The Hindu : Front Page : ZCubes will soon have innovative web-driven spreadsheet

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Sunday, Dec 30, 2007
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ZCubes will soon have innovative web-driven spreadsheet

Special Correspondent

It will support nearly 1,000 mathematical functions

The free suite of tools became popular with lay users and professionals
ZCubes is one of the top 100 “Always On” private companies in the U.S.

Bangalore: Almost one year ago, The Hindu was the first in India to highlight the unusual web-based tool for lay users that was created by a Houston (Texas) U.S.-based start-up fuelled by ‘desi’ brains.

Then the “ZCubes” ( www.zcubes.com) was the world’s first website where one could seamlessly browse, search, edit, paint, draw, hand-write, watch, listen, publish, type, print, teach, learn, and work — all with a few clicks and drag-n-drop operations, without any specialised knowledge. (‘One-stop Cybershop for creativity,’ The Hindu, January 22, 2007).

The free suite of tools became popular with lay users as well as professionals, who liked the convenience of creating complex art work on a PC, with just a mouse as pencil, brush and palette.

Now, Joseph Pally, IIT-Madras graduate and the founder-Chief Executive of Z Cubes, has shared with The Hindu, details of the company’s latest product, CALCI, an innovative web-driven spreadsheet or calculating engine, that can be used to power any document or web page created at ZCubes.

In the process it goes where no spreadsheet has gone before — supporting nearly 1,000 mathematical functions (where typical spreadsheets support around 400) and allowing complex calculations to go ‘live’ inside applications such as a presentation, even ‘floating’ in a three-dimensional space.

Final testing

The CALCI is undergoing final testing right now (you can see a demo at this link: http://home.zcubes.com/?show=calci.htm) and will be fully functional by January end. By Sunday, a prominent link will be added to the home page at www.zcubes.com.

In the year gone by, ZCubes has been recognised as one of the top 100 “Always On” private companies in the U.S. with strong technology and investment potential, in a poll by peer enterprises. It has opened small development centres in Thiruvananthapuram and Jaipur ( Mr. Pally belongs to Ernakulam) and many of the company’s latest offerings are fuelled by this India-connection.

The CALCI and other recent add-ons to the basic Z Cubes offering are some of the most blogged applications in the U.S., lending weight to developers’ claim that they are in fact the vanguard of what is being called Web 3.0.

Many users are only just enjoying the web-based sharing that was central to Web 2.0 offerings such as MySpace and YouTube and their many regional clones. From being participants in such enterprises, Web 3.0 is seen as a development where users seamlessly form part of the Web by harnessing its huge resources of data and tools.

A ‘cool’ cyber-age calculator might just be the foot in the door that leads to Web. 3.0 and beyond.

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