Google and iRows

From TechCrunch:

Google Takes Out Ajax Spreadsheet iRows

A popular Hebrew blog is reporting that the two founders of Israeli startup iRows have been hired by Google. Along with ZohoSheet and NumSum, iRows is one of a few online Ajax spreadsheets that competes with Google’s own Excel-clone. The blog reports that the founders will retain the intellectual property in iRows, but that the site will be shut down.

If this is accurate, the deal is a mirror of the Google-Gtalkr deal from May 2006, where the founders, brothers Wes and Dudley Carr, joined Google and agreed to close the site down.

This is a shame. iRows was one of the best online spreadsheets out there. Now there are fewer choices for people, and that’s bad.

[tags]irows, google, techcrunch[/tags]

Leaves

Out on a walk today, the ground all covered with leaves. Thought it would make a nice wallpaper for my PC desktop – and it does – and cropped a bit for this blog’s header.

Leaves

Will leave it up for a bit before returning to my rotating header, which this will be a part of.

LGSearch

One of the frustrations of my job is when I am searching the web for information on what other councils are up to in my field. The trouble is that, by and large, I only really want to find results from the websites of local authorities in the UK.

So, using Google Coop, I’ve created my own. The main difficulty I had was tracking down the websites of every council in the country, but once that was done (and I have saved the list in about five different locations, just in case), it was all downhill.

I’ve called it LGSearch. Hopefully others will find it useful too.

[tags]local government, search, lgsearch, google coop, cse[/tags]

FeedDemon Release Candidate 1

Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.

One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!