October 11, 2006

Preezo Enters Online Office Race

Michael Arrington

25 comments »

Google and Zoho aren’t the only companies making waves in the online office race. New startups are launching regularly that emulate one or more products in Microsoft’s Office suite.

Preezo
just threw their hat in the ring with their soon-to-be-released PowerPoint clone. We’ve tracked a number of these products, including Zoho, Empressr, Thumbstacks. We’ve also tracked a few companies that just handle putting the presentation online after creation with a desktop application - our favorite is Slideshare, which lets users upload PowerPoint presentations to a YouTube like service.

Preezo clones the PowerPoint interface very well (see screen shot below), and assigns a permanent URL to the presentation. Presentations can also be embedded into other websites. At this point though it’s more of a demo than a working product. Only a few users have been let in to test it, there is no import feature to upload PowerPoint files and there are no tools to create animations or drawings. These are all features that are being built, but there’s no release schedule.

What’s most impressive about Preezo is that it’s the creation of a single developer, Jason Roberts. Given the number of established competitors in the market already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jason quickly join a bigger company. If that’s the case, Jason just built himself one hell of a resume.

Sign up on the Preezo home page to be notified of launch. Or, perhaps more likely, get news of Jason’s future employment on the Preezo blog.

  • Sphere It

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Preezo, 8 Social Networking Sites for Men who love Men « Technically Speaking
  2. thefitzpatricks.net » More On-line Presentation Tools…while Presenter celebrates its seventh birthday…
  3. nonsmokingarea.com » Blog Archive » Preezo: online presentation builder
  4. BarCampLA alum Jason Roberts on TechCrunch « ‘Round the Bar Campfire
  5. My slideshow application for a Web 2.0 Office « dsgdev
  6. Preezo » Three:Twenty Interactive
  7. Mi otro blog… » Blog Archive » Office 2.0: Algunas aplicaciones
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Comments

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  1. Startups.in/India

    What are the odds?
    (i) Jason quits on Preezo and joins Goog (Gtalkr like ?)
    (ii) Preezo is auctioned off on eBay
    (iii) Preezo evolves into a rock solid app and gets acquired by G/Y

  2. Dan

    I would never blackmail her….what are we gonna figure out communicating this way?? Sorry I have a hard time thinking like a teen, but I’m still here.

  3. Dan

    wtf?

  4. Dan

    I’m always the one in the dark, way, way, way out on a limb for her….I’ve risked everything already…I never lied to her untill she said goodbye….after that I had no choice but to try anything or fade away. I’m not a stalker. I love her…she has a better memory than she lets on.. she knows I do.

  5. Michael Arrington

    huh?

  6. Startups.in/India

    Dan, u drunk? ;-)

  7. Rian

    Either he’s drunk or he got a bit too emotionally attached to the TechCrunch blog ..

    I like the idea of the online office apps.. especially with this many different companies working on it there’s bound to be a lot of productive competitiveness.. which (hopefully) means better apps and more features!

    Microsoft office and Open Office wont be the sole applications to use anymore, you can pick whichever you like.. Awaiting the “Microsoft Open Document Format” we’ll even be able to pick freely between all these applications.

  8. cram

    So there is space for another sun in the online office universe? Good. I was getting a bit doubtful, what with Zoho and Google in a frenzy to out-office each other.

    We are also in the online word processor space (even though we prefer to call it an authoring tool), the difference being that we are focused on local-language services.

  9. Jhatak Free Web Meeting Client

    The SaS ( Software as a Service) model is getting very popular with Web 2.0 companies.

  10. Web Site Builder

    Go Jason!

  11. Pranav

    Mike,

    There’s an open-source version also available. The sample app is in .NET and will run only on IE. Nonetheless, pretty interesting.

    Pranav.

  12. Pranav

    Sorry…forgot the url:

    http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pic.....tion.shtml

  13. larry

    Michael, now that you’re going back to cover older Web 2.0 companies (i.e. your nicely done Payscale writeup), you should include http://www.gOffice.com in your reviews, as they were probably the first company in this space.

  14. vijayendra

    Preezo has out with a powerpoint clone just at the right time. Take a look at this sceanrio. Google no doubt wants to take over the online office suit sometime soon. They have Writely a la MS-Word clone and Spreadsheets an Excel clone. Whats missing? You guessed it the PowerPoint.

    Now, is Google taking note of Preezo? All Google has to do is just gooble up Preezo and include it the Writely, Spreadsheet group.

  15. n2000

    Check EditGrid. Its an excellent online spreadsheet application: http://www.editgrid.com/ based an open source engine called Gnumeric http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/