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Zoho.com has email hosting, including a free account that includes up to five users and supports one domain. There are tools to move everything over from GSuite and Office 365 but they may cost extra. I've been using their service for years and it's good. I even have a domain attached to my account. I have my domain hosted at freedns.afraid.org.

Zoho asks you to make an entry in your DNS record in order to prove that you actually own the domain name. Then it's just a matter of making the entries that Zoho provides into the domain record.

Zoho is pretty decent, IMHO. In fact, the whole Zoho Suite is very interesting.

Free domain hosting: https://freedns.afraid.org/

Free email hosting (can use your domain): https://www.zoho.com/

I'd like to find a place that has free web hosting with your own pages (not WordPress.com or anything like that).

Try getting your own domain. You can host it for free at https://freedns.afraid.org/ and then find a free mail provider. I have used https://www.zoho.com/ for the past couple of years and been pleased with them. You could also skip the domain and just get your mail at Zoho (or where you get your free mail from). With Zoho you get a number of mail accounts with their free program so if you create your own domain you can have accounts for your family or friends.

Zoho Docs has supported ODT for some time. It's sad so few know about it. Their app Zoho Writer even supports editing ODT on android (and perhaps other platforms?). I was amazed when I stumbled on this functionality entirely by accident. The Zoho Writer app also supports opening files from Google Drive and Dropbox... so technically you could say that it supports editing ODT on those platforms as well.

Furthermore, Zoho has a desktop file sync client that supports Linux, unlike Google who has has seemingly utterly failed to provide a linux client despite promising it when Drive launched.

Way too little, way too late from Google, as far as I'm concerned.

(My documents are fairly simple, so I'm not sure how technically complete the ODT support is. But it's worked for me.)

I assume you have an Internet connection. If you want ease-of-use and -modification, check out Zoho Creator https://www.zoho.com/creator/ , a tool that makes it easy to build database-backed web forms

In my experience, Zoho Docs is years ahead of Google Docs. Very few columnists talk about it but it's the only serious "office for web" I would consider for my business. It does everything Google Docs, Hangouts, Drive, etc do, plus a few more things.

For regular browsing I believe you're right. However, there are a couple of Google spreadsheets I use (I didn't create them) that are painfully slow under Firefox but just awfully slow under Chrome. So speed does matter for more than just benchmarks, but not necessarily for regular browsing. Note that this is on a self-built desktop gaming system that's less than a year old, so it's not like I'm comparing this on my dual-core netbook.

Link?

Also is it open? I wonder if the result would be the same if it were loaded in Zoho sheet:
https://sheet.zoho.com/login.do?serviceurl=%2Fhome.do

It seems that Google probably made more optimization efforts for Chrome than Firefox.

Single sign-on could become an antitrust issue. A single sign-on system which supports sign-on to third-party sites, yet can be arbitrarily turned off by the provider of the sign-on system at their discretion, creates "restraint of trade" issues. Google's sign-on system reaches beyond Google; Zoho, a business email system, accepts Google signons. Facebook's sign-on system reaches far beyond Facebook.

Arguably, single sign on systems should be split off as separate companies to comply with antitrust law. This may come up when Schmidt testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.

Would be nice to have a standard design for Aeroponics or similar setup that scales. 6 to 7 times better output then standard gardening.. Maybe something like this design http://viewer.zoho.com/api/urlview.do?url=http://www.synergyii.com/aeroponic/VAP.pdf Vertical farming also.. This design uses the red & blue led lights but for some reason didn't use aeroponics or hydroponics... just that mud stuff ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct3dK2_ksvk

Someone with 10 years working in the field with the new technologies as they roll out ought AND a degree is more attractive than the person that doesn't have the degree.

My experience has been the opposite; my hires who rose to the same experience and responsibility level with no degree have tended to outperform the degree holders. Of course, I've needed people with high ambition levels, outside-the-box thinking, and the ability to execute quickly and decisively more often than people with strong academic knowledge in a certain area (I'm not discounting the need for them, btw, just making an all-else-being-equal comparison for the bulk of the roles).

Interestingly, Zoho has started hiring most of their engineering team straight out of high school.

For most app development, I would be comfortable applying Pareto's Principle. I don't have any data, and unless I'm mistaken about how fractured the Android OS implementations are, then I imagine that 10% of my effort would work on 80% of the market.

While I would agree with the idea, you do realize that sometimes it's not that clear whether it works or not. 80/20 (probably more like 97/3 or something really stable) rule applies for *each feature*, resulting in a really mixed bag of some things working weirdly or not at all on some handsets, and *other features* not working properly on other handsets.

Also consider this argument against the Pareto principle for software features:

...The point I am trying to make is that the other 80% of the features we may not need regularly varies between users.

So while in principle I agree with you (I try to apply Pareto's principle regularly towards feature/bug discussions with my customers), often the "undesireable 20%" rears it's head and we have to go back and revisit a fix/enhancement to broaden it.

Finally, examine the Kano Model to find "killer features" that will help you market your product - some features working solidly across versions/hardware will be far more important than the vast bulk of features your App provides.

Why not Zoho? Anybody?

Essentially what I'd want would be a Task List on steroids, allowing for hierarchical subtasks, attachments, and prioritization

mylifeorganized.net - awesome windows task list app.
This app addresses your stated problem directly. I use it myself for professional and personal tasks. You can export as XML and sync with outlook too.

Clearcontext - an outlook addin
Adds many features to outlook making it much better at handling lots of shifting work. It takes a bit of learning and setting up, worth a look though.

TaskFreak! web based task manager / todo list written in PHP

www.Gtd-php.com
A surprisingly full-featured GTD system done with PHP.

Here's a list of groupware/collab/project management tools I've either used for work or had a good play around with.
Most are commercial, since I'm sure that all the OSS stuff will already be posted here. Some of them have local hosted options

COMINDWORK - my personal favourite
Central Desktop - has outlook plugin + bookmarklets etc.
Zoho Projects - v2 is very fast and responsive
activeCollab
Assembla - would appeal to the slashdot crowd IMO
Group-Office groupware - Very slick. Also has outlook plugin.
Teamwork Project Manager
Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org

For an SMB with no history, there are many more options available for you than for older businesses which need to support legacy stuff.

The Google Apps method mentioned by bplipschitz is $50 per user per year, and will offer much of the functionality at a low cost with a limited SLA and no maintenance. If I were starting a new business right now, I'd probably try to make this one work and create a work-flow around it while backing up data locally on a regular basis. Once Google comes out with an Apps version of the Google Mini, it should be a go-to choice for a lot of businesses. Right now, though, the whole system's pretty new and that worries some folks. Don't believe the "Google Beta" FUDders -- the Premium Edition has an SLA and isn't marked "beta" (but it also doesn't have the newest features in the Free "beta" version).

eGroupware is an extremely mature web-server based collab suite with Echange functions plus project management, a wiki a DMS (more limited than Sharepoint), and a knowledge base. The whole thing can use LDAP for auth, meaning that it can tie into an AD or LDAP-Kerberos setup. It uses IMAP and ICAL protocols for client software if you want that. It's free, but you need to admin your own hardware. There are support contracts available.

There's also Citadel, which has been pushed really hard lately in a lot of Open Source press, but which I've never used. People say it's able to work with Outlook directly, is mature, and is feature-complete. It's free, but there doesn't appear to be official paid support on the site.

If you're willing to go the Google Apps method, you should also look into Zoho. It's also $50 per user per year, but the first ten are free. If I had a bunch of users used to MS Office, I think Zoho would be an easier transition to hosted for them than Google Apps would be. I like GA better for its simplicity, though. Zoho is more integrated and pollished, but it doesn't have the real-time collaboratiion.

Zoho is mentioned as an alternative in quite a few places. Haven't tried it myself, but you might want to give it a go here.

The similarity between http://notebook.zoho.com/ and the usual Google login pages is strong enough to qualify as phishing...

Well, I'm a big fan of Evernote, and so I strongly recommend that you check it out, While it's not identical to Google Notebook, the searching and offline capabilities are really nice. The Evernote folks are supposedly working on a Google Notebook to Evernote migration path.

That said, if you don't like Evernote, I think the closest match to Google Notebook is Zoho Notebook, which is part of the Zoho online suite: http://notebook.zoho.com/ . It even has a Firefox plugin, although I've never used it.

Also, if you're paranoid about your personal information, Microsoft's OneNote is a decent standalone note-taking program. I don't think there's any web access, but you should be able to access the same notebook files on multiple PCs, via online storage providers like DropBox or JungleDisk.

Go-OO has VBA support. It's Novell's fork of OO.o. (You know, just like IBM has, too.)

Zoho Office is an on-line office suite with VBA support.

1. Google Docs -- not so limited if you know CSS.
2. Zoho Office -- a more complete solution (including VBA support) with an MS Office-like interface.

For timetracking/project management.

letsfreckle.com
myquire.com
GetHarvest.com
BasecampHQ.com
tasktic.com
Tickspot.com
AtTask.com
paymo.biz
rememberthemilk.com
zoho.com
nozbe.com
www.tenrox.com
whodo.es
clockingit.com
activecollab.com
project2manage.com

Apples and Oranges indeed. Now what I want to see is a comparison between GoogleDocs and Zoho.

Has anyone tried checked out the features and facilities that Zoho offers ? I for one use Zoho creator http://creator.zoho.com/ to teach visual application development to my grad school students and quite a few of them have gone on to develop corporate applications with persistent data -- ok, not giant ones, but useful ones nevertheless ... and all up in the cloud.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

Ranked Pairs is far and away the best option. It satisfies the monotonocity criterion. It is very simple to understand, especially from the perspective of a voter. You simply rank who you want to vote for. (Any voter who doesn't like it can simply rank their candidate #1 and leave the rest blank, just as we do now.)

I was a huge fan of Schulze method (another Condorcet variant, and one used in the real world in Debian elections), until RangeVoting.org convinced me today that Favorite Betrayal is an actual problem in any Condorcet method. Not only does Range Voting not have this problem, it also bypasses a lot of the Arrow's Impossibility Theorem baggage (since Arrow only applies to ranked systems, not scored systems) and, even better, is nearly as simple as Plurality or Approval.

(As the RV.org site points out, when you sit down and write code to implement a Condorcet method, any of them, you end up with about twice as much code compared to implementing RV. I've implemented Schulze voting before, so I know that of which they speak. Meanwhile, with RV, you just sum the votes as you would with Plurality or Approval, then divide by the number of voters. The fact that each vote is a ranged score rather than a {0|1} doesn't really change how the code works. Maybe you add a simple quorum check on the final score sums, but that's 2 lines of Perl using sort and grep.)

Plus bee swarms use it to vote on new hive locations, so even though I was skeptical at first about the Bayesian regret metric, RV is a tried and tested voting method in the real world, and bees are considerably less intelligent than even the dumbest voter.

There are two main problems with range voting. One, it makes voting overly complicated (not to the Slashdot crowd, but for the average voter.) Two, it is subject to gaming. Voters will be likely to rate secondary candidates lower than how they really feel in order to increase their top candidate's odds.

Re #1: I'd argue that RV is actually simpler than any ranked ballot. Seven words: Hot or Not, Olympic scoring, IMDb, Netflix. Every Joe-on-the-Street already understands RV. It's one of the three simplest systems possible (after Approval and Plurality). Try out this Range Vote on the US Presidential race — unlike Condorcet, you don't have to stand around hemming and hawing about exactly which order you'd put them in, plus you can actually express "I have no opinion" by leaving a line blank. (And since they threw in all the kitchen sink candidates on that poll, you'll use that option a lot.)

(In Condorcet, your only option for unknown candidates is to lump them all together in one big tie in the middle... but you're still saying "These unknown candidates are definitely worse than any of the ones I like" and "These unknown candidates are definitely better than any of the ones I hate". One of them could be {your undiscovered favorite|the reincarnation of Hitler}, but you've just {hurt|helped} their campaign. RV lets you leave them blank, so that better informed voters can put their knowledge to work — but thanks to the quorum, unknown bad candidates can't win by voting once for themselves or anything silly like that.)

(Oh, and speaking of unknowns, RV works well with write-in candidates, thanks to the quorum. Condorcet does not, since write-ins are implicitly in last place on every ballot by default.)

Re #2: Yes, there's some ga

I've been using Zoho for a while now. With six kids in school, it has been a fantastic tool for them to write, edit and print documents accessible remotely at a moments notice. So what makes live doc's so much better? Furthermore, from what I've read thus far at live-docs, it seems Zoho has also provided more features... a more thorough overall user experience. Admittedly I have nothing solid for comparison since live-docs is still by invitation only (yes, I did register). Can anyone that currently has full access to live-docs that also uses Zoho regularly care to post a comparison... [or get that invitation approved for me :) ]

I would love to see a real-world comparison of a large number of 19-22" LCD panels

(replying to myself here)

Found one, using numbers from PG&E.

According to Wired; the layout tools are weak, it's limited to a lousy 10 MB, and Zoho's Show is better for both layout and online collaboration. So, who exactly is this app aimed at (other than just trying to cash in on the "Google" name)?

For the Excel-averse, I have uploaded the Excel Results of the test to the Zoho Viewer website. So you needn't install Excel or OO. http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/edblaI

While I would prefer to recommend pure Linux solution, I'm afraid there is no SVN connector for OpenOffice, and M$ collaboration features are well superior to those of OpenOffice or AbiWord.