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Zoho adds another feature to its online office-suite (read my previous review). Zoho Notebook allows users to collect web-snippets, images, notes, flash-based video, RSS-feeds and documents from other Zoho-applications in a single place. currently not available to the public, Zoho Notebook supports collaborative access and will be controlled by Firefox- & IE-plugins.

Nexo is an easy-to-use, yet feature-rich collaboration & content-sharing tool. Nexo allows closed or open user-groups to create comments, polls, list, calendars, feeds, maps, directories, photo-galleries, web-snippets and more. pages support detailed permission-settings and customized page-layouts. even better, all content is exposed via RSS.

Walter Rafelsberger introduces mawih, a wiki-based mail-client. mawih seems to fetch incoming mail to wiki-pages, which should allow users to annotate/collaborate effectively on mail. this could be very useful groups of users processing a shared email-adress (f.e. office@, support@, admin@…).

I just happened to read about partyStrands, a music-service demo’ed at yesterdays TechCrunch 8 party in NYC. partyStrands tries to replace oldschool club-DJs with a collaborative, SMS-based voting-system. to get things started, venues hook up a video-beamer or -screen with a PC running the locally installed partyStrands software (the music-library isn’t provided by partyStrands, venues have to provide their own media-library - and of course pay royalties for public performance). during the party, on-screen instructions encourage the party-crowd to join the voting by texting their song-requests to a special phone-number provided by the service (which is, of course, a value added number). partyStrands not only cues up the requested tune (if available, that is), but also considers the request for auto-generatig a playlist fitting the “overall-mood” of party-attendees (sounds a lot like a collaborative music-recommendation engine). other than song-votes, users may also send greetings & MMS-pictures for public display. in addition, partyStrands is marketing the display-estate for advertising to 3rd parties - revenue from both ads and messaging-fees are split with the venue.

I don’t see partyStrands as a DJ-replacement accepted by the average club-head anytime soon. the service is probably better aimed at DJ-less lounges & bars which are playing the same old compilation-CDs over and over again. and of course tech-events like mentioned TechCrunch party

update: a friend of mine just told me that he had seen a similar setup in a London-club recently, people seemed to be kinda into it. what do you think about systems like partyStrands? any chance to get into the groove while fumbling away on your mobile? or, imagine a sequencer-based system that could acutally mix (i.e beatmatch etc.) tracks? now that sounds interesting to me…

I haven’t been using online collaboration- & email-suite Zimbra until now, but todays announcement sure sounds interesting: Zimbra is about to receive a local cache-feature, which will allow users to access email even when being offline - auto-syncing included. however, the official blog-entry doesn’t go into detail on how this will be implemented. recently introduced online-PIM Scrybe seems to realize similar functionality by using a flash-based cache.

solving the offline-dilemma might be crucial for the success of web-based office-apps in the nearer future (”network anywhere, anytime” doesn’t seem very realistic, esp. considering airplanes). what seems to miss is a general, standards-based approach on solving this issue (mabye browser-integrated?). while this spawns lots of different, incompatible on/offline-synching mechanisms, it’s at least a way for upcoming products to differnetiate themselves.

Competitious is a collaborative tool, helping project-teams to track competing websites in their market. just enter URL and name of a site and watch Competitious automatically collect traffic-data and related blog-posts both from the companies’ blog and from all over the web. users can create feature-lists to compare several services in a feature matrix. comparative traffic-data is graphed using Alexaholic (therefor limited to max. 5 sites per graph). users can track several independet projects and may share data with team-members. a bookmarklet is used to collect data from other sources - those so-called “clippings” are distributed among the team via RSS. keeping things simple & lean, Competitious might be a great timesaver for everybody in need to staying up-2-date in web(2.0)-space.

experimenting with Splice for the first time is quite an experience: using a flash-based online-sequencer, users arrange audio-loops and soundbites very similar to desktop apps like Reason or Fruity Loops. editing-functionality is reduced to the basics: clips are looped and automatically beat-matched on up to eight tracks which can only be adjusted in volume and panning (no effects or EQ). changing the BPM-rate requires the sequencer to take a break resynching the tracks, signatures aside the omnipresent 4/4 aren’t supported. users can record new samples directly into the flash-application by using a microphone.

while the sequencer itself isn’t much more than a very impressive demo of flash’s multimedia-capabilities, Splice emphasizes on community-features. users offer their creations for being remixed by others and share samples among each other - all that under Creative Commons-licensing. besides 1.000’s of user-created clips & songs, Splice integrates the CC-based audio-database created by the freesoundproject.

thanks to lifehacker I received an invitation to HiveLive’s currently private beta. HiveLive is an online-collaboration tool allowing closed or open user-groups to discuss and share any kind of information. HiveLive organizes data in ‘hives’ - databases which can contain various types of items, f.e. blog-posts, contacts, bookmarks or photos. users are encouraged to create new item-categories and share them with other users. top user-created categories include ‘book-review’, ‘restaurant-tip’ or ‘movie-review’. hives can be kept private, invite-only or public to all users. data is posted to hives using a bbcode/wiki-like markup, which probably might scare off beginners - I’ld like to see a good richtext-editor instead. otherwise the user-interface looks clean and neat.

if you want to try out HiveLive, check if there are any lifehacker-beta-accounts left…