Num Sum - web spreadsheet

Num Sum - web spreadsheet

This is the perfect companion to Writely--a Web-based spreadsheet. I found out about this during a conversation with a journalist that is covering Writely for Inc Magazine. Like Writely, NumSum is free. Seems like numsum and Writely ought to combine forces...add web-based database and presentation software, interface them (can you say "mashup?"), and you've got a very interesting alternative to Office--particularly so when paired with OpenOffice or StarOffice, which gives you the "offline" side of the equation, also at low cost.

At first glance, I thought this was another app by the 37signals guys (the same group that brought us Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboard and Ta-da List), but upon further inspection it appears to be a totally new group called TrimPath. It seems that the perceived similarities between all of these new SAAS (software-as-a-service) offerings is that they're all based on Ajax, which tends to give them a similar look-and-feel.

Regardless of who is behind it, Num Sum seems to work well, especially for Beta software (although to be fair, I haven't done anything really difficult with it yet). The biggest ding so far is that NumSum doesn't currently support a direct import from Excel, but you can copy directly from an Excel spreadsheet and paste it into Trimpath's 'import' function (which, as you might guess, copies the contents of the cells but not the underlying formulae). That's OK for simple sheets, but let's hope they add a direct Excel import function soon!

I'm still wondering about the business model here...but perhaps that's it--build a product on the cheap, get some free publicity, and sell the company to Microsoft for a few million. Not a bad idea.....