Ajax Girl

Zimbra will announce a new offline client application, Zimbra Desktop, later this week. It will allow Zimbra users to access and use Zimbra’s email and other office applications, in the browser, when offline.

I spoke withZimbra Co-Founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj about the history of the company and the new Zimbra Desktop product this morning. Listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch.

Offline access to web applications (and just as importantly, web-based data) is an area getting a lot of attention right now. Firefox has announced that Firefox 3 will allow sites to work offline by accessing local datastores. New startups like Scrybe are experimenting with this offline syncing. Adobe (and competitors) has just released it’s Apollo platform, which lets developers run HTML, javascript and Flash code outside of the browser and when offline.

Most of these products are still being developed (Firefox 3) or have just launched early or private beta versions (Apollo, Scrybe). Zimbra has written its own code to handle offline functionality, and the user experience will be identical whether users are online or offline: open Zimbra in the browser and use the application.

Zimbra Desktop will be available cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and cross browser (Firefox, IE, Safari). The Zimbra web application and all user data is stored on the client computer (the database is Apache Derby). Data is synced real time when in online mode.

Zimbra Desktop does not include drag and drop functionality into the browser (for, say, dragging an attachment into an email), although the company says it will be included in a future release.

All Zimbra source code, including Zimbra Desktop, is open source - I expect other web developers to be taking a close look at how they are architecting things.

Zimbra recenty announced that they reached 6 million paying customers. The company is based in San Francisco, with a ten person office in India. They’ve raised $30.5 million over three rounds of financing, and say they will most likely not need to raise more capital.

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Real world services become much more efficient when paired with Internet-based search and booking platforms. Today, event venues, hotels, airlines, restaurants and other businesses can build their own booking applications with software from various vendors. And OpenTable has done a good job creating a bookings portal for restaurants. Skype Prime and Ether are two good services that let phone-based vendors book, charge and perform their services online.

But no one has created a distributed bookings platform that can easily be plugged into individual businesses’ websites (without any programming knowledge), as well as yellow page and other local business sites. Once this platform exists, consumers will have a much easier way of booking everyday services (think tennis lessons, dentist appointments, hairdresser appointments, massages, cooking course, etc.). The potential market is millions of daily transactions.

At least two companies are racing to be the first startup to do exactly that, and help businesses integrate their services online.

Genbook

San Francisco/Australia based Genbook, founded by Rody Moore, raised $2.2 million from Neo Technology Ventures last year to build its product.

There is little information about Genbook on the site, but a press release on the funding mentioned above says they are building a “pay-per-booking” product to allow local businesses to capture online bookings in real-time. The product will be distributed through online directories and local search engines, and businesses will pay a fee per booking.

Libersy

There is much more information available about Amsterdam-based Libersy. The company, which is relocating to silicon valley, has been in stealth mode for the last year and will launch a pilot beta in Europe in May. The target public launch is Q3 2007. They’ve raised $500,000 in angel funding to date.

Founder and CEO Karin Loeffen let me poke around on their development site this afternoon and gave me an overview of the service. Libersy is building a central portal for businesses to create a profile and enter relevant information about their service (category, description, pricing, keywords/tags, etc.). The design is still raw but they’ve nailed the functionality, which includes good use of Ajax to minimize page views. Once they are in the Libersy system, they can add a “book this” button to their website (see screen shot) which links to a mini-booking page. The company will also give an embeddable code to service providers and allow bookings to be made directly from their websites.

The service will also be distributed through search engines and local business directories, and via the main Libersy services portal. Users will be able to search for service providers by location and pricing. Libersy will also encourage user ratings and feedback of service providers, creating an “ebay feedback” type of system (this is also a good potential partnership for Rapleaf).

Libersy will also assist providers in taking credit card and paypal payments for services. They plan to charge a small monthly fee to providers, and/or take a cut of transactions booked through their service.

The company is preparing to close a Series A round of funding.

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We reported on the launch of Scribd, the “YouTube For Documents” a little over two weeks ago. The site drew a significant amount of traffic at launch. Unlike most startups, though, that traffic didn’t just vaporize after a day or two.

100,000 or so unique visitors come the site daily. 12,000 documents have been uploaded to 8,600 unique accounts (35% anonymous). The team says the site’s traffic has been about an even split between U.S. and non-U.S. visitors (and about half of the documents are non-English). One prolific member, Builder (Bill Allin), has 113 documents to his account. One of these, “Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy”, was so popular that it got on Digg and was mentioned on Adam Corolla’s morning show.

Scribd is an example of a small startup doing many things right. They created a naturally viral product and made it ridiculously easy to use. Posting and viewing can be done anonymously. More interesting documents get voted to the top for discovery by more users. It also seems to be very Google-friendly - many documents are working their way up in search results.

Copyright holders have been complaining, though. Twenty five DMCA take-down notices have been made against the site to date. In each case the documents were promptly taken down and things ended amicably. However, a noticeable amount of copyrighted material remains on the site, and Scribd has hired Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (the same firm retained by YouTube) to defend them on copyright matters. Compared with YouTube, Scribd is better suited to deal with any ensuing complaints. The sheer volume of personally written works on people’s computers will make it easier to not depend on illegally copied works. Copyright violating text-based documents are also easier to detect than rich content.

Scribd will be releasing some new features to improve the user experience, including adjustable embed sizing, groups, and private documents.

Below is a graph showing Scribd’s internal traffic numbers since launch. These internal Scribd stats track Alexa data fairly closely.

The company a Y Combinator company founded by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam.

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