eXpresso Gets $2 Million To Grow An Online Office Suite
Nick Gonzalez
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eXpresso is an online collaboration tool around Excel spreadsheets. While a bit late to the game, they have plans to expand to other productivity tools as well. They will be announcing a new $2 million round of financing from Novus and Rocket Ventures on Monday, with the target of raising another $2 million soon. This is on top another couple million they’ve made off the sale of their original product, Smart DB, to Rocket Software (no relation to the venture group). The money will be put towards expanding their current Excel product and building a online Powerpoint application due out next Summer as well.
However, eXpresso isn’t the usual AJAX online spreadsheet competitor. Rather, it’s a series of collaboration tools and back-end database secret sauce wrapped around Microsoft’s own online spreadsheet editor, Microsoft Excel Web Component. This avoids a lot of the compatibility issues faced by other editors when they try to import Excel documents on to their platforms. The company seems oddly positioned by leaning heavily on Microsoft’s technology, but CEO George Langan assures me that they can continue to develop the component without Microsoft’s support and have a great deal of patented IP in the database system they run on. Microsoft has abandoned the technology themselves, announcing an end to development of the Office Web Components. Instead, they are focusing on developing new technologies around Microsoft Sharepoint.
The spreadsheet editor works smoothly, provides a familiar interface, and exposes a great deal of Excel’s desktop functionality online. You can edit cells, add formulas, sort, filter, and format. Google and Zoho have been aggressively adding a lot of these features themselves, but support auto-fill and charts as well. They also offer more applications. You can create a new file from within the program or sync one directly from Excel using their plug-in. eXpresso also offers file permissions (down to cell ranges), enables real time chat, and file management (version control, spreadsheet comparison). It’s currently free in beta, but will cost $10 or less per seat when it’s finally released into production.
This will also make a great training tool for students learning Excel and want to avoid the costly MS office suite
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You can exercise on eXpresso as well!
http://www.expressocorp.com/
Hope i get my $100000 funding for a new product i’m thinking.. Anyways dugg at
http://digg.com/tech_news/eXpr.....fice_Suite
try this http://mobigamut.com
This is great for competition with Google. Too bad when its out of beta and charging a $10 per month subscription fee the traffic will reach all time lows only family members will be paying for a subscription to something others offer for free. i.e. Google Docs, Zoho, etc…
maybe, we have seen a future, a bright future where you no longer have to buy software, you rent it. You won’t have to worry about illegal software, media, music etc… being on your PC
With more ubiquity of Internet I see growth in Cloud Computing.
How is eXpresso using Office Web Components? The licensing terms for OWC found here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q243006/ - specifically forbids using it as an option to access documents on the internet.
Am surprised to see that this company has been funded - expect to hear from MS on the licensing violation shortly!
Besides, there is another shortcoming with this model - OWC works only if you have a local copy of Excel on your system…so unlike Zoho, Google docs et al, you can use eXpresso only if you are using a Windows machine with Office already installed…
Too bad when its out,also pay is sucking.
Its good if its free. No way paying for something that i already got. ie google docs, zoho, etc
There’s no way people will pay $10 monthly spreadsheet. Other companies offer free spreadsheet. You can find free spreadsheet at Linux redhat or Linux.
eXpresso may need solid business model.
They didn’t do enough research and homework. They start company too early. Why ask such huge risk?
There’s tons free spreadsheet online. You find everywhere on web.
Did the small business book tell you don’t start small business by using exist product that will fail?
If you don’t believe it. I think you guys need to go back and take small business basics in college.
Good for students who cannot afford expensive MS office suite but are willing to learn excel. Thanks for posting and keeping us updated.
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Do u really think that there is enough market to another office suite?
You still need an Excel license so this isn’t an alternative to someone who can’t afford it. Also, looking at the limitations of the support section shows a lot of common Excel features are not supported, so the workaround is to open the file in desktop Excel. Wow.
What the point of running it in the web if Excel already install in your machine ? May as well use Excel for more power and speed !
Quick note: There will always be a version of eXpresso that is free. The professional version, which will include detailed audit trails, cell history alerts and along with a very cool way to compare spreadsheets will have a small monthly fee.
who’s gonna pay ?
So many tight-arses.
Lots of good comments but I think many are missing the point. Sure if you have a few spreadsheets, you don’t share them, they’re not critical documents, you don’t care who has had access or made changes to them and you don’t mind converting them to the inferior spreadsheet alternatives, go ahead and use Zoho, Google, etc.
If however, you’re a business user who cares about such things or you want to make sure no one has changed their NFL suicide pool pick after the results are in, then eXpresso is the answer.
FYI, businesses will pay for these capabilities.
What about OpenOffice (free software) ?
Wow, I dont get why there are so many negative comments. I really like using expresso. Its great when you are collaborating with other users. It is easy to use, I can access my spreadsheets on any PC, and I never lose controll over my spreadsheets. This is something I would pay for.
$10 only for a spreadsheet is something not worth, well there are few dedicated users i see, there are many online office suites like zoho, thinkfree, eDesk Online etc which provide many other applications apart from spreadsheets ….
eDesk Online - Free Online office suite