Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia is placing his bets on an online office productivity suite that aims to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google.
Instant Collaboration Software Technologies (InstaColl), a Bangalore company co-founded by Bhatia, unveiled Live Documents on Wednesday, an online service that allows users to access and edit documents using a Web browser, and collaborate and share documents with others.
The service works with any browser that supports Adobe Systems’ Flash and runs on any operating system, said Sumanth Raghavendra, CEO of InstaColl.
Online documents can also be worked with off-line, using an optional desktop client application that “wraps around” Microsoft Office to give it online collaboration capabilities, Raghavendra said. Users can work on a document in Office when off-line, and the document will be updated in Live Documents the next time the user goes online, the company said.
The hosted service, which is available as a limited technology preview at www.live-documents.com, will be free for individuals to use, but corporate users will have to pay. Corporate users can sign up for the hosted service or buy a license to run the software on a server at their own premises, Raghavendra said.
Live Documents uses Adobes’ Flash and Flex technologies. Raghavendra argued that this gives users a better experience than Google’s hosted applications, which he derided as a stripped-down version of Microsoft Office.
Bhatia, who shot to prominence after selling Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported US$400 million in 1997, told reporters in Bangalore that the new application addresses a bigger market opportunity than Hotmail.
InstaColl is targeting both the office productivity market, which it estimates to be $20 billion this year, and the market for document management and collaboration software.
