Filed under: Business, World wide web, Office, Web services

As usual, TechCrunch makes a good point about Zoho calling their offerings “still a bit all over the place.” But the fact that Zoho now has over one million users and just launched Zoho Docs bodes well for the company (and the still-nascent online business suite business at large). Zoho Docs integrates Writer, Sheet and Show, grants some version controls, more organization features and access control lists. That’s a powerful set of glue tying some already-useful apps together. Now we’ll have to see if they continue to grow beyond their core users and make real traction in the business space. With Office Live Workspace and Google Docs + Chrome powerhouses coming on strong in Q4, it’ll be one heck of a battle.

Previous coverage of Zoho:

• The launch of Zoho DB.
• Zoho’s iPhone-tuned set of pages (we’ll give them a full review soon).
• Zoho did DocX before some others, and it works well.
• Did you know you can export PPT, PDF, ODP files and send to Picasa and Flickr?
• It was only a week or so ago that they released Zoho Share, which grants you to embed docs on a page.

And here’s how you can log in to Zoho with your Google Apps account.

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Filed under: Before the bell, Earnings reports, Analyst upgrades and downgrades, Deals, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), General Electric (GE), Market matters, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), BP p.l.c. ADS (BP), Marriott Intl’A’ (MAR), Lilly (Eli) (LLY), Economic data, ImClone Systems (IMCL), Federal Reserve, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan (POT)

U.S. stock futures were flat to lower Thursday morning following the senate approval of its version of the $700 billion bailout package. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve stated it was considering a rate cut. Following all the economic data released Wednesday indicating the U.S. is in a recession, this isn’t surprising. The ECB is also meeting today to take into account its move. Today, the Labor Department will report weekly initial jobless claims and the Commerce Department will release August factory orders. Regulators also extended the ban on short-selling shares of some 800 financial companies.

UBS (NYSE: UBS), which has been hard hit by the credit crisis, said Thursday it expects to return to profit in the third quarter after four quarters of losses. The bank has substantially reduced its exposure to U.S. commercial and residential mortgages. The bank wrote down more than $40 billion and raised close to $30 billion.

Mosaic (NYSE: MOS) shares are down about 20% in pre-market trading after it missed analyst estimates when it reported its fiscal first-quarter earnings.

Marriott International (NYSE: MAR) was expected to report earnings of 32 cents a share in the third quarter. The company reported 34 centsearnings per share excluding an 8 cents adjustment.

Continue reading Before the bell: Senate approves bill, futures down; UBS, MOS, MAR, IMCL, GE, EBAY …

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Filed under: Business, News, Google, Browsers

As Brad reported earlier today, Google is launching the first beta of its Webkit-based browser, Google Chrome, tomorrow!

Details of Google Chrome were originally leaked by the Google Blogoscope blog, who received their press copy of the Chrome comic book early, and as a result Google has moved the date of the release up 24-hours.

There have been more leaks, with the google.com/chrome and gears.google.com/chrome sites intermittently displaying content. You can see screenshots here, here and here.

As for us, being the Googleholic’s that we’re, Download Squad will be covering all-things Chrome-related tomorrow. Here’s a rundown:

• I’ll be following the Google press conference and posting any pertitent information.
• We’ll publish screenshots, screencasts and our general first impressions of the browser — I’ll be making the ultimate sacrifice and using Windows!
• Download Squad bloggers will be having a Talkcast of sorts to discuss Chrome, its implications and what it means for the rest o the browsing market.

So keep your eyes on Download Squad or our RSS feed as we jump on the Chrome-caravan!

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Filed under: Deals, Pfizer (PFE), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Lilly (Eli) (LLY), ImClone Systems (IMCL)

The story of ImClone Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: IMCL) in its endeavor to sell itself surely feels by now like a never-ending saga, with twists, derisive comments from management and even a mystery. I guess that with Carl Icahn at the helm it’s not surprising; he would always try to get the ideal price he could.

After Icahn announced almost a month ago that ImClone has a mystery suitor that would pay $70 a share to Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY)’s offer of $60 a share, today the mystery was unraveled and the suitor revealed. (I must admit I was somewhat skeptical, almost thinking this was some sort of tactic by Icahn to get to BMY, but he was serious.) While Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) has been the name most tossed around as the likely candidate, another name that’s been cited — Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) — turned out to be the one.

As it was, after a rival buyer was revealed, Bristol indeed increased its bid for ImClone to $62 per share last week, but since Icahn insisted the unnamed big pharma company was willing to pay much more, he exchanged some very colorful comments with Bristol’s chief.

The Wall Street Journal finally reported this afternoon it is Lilly that’s in advanced speaks to acquire ImClone for about $6.1 billion. There’s no doubt Lilly would benefit from ImClone’s one and only product, Erbitux — a lucrative cancer drug. Also, as Lilly sees its drugs come off patent, and with its own poor pipeline of cancer drugs — not to mention its current troubles getting new drugs past the FDA — this acquisition would make sense.

The deal’s deadline is tonight. If Lilly indeed issues a formal offer, I bet Icahn hopes Bristol would increase its offer as not only does BMY already own about 17% of ImClone, it also co-markets Erbitux, and is simply seen by many as the natural buyer. I doubt we’ve seen the last of this story.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

New web apps often make a lot of claims that just don’t hold up under testing. When I decided to put Quarkbase.com through the paces, I fully expected to be underwhelmed. After all, their motto is “Everything About A Website.”

Holy information overload Batman, this one really surprised me.

Pick a domain and hit search, then give Quarkbase a chance to dig up its research. They say to wait about 30 seconds, though my successful searches worked more swiftly. I did get a few failure notices because of high traffic, but I understand why. Quarkbase finds so much information about your website that it’s mindblowing.

What does it find? The domain owner, registrar, creation date, primary language, similar sites (*yawn* so far), traffic rank, blog rank, countries in which it’s popular, description and “official” contact info, people involved, incoming links, and more. Unlike the “similar pages” Google search returns, the Quarkbase suggestions were pretty much right on the money.

But wait, there’s more. It’ll track down numbers on Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Delicious, and Yahoo Answers. Quarkbase even knows how many times the site have made Digg’s front page. It also generates a list of the most popular current page and five popular pages of all time based on these stats.

Quarkbase is an incredibly informative tool and undeniably useful for anyone working the web.

[ via FeedMyApp ]

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