write, copy, or print. You can even control how many times a document is viewed. For instance, if you are sharing a business plan document with someone, you can specify how many times the document can be read,” said Bhatia.
The company has already signed up its first corporate customer, Aricent (formerly Flextronics) for 7,000 users. Like Office, users will be charged a licence fee per user. But the licence fee “will be pennies to the dollar” Raghavendra said.
The pricing is around USD 50 per author licence per year or USD 10 a month and The software is free for individual use up to 100 MB. The software is currently available for technology preview at Live Documents’s official website.
With Live Documents Bhatia would hope to take on the Web pioneer Google Documents and the dominant force in the business, Microsoft, in the global market.
