Ecommerce Blog

Small- and medium-sized businesses are the hot target markets right now, whether it’s voice and broadband or web services. The biggest opportunity, however, seems to be in hosted email, as Yahoo’s (YHOO) $350 million bet on Zimbra and Google’s (GOOG) Apps initiative demonstrate.

Rackspace, a San Antonio, Tex.-based managed hosting company, today made its own move to tap the opportunity by acquiring eight-year-old Webmail.us of Blacksberg, Va. The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but I suspect it was a substantial amount of money.

With some 70,000 companies as clients and 600,000 paying business email accounts, Webmail.us expects to have revenues of around $6 million in 2007. It is popular because of its spam protection features, quality service, and a web interface that is both rich and just generally impressive.

Rackspace, meanwhile, is rumored to be in the running for an IPO. Its acquisition of Webmail.us is another way to distinguish itself from being just a hosting company. Lew Moorman, senior vice president of corporate strategy and product development at Rackspace, believes the opportunity for offering email services to small- and medium-sized businesses is wide open, even with competition from Yahoo and Google.

TechCrunch also just announced a TechMeme related piece of news. New top blogs list coming out. That’ll be very interesting.

Adobe tonight is announcing that they’ve bought Virtual Ubiquity, makers of the very cool BuzzWord (which is now open for public trials). For the details, go and see TechCrunch’s post cause I’m too lazy to write up all the news word-for-word (I was driving when I got the call, so might have missed some important detail and we were both embargoed until 9 p.m. tonight — I’m sure this news will be covered in depth by tons of bloggers) I saw this at an Adobe event a few months ago and wondered why it hadn’t been acquired yet cause it’s a lot nicer than what other companies have shown me so far like Google’s Docs.

Adobe also announced a cool new widget that’ll make sharing files easy, especially PDFs, which will be automatically rendered by this new widget. I’ll play around with that and see how it compares to some of the others from places like Microsoft’s Folder Share and Box.net, among others.

I was briefed on Friday by Adobe and asked them whether this represented a new strategy for Adobe and whether or not we’d see more acquisitions. The non-committal answer on the other end of the phone told me the answer. Look for Adobe to make other moves in the near future to dive further into the deep end of the Web 2.0 Work 2.0 pool.

Don’t pay attention to what Adobe is doing here, though. Alone it doesn’t seem all that significant (even though, to me, it represents a real shift in strategy and an interesting one, to boot). But, rather, look at the bigger “Work 2.0″ trend that’s underway here. I doubt that any one company will end up owning a monopoly share the way that Microsoft really controlled Work 1.0. It’s rare that I see an office worker who isn’t using Microsoft’s Office. Walk through an airport and on almost system you’ll see Outlook/Excel/PowerPoint/Word.

But, I love the new collaboration software that’s coming along. The trend got moving with Skype, but includes things like Zoho’s Office suite, Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets, the recent purchase of Zimbra (now owned by Yahoo), Edit Grid, Etelos, Atlassian, Skitch, 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc), 30 Boxes, ThinkFree, SmartSheet, Spresent, Grand Central or Callwave, Vyew, Stixy, and Concept Share. I’m sure I’m missing stuff, please add in your own favorites to the comments here and I’ll keep updating my post.

Or, as Jake Luer says: anything that keeps 18 versions of the same doc out of my inbox (I asked everyone tonight about what services came to mind when I said “Work 2.0.”).

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Now, is Microsoft in trouble? No. Office is going to sell well for quite a few years still.

But there is blood in the water. If you try all these companies listed in this post you can work together with people in new ways that simply aren’t possible using Microsoft stuff.

Anyway, Adobe tonight just added onto the pile. This is significant. It’s amazing to me that Microsoft is letting all this competition build up strength and power. How long before people other than the “insiders/early adopters” start switching over to these newer services? I know I’m using Microsoft stuff less and less. There IS blood in the water even if only the early sharks can smell it.

UPDATE: More on TechMeme about these announcements.

UPDATE2: Microsoft itself is working on an online collaborative word processor, Mary Jo Foley says. Again, don’t get waylaid by the word processing announcements here. The bigger picture is more important.

Adobe tonight is announcing that they’ve bought Virtual Ubiquity, makers of the very cool BuzzWord. For the details, go and see TechCrunch’s post cause I’m too lazy to write up all the news word-for-word (I was driving when I got the call, so might have missed some important detail and we were both embargoed until 9 p.m. tonight — I’m sure this news will be covered in depth by tons of bloggers) I saw this at an Adobe event a few months ago and wondered why it hadn’t been acquired yet cause it’s a lot nicer than what other companies have shown me so far like Google’s Docs.

Adobe also announced a cool new widget that’ll make sharing files easy, especially PDFs, which will be automatically rendered by this new widget. I’ll play around with that and see how it compares to some of the others from places like Microsoft and

I was briefed on Friday by Adobe and asked them whether this represented a new strategy for Adobe and whether or not we’d see more acquisitions. The non-committal answer on the other end of the phone told me the answer. Look for Adobe to make other moves in the near future to dive further into the deep end of the Web 2.0 Work 2.0 pool.

Don’t pay attention to what Adobe is doing here, though. Alone it doesn’t seem all that significant (even though, to me, it represents a real shift in strategy and an interesting one, to boot). But, rather, look at the bigger “Work 2.0″ trend that’s underway here. I doubt that any one company will end up owning a monopoly share the way that Microsoft really controlled Work 1.0. It’s rare that I see an office worker who isn’t using Microsoft’s Office. Walk through an airport and on almost system you’ll see Outlook/Excel/PowerPoint/Word.

Or, as Jake Luer says: anything that keeps 18 versions of the same doc out of my inbox (I asked everyone tonight about what services came to mind when I said “Work 2.0.”).

But, I love the new collaboration software that’s coming along. The trend got moving with Skype, but includes things like Zoho’s Office suite, Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets, the recent purchase of Zimbra (now owned by Yahoo), Edit Grid, Etelos, Atlassian, Skitch, 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc), 30 Boxes, ThinkFree, SmartSheet, Spresent, Grand Central or Callwave, Vyew, and Concept Share. I’m sure I’m missing stuff, please add in your own favorites to the comments here and I’ll keep updating my post.

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Now, is Microsoft in trouble? No. Office is going to sell well for quite a few years still.

But there is blood in the water. If you try all these companies listed in this post you can work together with people in new ways that simply aren’t possible using Microsoft stuff.

Anyway, Adobe tonight just added onto the pile. This is significant. It’s amazing to me that Microsoft is letting all this competition build up strength and power. How long before people other than the “insiders/early adopters” start switching over to these newer services? I know I’m using Microsoft stuff less and less. There IS blood in the water even if only the early sharks can smell it.

Greg Linden, the founder of news aggregation service Findory is shutting down the service on November 1, 2007, according to a blog post on his personal blog. It is a shame!

Findory was riding the “information personalization” trend that is only going to gain importance in coming years. The excessive amount of content is making discovery of information a challenge. Findory shutdown was long time coming. Linden had announced in January 2007 that it was time to let Findory go. I am surprised it took so long.

“Though it will not be Findory doing so, I continue to believe that the future will be personalized,” Linden writes as the epitaph of his start-up. Good luck Greg!

What a fun week. Milan has proven I can love something more than I love blogging. Well, heck, Twitter and Flickr proved that too (that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my online time this week, check out my new photos — we had a fun day yesterday with Dave Winer. In two weeks with my new camera I’ve already made 36 GBs worth of images, whew! Then compare to Patrick’s photos. He’s pretty good with the 5D).

Twitter has really turned into something special. It’s how I keep in touch with my friends and the world. I find I like spending a lot more time there than on my blog because of the immediacy.

So, let’s get back into it. Tonight there’s a couple companies announcing news. Come back at shortly after 9 p.m.

One of the companies speaks to the future of development. Four years ago I predicted that within 10 years very few people would be doing standard old Win32 style development. At the time I thought that Vista would be a lot more popular than it turned out to be and that the world would shift toward .NET development. I was wrong. The truth is that Web work is becoming far more popular than i thought it would be. Every startup lately is showing me Web work and, while some use .NET, most use LAMP on their servers.

Anyway, see ya tonight and don’t miss the Photowalking at Stanford University tomorrow. It looks like a huge crowd will be there.