Supersize McDonald's Clown

OK ... this is cool

Alright I'm still not "sold" on Zoho. However this one thing is too cool. Go there sign in and then click on Zoho Creator. Just watch the starting video. AAAHHHH too cool.

Now, without any purchase of a server or software, you can create online databases that are accessible in other websites or blogs. (OK, if you've never done this the hard way, then you won't get this but trust me, this is very cool.)

Another amazing thing is that you can embed any zoho document anywhere else on the web. I'm just looking in to this, but I love the first results I've had with placing the documents into Moodle. Now, different students could be collaborating on a zoho document, but we can all see their progress on our classes moodle site. This could be big !

Zoho ... another online office with lots of features.

I can't say I'm going to use Zoho (zoho.com), but it is worth checking out. If you have not yet bought in to google with gmail, googledocs, and googlecalendar, I would definitelycheck it out.

What is it? Well, it' s basically all the software you might use on your machine, but online. So you can create spreadsheets, word processing files, presentations, and much more. Why this stands out as perhaps better than google is all of the unique extras you can do. From online invoicing, databases, meetings, detailed planning, to complete project management software this online office offers much more than what I've found before.

If you are considering keeping and sharing your documents online, I'd look at this start up. No doubt it will be bought by one of the giants, but cool anyway.

Why so little is here

Seems like the last two years have been too much reality and not enough dreaming. I see cool things all around, EEEPC, N800 tablets, inexpensive science probes, Moodle, gmail for schools ...

However, most technicians with school districts just think inside the box. What's worse is they force the rest of us too. Why not try to do a whole lab in linux? Why not try a cart of EEEPCs instead of full size monsters? Why not dump exchange for gmail or some other free but amazing product?

I don't know. It just might be time to go looking for another school board. I mean, come on. My school district is still running like we are all on Novel or Win NT. We're not. Labs could be on the way out. Students are going to increasingly bring in their own ways to connect. Content needs to move online, not sit in file shares or home directories. We need to get to portfolios, school online centers, and beyond. We don't need to "catch up", we need to lead.

More on Syncing.

I just don't know why this is hard for everyone to do. Companies like PALM have been doing it forever between Outlook and the in PALM databases. Why is this hard for everyone else?

I carry one VISTA notebook. Sometimes I boot it into Ubuntu (I'd love to live here but...). I have a desktop machine at home in an office, and my wife has one in the living room. I carry a Windows Mobile device (this one is very, very bad, but it does work with email).

All of these locations need access to my calendar. I have tried everything and it does not take long and duplicates start to show up. I finally had to kill scheduleworld and funambol from all my machines. It started great, but soon duplicates started to show up.

Now I'm trying to tie my world together with Plaxo. We'll see. They offer a $49.95/year service that does such amazing things as "removes duplicates". Why is this an extra feature? I'm going to try it without paying for that feature. Why? I'm a teacher, I do not have $49.95/year to blow on this.

Common folks, can't someone write a client/server solution to tie together and online calendar like google calender, and offline calender like outlook, and a carry it around calendar like WinMobile. Google should be all over this.

I'll let you know how plaxo works. It looks very close, but the price for the extra is just too much.