Do you tweet? Is hashtag part of your vocabulary? Are you constantly being followed or are you the one doing the following? Or, are you a Web extrovert and crave more friends?

Whatever the case, you can follow expressocorp on Twitter or connect with us on Facebook.  With Twitter, you’ll receive short updates from our team. We’ll tweet about things like development, product announcements, user tips, and more. It’s painless, and we promise not to overtweet.

On eXpresso’s Facebook page, we would like to see our users participate in open discussions, in addition to seeing announcements, event info, and more. Please check out our page and follow us by becoming a fan.

Thanks and let the dialogue begin!

Note: We’ll tend to use both of these services to communicate informal information that is better suited for dialogue in these forms of media. Please continue to get official news through the eXpresso website, our email newsletter, and our blog.

Tags: twitter, facebook, expresso, expressocorp, office, collaboration, new, announcements

Hollywood’s annual award season just wrapped up here in California, and I have to tell you about my favorite part.  I love it when the Best Actress award is about to be announced, and they have that split screen that shows the faces of all of the hopefuls. The music wells up and the presenter finally reads the name of the winner.  Here’s the good part.  The best actresses in the world perform some of the world’s worst acting.  The winner acts surprised, even though she figured she ought to win all along.  The losers act like they are not surprised at all and that they are happy for the winner, even though they fully expected to be accepting the statue.  Oh, and then they say, “It was an honor just to be nominated.”   Some are better than others at this little drama, but usually it is hilarious.  I guess this happens to some degree with each category, but the actresses are the best because they try so hard.

Well, I can’t act, so I’ll get to my point.  eXpresso has been nominated for Information Week’s Top 50 Start Ups of 2009, and I want us to win!  It is an honor to be nominated, but let’s not kid ourselves.  Being selected is much better.  The Top 50 will be based on reader votes and Information Week’s analysis of several criteria including innovation and the companies’ ability to inject new ways of doing things into business processes.   I hope you’ll agree that this describes eXpresso perfectly.  We have not reinvented the Microsoft Office Suite; rather, we have added a collaboration framework that creates a new way of interacting with the files and your team.  Innovation involves adding new ideas to what works, and that has been exactly our approach.

So, will you help us?  Please vote for eXpresso.  It only takes a minute and it will save me from doing that resigned-smile, polite-clapping thing.

Vote for eXpresso Today!

No matter how your look at it, this is a wonderful season. People of all viewpoints reflect on the past year and make resolutions for the New Year; we treasure family relationships and celebrate friendships. For my part, I couldn’t be happier. eXpresso is growing by leaps and bounds, and people like you are benefitting from eXpresso and fueling our success. Thank you.

Many of you are focused on your own businesses and careers. That’s not only understandable, but admirable. And of course, I wish you all the best for the New Year. But after 59 years of relationships with family members, my kids, friends, customers, and business associates, let me share my best advice: Pay forward!

We have all benefitted by a teacher, a relative, friend, or colleague who went out of their way to help us with absolutely no expectation of return of benefit. Instead of paying them back, we can best thank them by paying forward: extending their wisdom and caring to someone we think can use a boost.

Paying Forward means contributing to someone’s success, not because there’s anything in it for you, but because someone helped us and now we can contribute some insight or support for the next guy or gal, without expectation of credit. Paying Forward in the New Year is one of my annual resolutions. I hope you will make it one of yours too!

On the business front, sincere thanks to you for supporting eXpresso this past year. We continue to get emails from users who are discovering new uses for Excel by sharing and managing the files in eXpreesso. That’s very gratifying, and I hope you will keep us up on your “inventions”. There are exciting things planned for eXpresso in 2009 that I think you will really like, including adding Word and PowerPoint. Next year will see tremendous growth for us, and I’m glad you will be a part of it.

I wish you a happy holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

Tags: happy, holidays

Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the first phone?  He actually invented the first two phones. The first phone was simply assembled parts until it connected to the second. Similarly, one might question, “Which sucker bought the first fax machine?”  After all, a fax machine is only valuable when it can transmit to another.  It has little to no value without the existence of others.

Social networks evolve in a similar way. The first person to use MySpace or Facebook didn’t get much out of it until others joined in. Social networks are built on the principle that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is a fundamental aspect of Web 2.0 – also referred to as the social Web.

As a social application, eXpresso is about bringing people together to perform document collaboration in the context of business. The adoption curve of eXpresso follows much the same pattern as demonstrated by the above technologies. And as social technologies reach mass appeal, they become less about looking like the future and more about defining a better future.

At eXpresso, we are creating a future where people can collaborate on the same Microsoft® Office files at the same time. Once people use eXpresso, they wonder how they managed without it. The same can be said of other social technologies. Today, we could not imagine our world without phones, fax machines, or even social networks.

Tags: phone, fax, social, collaboration, business, Microsoft, Office, expresso, online, word, powerpoint, excel, shared

Depending where your political tendencies fall, some may say this was a close election and some may say it was not.  No matter where you fall, the numbers do not lie. If you are curious what those numbers are, we’ve got a spreadsheet for you.

Although it will not change the outcome, did you know two states have yet to be declared? Do you know how many total states went for Obama and how many for McCain? One state voted two-thirds McCain.  Think you know which one? Do you know where Obama gathered 93% of the popular vote? Want to see how the results would be if the electoral votes were distributed differently?

Well, we have put together a spreadsheet with all the necessary electoral and popular vote data available.  If you would like to see it or save a copy for yourself, simply sign in to eXpresso and add files@expressocorp.com to you list of contacts. We’ll share it with you, and you can download it and do whatever you want with it.

Oh yeah, the best thing is, when the last two states get declared and you go to view the file online, we can update the results without having to send you a new file. Real-time collaboration in the cloud rocks!

But if you are still undecided about our service, eXpresso is the only service you can use to natively edit Excel files in your browser or on your desktop. Nobody else offers this level of collaboration with Excel.  So if you never thought it was possible to share and edit Excel files in the cloud, to that we simply say, “Yes we can!”

Sign Up Today (30-Day Free Trial)

Tags: 2008, US, Presidential, Election, Results, spreadsheet, files, excel, cloud, collaboration, expresso

The Facebook saga is both fascinating and paradoxical. Facebook has drawn millions of users to its site and has become a pop culture icon. The giant asterisk to this success is they have yet to figure out how to monetize it (in other words, how do you get paid – how do you make money?).

The CEO of Facebook (pictured below) says it will take 5 to 15 years to figure out how to monetize social networking applications. He says his focus is on growth, not revenue. (See also this report suggesting Facebook has a growing cash problem, despite getting hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.)

In the meantime, Facebook and its poorly- or non-monetized brethren (YouTube, Twitter, et al) continue to break new ground by influencing how people behave and spend their time. In fact, our own consultants and venture capitalists urged us to utilize social networking when we rolled out our SaaS application last year.

So, I opened a Facebook account and we produced a few cute YouTube videos. Voila! We generated over 10,000 eXpresso users over the past year. With each paying $79, that would be a very nice return! Trouble is, these users weren’t used to paying anything for Web applications and most opted for our “free” version.

What has to be frustrating for the social networking companies is that their users don’t believe they should pay for their services.

Fortunately for us, there is a marked distinction between social networking sites and SaaS (software-as-a-service) business applications. I think a lot of industry pundits and investors are beginning to understand that although social and business applications both play in the “Cloud”, their respective users play – and pay — differently.

But there’s a silver lining. Any complaint about social applications “training” millions of users that their online experience must be “free” is offset by having a generation of people now comfortable with, and trusting of, online applications. That, combined with the legitimization of the SaaS business space by pioneers like Salesforce.com, sets the stage for a computing sea change that will dwarf the social networking phenomenon.

The next generation of business applications will be based – and used – in the Cloud. They won’t be free, but they’ll be cheaper, quicker, and more functional than what anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. We’re going to be real-time witnesses to history. The speed of adoption will be faster than any other business landscape change we’ve seen since the introduction of the abacus.

Tags: facebook, cloud, computing, monetizing, SaaS, expresso, online, collaboration, office

As you might guess, I’ve seen a lot of spreadsheets lately. I’ve seen extremely complex spreadsheets for production management that include pivot tables and macros. I’ve seen very simple spreadsheets with only a few rows for expense reporting. I’ve seen boring spreadsheets and even a fun soccer one. (Thank you Reto.) Most of these spreadsheets are developed to fill a very specific need and are really only useful to their owners and collaborators.

However, a partner recently suggested that a good way to introduce eXpresso to new users would be to create package of more generic spreadsheets that would be useful to many different small and medium businesses. We’ve done just that, and we would love to share them with anyone who is interested. Our free Excel template package includes:

• Balance Sheet, Projected
• Cash Flow, 12 Months
• Financial History and Ratios
• Profit Projection, 3 Year
• Sales Forecast, 1 Year
• Start-up Expenses

These spreadsheets are simple, will save you lots of time, and include easy-to-follow instructions. If you are interested in some or all of these spreadsheets, just send me an email, and I will share them with you. Or, add me to your contacts the next time you are in eXpresso and send me a chat message the next time you see me online.

My email address (and user ID) is anewman at expressocorp dot com.

Tags: free, excel, spreadsheet, templates, expresso, online

Last Friday while most of the world was closing their work week, eXpresso was ramping up for one of our most significant upgrades to date. And thanks to careful planning and communication, we are happy to report that the upgrade went exactly according to plan. Here’s a summary of what we accomplished.

Infrastructure – This was the most significant component of the upgrade. Although eXpresso outperforms other online spreadsheet applications, we fine-tuned our back-end to handle traffic better and scale to meet the demand caused by our growing number of users.

General Improvements – In the software world, we refer to these as feature enhancements and bug fixes. But all people really care about is that we added some new things and fixed things that may not have worked as intended.

Off-Line Capabilities – We released a new version of the eXpresso Add-In for Excel®. It is leaner and meaner than its predecessor, plus it will automatically check for updates. And for those who are not aware of the Add-in, it is a small utility you can download and install as an add-on to Excel on your desktop – allowing you to view and edit the spreadsheets you have in eXpresso without leaving your beloved Excel environment (Stay tuned for another blog entry exclusively about the eXpresso Add-In).

Partnerships – Part of this release includes integrated support for two of our partners, both leading cloud computing platform providers. We can’t mention one of them at this time, but the other is Salesforce.com. eXpresso is listed in the AppExchange, and our certified application integrates into Salesforce and allows users to share spreadsheets with their Leads and Contacts contained in Salesforce, as well as have alerts delivered to their Salesforce dashboard. (Learn More)

Lastly, we want to give a special thanks to our users for giving us feedback about eXpresso and for accommodating us while we make changes in response. We think we have the most encouraging and faithful users on the planet. Please keep the feedback coming, and we hope you enjoy this latest release. And remember – you never have to email another spreadsheet again!

Copyright Acknowledgement: The Simpsons characters are created by Matt Groening. All rights belong to the respective copyright owners.

Tags: expresso, online, spreadsheets, excel, product, development, release, version

The European Soccer Championship 2008 is just a few days away. I’m especially excited to write about it because Switzerland, together with Austria is hosting it.
The opening game (Switzerland – Czech Repulic) is taking place in Basel on the 7. June 6PM GMT+1.

You may ask what eXpresso has to do with this championship? Well, in nature not so much but it provides an ideal platform to host a “score game” among friends and co-workers. Simply list all the games in a spreadsheet, share it with your friends/co-workers and let them put in their guesses.

Each participant has only access to his/her cell region. Final results and the finalists will only be known during the championship. Thanks to eXpresso I will be able to update it without ever emailing a single spreadsheet back and forth!

Send us an email if you would like to participate our internal eXpresso game or simply host your own. I would love to share the spreadsheet with you.

I hope to see Switzerland in the finals. Do you?

Tags: soccer, football, european, excel, spreadsheet, picks, championship, 2008, expresso, share, fun

Many golfers don’t understand the difference between their USGA Index and their course handicap. If you play in a league run by a golf club, then you probably don’t have to worry about it. But if you play in a league with a mish mash of people that somehow ended up together, like the one I play in, and they belong to different clubs, then calculating handicaps becomes interesting.

For years the league was mostly an honor system. Before each round you’d ask your opponent, “What’s your handicap?” and then you’d figure who was getting strokes on what holes. Well after some complaints, I decided to become the “Handicap Police.” You should have heard the howling when I first produced the spreadsheet that calculated a person’s Course Handicap for the course we play on!

The prevailing comment was, “Hey, at my club I’m a 20, why am I only an 18 here?” The answer lies in the slope differential between the two courses as defined by the USGA. Yes, at their course they were a 20, but the slope there was 128 while the slope of the course our league plays on is much less – therefore their course handicap is less. Even after explaining it many times, some people still don’t get it!

Now things have settled down, and I update the spreadsheet with everyone’s most recent USGA Index and share it with the league via eXpresso. It’s nice because it’s located in one place, and I don’t give anyone edit rights. Just can’t trust some of the guys not to mess it up!

If you would like a copy of my spreadsheet, please let me know, and I’ll share it with you via eXpresso. It’s actually very simple. Heck, if you let me know the name of the course you play on and what state you are in, I’ll even set it up for you.

I reference the following Web addresses:

• USGA Indexes (It’s all public info. All you need is a name and a state)
• Course ratings and slopes
• The schedule for when my association updates Indexes
• The Index to Course conversion table.

Oh, one last thing. The USGA made a change this year. When you look up handicaps online, they no longer show the dates you played on the Score History. Something about “privacy”. (i.e. They don’t want people playing hooky to get caught by the boss!! LOL)

Kevin Dewhurst
VP Sales, Eastern Region
kdewhurst at expressocorp dot com

PS: If you are interested in multi-user subscriptions to eXpresso for your company, please send me an email.