The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Google organized Wordmasters Challenge in several cities in India recently (30th September,2006). Word is that close to 3000 people participated in this event.
(See Harshad’s report on the event here) The winners are supposed to be declared today.Wonder who won it and what did the winning entries look like. Does anyone have a clue on this?

Updated:Nov 9 , 2006:I just decided to send a self-addressed-stamped envelope to Google. If and when I get a response, I will update this post.

Updated:Nov 16 , 2006: One week and no response received. Yes, a self-addressed stamped envelope with a covering note was indeed sent to Google’s Bangalore office on the address specified in the event leaflet. Snailmailed on 9th Nov. So much for the mission to organise the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone

Updated: Nov 29, 2006: I did send a second letter to Google, this time by courier, assuming the previous postal mail failed to reach them. The contents of my letter to Google are reproduced below.

——————————–Letter Begins Here——————————

Google India Pvt. Ltd.,
Prestige Sigma, No.3,
Vittal Mallya Road,
Bangalore 560001

Sub: Google Wordmasters Challenge results

Date: 22 Nov 2006

Dear Sir/Madam

I participated in the Google Wordmasters Challenge contest held on 30th September 2006(I am based in Chennai but I had participated in Bangalore). I would appreciate if you could please send me the results (essentially list of winners and the prizes they received). Incidentally, I made a similar request vide my letter dated 9th November but unfortunately do not seem to have received a response.

I am enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope for the same as indicated in the event rules pamphlet. However, I would indeed appreciate if you can send the results by courier or email (MY ID@gmail.com) if that is not too inconvenient.

Best Regards

RAJESH KUMAR

ENCL:

1. Self addressed stamped envelope
2. A Gmail invite(it’s a good service, give it a try, it’s free)

Rajesh Kumar has invited you to open a free Gmail account. To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit http://mail.google.com/mail/a-43c7aa1d21-1b7ff83ee6-90398ff24a

For more information on this service, visit http://www.gmail.com
———————————-ENDS HERE—————————————–

While I am not too optimistic on a reply, let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Google has come out with a new service called Docs & Spreadsheets.(The docs part comes from a company called Writely that Google acquired some time back) That left me wondering. Who is the targetted user for this? A person who has a PC and internet access, but not have a word processing programme. Or the roving sales guys? Appears quite an unlikely scenario.
Luckily, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not about word processing or about doing spreadsheets. It is about collaboration, and word processing, if I may say, is just incidental.In typical Google style of understatement, this is quite feature rich, allows multiple users to collaborate on the same doc and mail it off .

The ‘docs’ part is reasonably okay, but I still cannot visualize a scenario where I would use it.It is compatible with other Word Processing such as MS Word and Star Office etc, allows you to save the doc in PDF mode(a good value add). The spreadsheet part, to say the least, is quite sad. As Amit Agarwal pointed out, it does not even have the feature to create graphs.

But then, the fashion these days is to launch a software, and then take it to beta later (Blogger!). But once again, coming back to the earlier question of targetted user. Not sure this will see any significant adoption. Hang on Google. You are trying to take on Microsoft too fast. And on this on atleast, you are not appearing surefooted.