iRows team moves to Google

By Vivek Puri

Couple of months back iRows team had indicated that they were looking for an early exit. Today Itai and Yoah from iRows posted on the iRows blog that they are officially joining Google and will be shutting down iRows on 31st December 2006. iRows users have been asked to move their spreadsheets over to Google Docs.

This year has been really low for the collaboration technologies. After hectic activity late last year and until start of this year, where we saw number of startups providing Office20 tools, things seemed to have cooled down now. Notable startups in the timespan include Writely, Trumba, EditGrid, iRows, Numsum, Thumstacks, Preezo, CentralDesktop, Zimbra, Jotspot, and Kiko. Writely, Jotspot, and now iRows have been gobbled up by Google. Kiko went the ebay way. Trumba now caters to enterprise users. Thumbstacks and Numsum have pretty much silent for past few months. So all we are left with is Zimbra, EditGrid, Preezo, and CentralDesktop. Was this our Office20?

Related -ive:
iRows looking for early exit
Trumba hikes price, changes focus group

Related +ive:
EditGrid Spreadsheets now has Live Chat
Zimbra introduces offline-online sync

Links:
iRows

3 Responses to “iRows team moves to Google”

  1. StartupSquad » Blog Archive » Writely in offline mode? Says:

    [...] The blog post aside I personally believe that Google would be launching this new feature sometime soon. Especially after the buyout of iRows team and the integration of Google Spreadsheets and Writely being completed last month, this seems to be a logical next step in terms of its strategy for its collaborative tools and Google Desktop. Besides this we have the upcoming launch of Vista+Office 2007 that adds the extra fire power. Earlier Zimbra became the first company to demonstrate offline version of its collaboration suite.  Google would have loved to be there, but maybe next time. [...]

  2. Tuyen Truong Says:

    I don’t think innovation in the collaboration space is slowing down: it’s just that the flagbearers are changing. There were many examples of new office tools being shown at the Office 2.0 Conference. In the project collaboration space, check out TeamWork Live (http://www.teamworklive.com/) for a service that we launched recently for easy and effective project collaboration.

  3. StartupSquad » Blog Archive » peanuts+butter for Numsum Says:

    [...] There is not much rationale behind the move from pbWiki. Since CentralDesktop has partnered with EditGrid, SocialText has the WikiCalc angle, Google has Jotspot and Google Spreadsheets+iRows, pbWiki had to get onto the spreadsheet game. Today pbWiki announced that it has partnered with Numsum for offering spreadsheet functionality to it’s wiki users. Numsum was one of the earliest players to emerge on the online spreadsheet collaboration scene almost 2 years back but has never really capitalized on it’s early lead and hence remains a not so feature rich option. I would have loved to see EditGrid out there, but…… [...]

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