Exclusive EditGrid conversation with founder - David Lee
During last week whilst working through our first Lab series I had an opportunity to talk to David Lee founder of EditGrid. As part of that conversation David provided me with and Exclusive demo of the new version of EditGrid (Beta16) online via a Desktop sharing service.
First of all let me give a brief review of some of the information David provided me with. First of all EditGrid now boasts over 10,000 registered users which has been growing steadily over the last 10 months or so. In doing so the team have had to significantly upgrade their server facilities to a more distributed or clustered environment in order to cope with the growth they are experiencing. The result is that EditGrid is now providing a much more responsive and scalable service, not that the team won't be scaling this further as new more demanding features are introduced over the next few months etc..
Something else that most are not aware of is that EditGrid itself is actually built on opensource products. A core element of EditGrids back end is the code base of Gnumeric, take a look at their credits page for more info. This has a number of benefits, first Gnumeric is a mature spreadsheet engine and has been built on over many years by many open-source developers. Secondly most of the required basic functions needed in a spreadsheet are already coded in a very efficient and fast engine, leaving EditGrid to concentrate on the web and collaborative innovation. It is also good to see the guys crediting Dan Bricklin for his inspirational spreadsheet work and the Open source community in general, always good to remember your roots.
One other note about differences EditGrid has taken around $100K split by venture from the States and the other 50% matched by the Innovation and Technology Fund of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, for an important start-up funding, I think this is a level headed financing approach.
One thing that really struck me when talking to David was the EditGrid team stance, they come across as very helpful and always willing to listen and accept ideas and feedback. When I spoke to David about how they were approaching the market place, his attitude is to make as many friends as possible. In some ways this reflects the open-source mentality of building a commons, and I believe EditGrid definitely has that as a central meme. In other words rather than just trying to get as many registered users as they can, they are instead focussing on building a first class community around the service. I think this is exactly what is required to make this successful, especially competing with the other offerings in this market place. So David and his team is busy getting together with different businesses and service providers out there, he expects to be able to announce integrations with SalesForce, Google with their geo data in addition to existing work around GYM search and others. Because the API on EditGrid is open I would expect the possibility for many plugins to emerge from the community over the next 12 months.
David and the team are also working with vertical applications of their product, for example financial data trading players in the UK. One example is where customers are using EditGrid to manage very small trading/brokerage markets, too small to warrant a full scale development investment, but just the right size for collaborative EditGrid spreadsheets.This illustrates the emergence of small trading communities that were not financially viable previously. This is a great use of the product taking the spreadsheet to places it could not previously reach. In many ways this fits with David's long tail vision for the product. It also is a good indication the service is delivering new value that was not there before, always a good sign.
David's vision for EditGrid shows it delivering business I.T. project needs just below the SAAS sector (middle sector) of the long tail curve. EditGrid services this part of the tail via it's simplicity of access, familiarity with it's operation (a spreadsheet metaphor) and very low cost. Similar in many ways to how spreadsheets are currently employed inside organisations today. Spreadsheets help fill in the gaps that MIS systems always leave, EditGrid takes this further and provides an even more powerful tool for business information aggregation, processing and collaboration on demand.
Coming shortly is the Beta 16 version of EditGrid, past this towards the end of the year will see EditGrid coming out of beta (late December) and into live subscriptions etc.. In the new year we can expect perhaps other licenses such as OEM as well as more channel partners. In fact it looks as though David is building a healthy ecosystem around EdirGrid which is definitely the way to go.
One area where EditGrid has been a little weak and sometimes frustrating is their documentation. David has promised a new community based portal approach which will help tackle some of those short falls over the next couple months. We can look forward to a better looking and more organised source of information and documentation (I actually got a sneak preview it looked rather 37Signals'ish, very cool!).
David also told me they are working to add a complete REST style API in addition to their existing SOAP API which is good news for some of the other web integrators out there. Something else coming with the new version is realtime data updates, although to begin with the update rate can be set manually, as time passes this will become absolutely realtime linking and embedding which is a powerful new architecture for agile data structures on the web. It is a kind of hyper Publish and Subscribe for the 21st century.
One of the features I really like is that the charts built into EditGrid have permalinks. These permalinks enable one to link a graph in say a blog post and it will automatically update as the data in the spreadsheet underneath it changes (assuming the page is refreshed of course). This is a really neat feature and I can imagine numerous applications for this not just in blogs but across the enterprise also.
EditGrid also provides a built in conversation mechanism to enable collaborators to converse whilst working with their spreadsheets. At the moment this chat facility is limited to EditGrid users, but could of course be extended to Jabber GChat etc.. later.
David also showed me an interesting application of EditGrid. They built an web based event management example using EditGrid and some of the new functionality. The back end data was a spreadsheet that provided data storage such as registered users, events schedule etc.. and the front end was a few PHP scripts that connected to the spreadsheets using the SOAP API. Thus a whole application could be built very simply around the spreadsheet data and the team are looking to make this kind of assembly as simple as possible. The key benefit of going this route building on demand, agile projects, is that the data is all based around a familiar metaphor - the spreadsheet,. Thus removing the extra complexities of much of the graphical user interface design that we all have to deal with building web apps and their back end. Once David and the team roll out the new collaboration features and community portal, I expect these sort of applications to be popping up like wild fire.
In conclusion I think EditGrid is a great product and it is definitely leading the pack as far as web based spreadsheets. But it is so much more than just a web based spreadsheet service, It is offering us a tantalizing glimpse of what is just over the horizon for next generation business and office folk. Business collaboration is just about to receive a well needed adrenaline injection and it couldn't come from a better bunch of folks...
*Update - One feature I forgot to mention was that because your spreadsheet is available in different formats using a permalink with different extensions, you can use the xml version combined with an XSLT file (An XML style sheet) to transform the sheet into a web page. There are some good examples linked to here.
Technorati Tags: EditGrid, Gnumeric, Office2.0, OpenSource, passionate, Spreadsheet, web2.0
