LinkAngel.com

Continuing on the theme of the last post of incorrectly programmed banners, let’s look at an example of incorrect linkage. See the Yahoo.com homepage post on Spiderman which led to a missing page at USAToday.com. It would be quite interesting to see a study on the impact incorrect links has on revenue for an organization. Yahoo.com fixed this problem in a matter of a few minutes.

If you use a free email account like Yahoo.com or Hotmail.com, you usually see some sort of advertisement inside your email account interface which is what keep the service free. Advertisers who display their banners on such service get to show targeted advertisement to viewers and pay substantial sums to reach out to millions. But, often a great banner is accompanied with unexpected or unplanned behavior. For example I saw a banner of the Bank of America Small Business Online Community service while using Hotmail.com on January 10, 2007.

Intrigued, I clicked on the banner and nothing happened. Assuming that I did not click correctly or that I was supposed to click on one of 4 tabs within the banner, I tried clicking on the tabs. Again - nothing. But I saw that the tabs changed color to whatever I clicked last. I now tried right clicking on the banner and opening it in a new window. Voilà! - I land on the Bank of America Small Business Online Community site.

Well, I am sure that most people who clicked on this banner clicked a few times and just moved on. The Bank still would have had to pay and some part of advertising budget would have been wasted. The lesson here is to make easy to click advertisements with simple behaviors that have been tested extensively before turning them live.

Zoho.com is a new service that has been slowly becoming more and more popular since 2006. This not so well known online service offers a comprehensive office productivity tool set much like MS Office, completely online.

This includes Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Planner, Zoho Chat, Zoho Creator, Zoho Meeting. In essence, the applications cover almost everything that people are likely to look for in an office productivity suite.

While Zoho cannot replace traditional computer based office productivity applications just yet, the strides made by this online service can certainly fulfill the needs of a certain section of people, for example people who like using portable devices such as the Nokia N800 tablet or for people who tend to travel excessively.

Zoho Writer actually works pretty nicely and so does Zoho Notebook. I suppose these two applications are the most immediately useful applications. If you do not have an internet connection or a slow internet connection, do not even think of using this product just as yet

Addendum:
Zoho Writer allows you to work on your documents offline. It utilizes the Google Gears browser extension.