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Showing posts from October, 2006

FINALLY, WHO WON GOOGLE WORDMASTERS CONTEST?

Google organized Wordmasters Challenge in several cities in India recently (30th September,2006). Word is that close to 3000 people participated in this event. (See Harshad's report on the event here ) The winners are supposed to be declared today.Wonder who won it and what did the winning entries look like. Does anyone have a clue on this? Updated:Nov 9 , 2006:I just decided to send a self-addressed-stamped envelope to Google. If and when I get a response, I will update this post. Updated:Nov 16 , 2006: One week and no response received. Yes, a self-addressed stamped envelope with a covering note was indeed sent to Google's Bangalore office on the address specified in the event leaflet. Snailmailed on 9th Nov. So much for the mission to organise the world's information and make it accessible to everyone :) Updated: Nov 29, 2006: I did send a second letter to Google, this time by courier, assuming the previous postal mail failed to reach them. The contents of my letter to G

WHO USES ONLINE WORD PROCESSING ANYWAY?

Google has come out with a new service called Docs & Spreadsheets.(The docs part comes from a company called Writely that Google acquired some time back) That left me wondering. Who is the targetted user for this? A person who has a PC and internet access, but not have a word processing programme. Or the roving sales guys? Appears quite an unlikely scenario. Luckily, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not about word processing or about doing spreadsheets. It is about collaboration, and word processing, if I may say, is just incidental.In typical Google style of understatement, this is quite feature rich, allows multiple users to collaborate on the same doc and mail it off . The 'docs' part is reasonably okay, but I still cannot visualize a scenario where I would use it.It is compatible with other Word Processing such as MS Word and Star Office etc, allows you to save the doc in PDF mode(a good value add). The spreadsheet part, to say the least, is quite sad. As Amit Agarwal