Falling in love again ... almost

I was in Yokohama last Friday at the Zoholics offline meetup, and will blog about that shortly, but before that a note about one of the products I saw demoed there...

Zoho Notebook is one cool application.  I have been using it to organise an upcoming trip, and I just love the way I can mash up all kinds of content into a convenient book metaphor. 

For the trip my  book contains:

- web pages of all the hotels I am looking at

- a maps page with google maps of all the stops

- a Zoho sheet containing all my expenses

- the conference booking page

- my itinerary on Google Calendar - with the world clocks that appear on my blog pasted in for good measure (have to be logged in to Google Calendar at the same time for this to work)

- a public page that I can publish for general consumption.

So why isn't this total love? 

The offline story ... net connectivity is not everywhere I want to work. 

Even if it can't magically cache all the web content, Notebook needs to be able to leverage a consistent framework for offline access and sync control of its own data that works across the various Zoho apps... I want to input my expenses into a Sheet in Notebook when I want to, and that could be in a cab, train, plane or anywhere I can't get reliable or convenient connectivity.

This is a big challenge for the cloud-based crowd, and Zoho is rising to the challenge by piloting Google Gears on Zoho writer.  This is a good start, but integrating data, application settings, mashup configurations, etc. will certainly be a complex undertaking.