CALCI - The Calculation Powerhouse

ZCubes is the first comprehensive omni-functional platform. CALCI makes it fascinatingly big.

Why?

Because spreadsheets drive the world. And spreadsheets use technology that is almost 25 years old.

CALCI changes everything. It takes over the world of calculations and puts it into the most powerful authoring medium ever - the web.

The ocean of information called "the web" has never been so powerful. Now, with CALCI it will never be weaker than the desktop.

Digital life is not about organizing information. It is about achieving functions with the information.

ZCubes is the canvas and the calculation grid. With infinite possibilities. ZCubes is the ultimate authoring environment. And the most immersive platform to experience the world around you.

Do not get drowned in the chatter driving the micro-evolution called Web 2.0.

Welcome to the real and true revolution. Welcome to the next generation.

Synthetic vs. Natural Objects

Structured programming shifted to Object-Oriented Programming in the 90's. Enterprises throughout the world adopt Object-Oriented technology for all their serious applications.

Over the last 20 years, waterfall model of development has slowly transformed into a more prototype-oriented agile model. Though most folks adopt all the technically "correct" methodologies and alphabet-soups, cost of development in terms of time and money shows no slowing. Even off-shoring has not seriously reduced the amount of money needed to create serious applications. The cost of development and maintenance seems to add up to the same amount.

Everyone is/will be moving into the net paradigm, but IT budget requirements seem to be increasing - not decreasing. What is the issue here? One could argue that the use of methodologies without consideration of their applicability can give much skewed results from the expected. If the model is incorrect, the results will be unexpected. A core issue to realize is the inapplicability of object oriented systems when the object world has changing aspects.

One could define synthetic object world as an object model where all objects (or most of them) are defined artificially in a complete sense. For example, the Excel Object model contains worksheets, workbooks, application, cells, etc. All of these are completely under the control of the programmer who makes excel. On the other hand, natural objects deal with real-world objects. For example, and employee - has an age, salary, color, race, sex, picture, role, bank account, spouse, children, parents, and many other attributes. A system trying to reflect a person with an object can only cover a few aspects in real-life.

Since the superset of all attributes of a natural object cannot be represented in software, natural objects systems tend to run into problems when they try to reflect real-world interactions. Many of the failures in software engineering occur when the natural vs. synthetic boundaries are mixed.

In enterprises, the focus should be on data organization, not data relationship organization. Otherwise, each system will have its own artificial database, and an enterprise wide system will be hard to make and maintain.

The same danger awaits the Semantic Web, which is a small part of the next generation of Web 3.0. The simplification of data into silos of artificial structures that do not reflect and recognize synthetic vs. natural objects will run into the same trouble that enterprise systems have at the moment. We can predict that a practical Semantic web will be impossible with "aspects" being reflected onto it. Tags alone cannot make a Web 3.0 world.

Power Stroke

Everyone craves for the ability to express - smoothly and powerfully. When you have to type at 19 words per minute (average for composition according to Karat, et al) and think at 100 words per minute - expression suffers. And no amount of computing power is going to change that.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The answer is clear. The ability to manipulate text is not sufficient.

It is the expression modes that are more important.

Welcome to ZCubes where you can paint, draw, type, rotate, revise, do whatever else you want.

Are you not happy that you found us? BTW, when you are here, take a look at what hundreds of thousands of people been making for you to see. Yes, just for you. Check out the listings of some of these at http://www.zcubes.com/ .

Expect the unexpected, and unexpect the expected. Have fun!



References:

1. The ^ Karat, C.M., Halverson, C., Horn, D. and Karat, J. (1999), Patterns of entry and correction in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, CHI 99 Conference Proceedings, 568–575.

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The World to Come

The philosophy of ZCubes is not just openness, but also seamlessness. Just like in your life which is continuous and free, so should your work be. Seamless, continous, and unfettered.

Welcome to Web 3.0 where you are not just a user or a click or a unique count - but a citizen - a valued citizen of the digital community.

Welcome to ZCubes 3.0. We have something amazing coming up. This will blow your mind. Add it up. All of it. Do it all!

Stay tuned! Experience the power you never had before!

Information Gatekeepers

Information should not be at the mercy of the illiterate, ill-informed, ill-mannered, uninformed, under-informed, unwilling-to-be-informed, and those who control such entities. The openness with which information can be accessed should be reflected in the breadth and depth of information. Otherwise, skewed information will be reflected as the Bible - and this can be seen in so many communities over the world today.

The wiki world has been peppered with such Information Gatekeepers who decide with arbitrariness what should be kept, and what should not be kept. Especially when policies are made to be politically correct, but with so much fuzziness, the flow of information is impeded. It is similar to a legalistic world where you should not do anything, and somehow should do everything - without offending anyone who intend to be offended by anything.

ZCubes is a world where it works differently. The openness we provide gives all the ability to express, when they want to express, and however they wish to express. Then give the control to the ones who experience to control information rather than a select few.

ZCubes lets you write right !

The omni-functional ZCubes platform allows users create unlimited webpages called experiences by integrating different types of content including websites, media, RSS feeds, games, gadgets, painting, handwriting, text and much more. This post discusses the capabilities of the platform to add Text and some of the new exciting features that have been added to add richer text.

ZCubes contains a fully functional text editor with extensive formatting and spell check capabilities. Users can select from an extensive selection of font types, sizes, decorations, colors and a lot more. To add text; simply create a new ZCube and double-click to start editing it. The screenshot below shows the ZCubes text editor in action.

We are really excited about recent enhancements to the ZCubes platform that allow users to add text in decorated and creative ZCubes in addition to the basic blank ZCube. The new ZCubes have been grouped into 3 categories (Basic, Creative, and Advanced). This post discusses the Creative ZCubes.

Creative ZCubes - These include a variety of creative ZCubes that allow the user to express the emotion/relevance/ utility behind the text in the ZCube. Examples of available ZCubes include "Love Notes", "Postcards", "Scrap", "Ruled Writing Paper" and much more. The user can select from the available styles and then add text while using the features of the text editor. Again, the idea is to allow users to express themselves using rich and relevant content, a core concept in the ZCubes philosophy. The different types of available Creative ZCubes are shown in the adjoining screenshot.

Some examples of Creative ZCubes (Postcard, Love Note, Writing Paper) are shown below:

Hope you find these Creative ZCubes fun and useful to express yourself better! We'd love to hear your feedback.

ZShowcase: A kaleidoscope of experiences

One of the recent features of the ZCubes website is the Showcase. The showcase displays thumbnails of all the latest public experiences published by the ZCubes user community. It presents a great platform for "Cubesters" to truly express themselves by showcasing their creativity and interests.

Users browsing the showcase can search for experiences by name or tag. In addition, users can rate experiences (1 to 5 Stars). These tools help them explore and experience the versatility and creativity of the ZCubes community and its creations; as well as voice their opinion and contribute to the community. Users can also click on any showcase thumbnail to load the experience and edit/personalize/customize it further - one of the core concepts of the ZCubes platform.

So go ahead and visit the ZCubes showcase to explore the amazing world of ZCubes experiences.

ZLife: Unconstrained Social Networking

Social Networking is one of the key aspects of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Sites like MySpace and Friendster have become incredibly popular with millions of users able to obtain a web presence fairly easily. However, these sites come with a lot of restrictions and limitations for the user to express themselves in the social network. They typically have templates that are used by the community users to create "Profile" pages with predetermined layouts for text, pictures, videos, comments etc. In other words, there is very limited personalization provided by these sites. They could in-fact be described as "Drivers License" sites.

In addition, these sites are to some extent like "walled gardens" that prohibit certain external content to be placed inside them (for example certain gadgets, widgets, IFrames). MySpace had recently blocked users from embedding Photobucket videos (covered here by Michael Arrington) before actually buying Photobucket shortly afterwards.

Another important aspect of using these social networking sites is that users typically get ONE page to display information about themselves. As a result, they are limited to using text to describe/showcase their interests, hobbies etc. This is a big impediment to allowing them to be free and creative and expressing themselves as they wish.

The ZCubes platform provides a powerful and flexible tool for Social Networking users to freely express themselves using unlimited rich content. Users do not just have a profile page but a home page and a whole library of experiences to showcase themselves to the rest of the community. This allows them to communicate information in a rich and detailed manner with no restrictions. In addition, every user also shares his/her list of public CuBees (a recent exciting ZCubes messaging feature that is discussed in one of my earlier posts). The list provides further information about things that seem to interest the user and hence provide another view into their social networking world. Finally, if the user is already part of the MySpace, Friendster or other social networking community, he/she can always showcase their profile pages from those sites as MiniZs inside a ZCubes experience to kind of create an all encompassing social ZLife. Users can get a "ZName"to identify themselves inside the ZCubes community.

In a nutshell, in the ZCubes Social Networking world, users have a whole array of content that allows them to express themselves freely, using rich content and with a high level of personalization. The different components of the users ZLife are:

• Profile Page
• Home Page
• Library of Experiences
• List of Public CuBees
  

So go ahead and become part of the exciting ZCubes community by joining today, and enjoy the freedom to express yourself as you want.

ZCubes Announces CuBee at Web 2.0 Expo

The ZCubes team (including CEO Joseph Pally) is at the big Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (Booth 212) this week. The team is really excited to be there and hope to showcase the ZCubes platform to the numerous visitors. If you're planning to visit the expo, please take a moment to visit with us. We'd love to demo and discuss the features of the ZCubes platform with you. Another reason to be really excited is the big announcement from ZCubes today about the release of CuBee - the next generation in rich content e-mail and messaging.

With CuBee, users can send messages containing videos, pictures, animations, picture marquees, text, graphs, vector images, handwritten notes, or a combination thereof, to anyone with the click of a button. Further, CuBee messages can be sent as is or inside a digital envelope annotated with an emoticon to express the feelings of the sender and/or the content of the CuBee message. Based on the content, a CuBee can also be sent as Private or Public. Users can further enhance and personalize CuBee messages by dragging and dropping them on the ZSpace. Additionally, users can forward and reply to CuBee messages.

Again, we're really excited about the release of CuBee and hope it will be an exciting and fun tool for ZCubes users to quickly and easily share content online. We believe it will take online content sharing to a new level.