VentureBeat

Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the maker of Buzzword, an online word processor that offers features like those of desktop competitor like Microsoft Word. (Announcement here.)

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Adobe had previously invested in Boston-based Virtual Ubiquity, in an effort to promote startups make use of its Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, suite of software. AIR lets developers build applications that combine the connectivity of online applications with the “rich” features associated with desktop applications.

For example, Buzzword offers true what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) document formatting. You can view, edit then print a document from the web without affecting its formatting. If you’re using Google Docs and most other online word processors, text will appear in different places across web browsers and computer screens, which leads to confusion about how final drafts will appear in print.

Buzzword, like other AIR applications, works both on and offline. Online, it lets you share a document with other people so they can edit with you.

It is one of the more hyped AIR applications that we’ve heard about, although it is still only available in private beta.

We’ve been impressed by some of the functionality but wondered about its viability against competitors like Google, that are busy integrating applications such as Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs — we’ve found this integration to be more compelling than the RIA experience.

Read our Buzzword review in July for more details (here). As we said then,

While Buzzword may be a great stand-alone product, we think it will need more than support from its investor and technological benefactor, Adobe, if it is going to challenge the Google juggernaut.

In other email software news, another AIR application is launching called Pronto. Its software integrates email with a calendar, photo and video sharing, and other services. The company is targeting businesses and internet service providers, hoping to duplicate the success of Zimbra, another email provider that gained traction with such customers — and was bought by Yahoo for $350 million a couple weeks ago. Pronto is owned by Communigate.

In yet more email software news, GigaOm reports hosting provider Rackspace has bought Webmail.us, an email hosting service.

Virtual Ubiquity has just released more group features for Buzzword, its powerful new word processor.

The word processor, still in a private testing mode, is notable because it puts the key desktop features popularized by Microsoft Word onto the web, including desktop-style formatting and commenting. The Buzzword upgrade now lets you add multiple authors to a document, add icons to user profiles, print comments and scroll more seamlessly through long documents.

No other online word processor, including Google Docs, can currently match it. However, Google’s momentum is significant, as it integrates Gmail with Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar and other applications — making its overall offering steadily more useful to most people. Google’s brand power is dominant, too.

Both companies are preparing to push their products to students starting school this Fall. While Buzzword may be a great stand-alone product, we think it will need more than support from its investor and technological benefactor, Adobe, if it is going to challenge the Google juggernaut.

The product is already a showcase for Adobe’s AIR, a Flash-based platform for developers to build such “rich internet applications” (AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime and had previously been code-named Apollo). This has resulted in some great Buzzword features. One is real, working what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) document formatting: people can actually view, edit then print a document from the web without affecting its formatting. Contrast this with Google Docs and most other online word processors, where text appears differently across web browsers and computer screens — which leads to confusion about how final drafts will appear in print. Buzzword also features in-line notes, where users can leave notes for each other in reference to particular sections of text. It lets users work offline then sync back once an internet connection is made — good while on a plane, for example (discussion here).

Boston-based Virtual Ubiquity, backed by Adobe, may not have near the same recognition as Google, but Buzzword has made an impression on the tech crowd. Here’s Robert Scoble’s take after a demo at a conference last winter: “I have a new way for rating how cool a demo is. How many keystrokes per second can I count [in the audience]? You know, tap, tap, tap, tap on keyboards. Virtual Ubiquity is on stage right now showing off a killer Word Processor that works online. Teaches Microsoft quite a few lessons.”

AIR is, in a nutshell of oversimplicity, Adobe’s bet that users want a “richer,” more desktop-software-like experience on the web (in-depth coverage of it here).

Meanwhile, Google’s big bet is that what users want first and most of is interconnectivity between applications. Google employees tell us Docs has been experiencing a “near-vertical” growth rate almost entirely due to its integration with Gmail. When a Gmail user receives an email with a Word document attached, she can open it in Google Docs instead of downloading it and opening it in Word. Google has also recently parried AIR’s offline option with Google Gears (our coverage), which allows web applications to be taken offline, similar to Buzzword; and it’s already available for Google Reader. Furthermore, Google Docs’ upgrade last week introduced folders and better search. The company has been working hard to make its Apps the educational software solution of choice for students and their universities.

So where does this leave AIR? We’ve covered how Adobe has set $100 million aside specifically to fund Virtual Ubiquity and other companies that showcase AIR. If Adobe’s goal is to demonstrate how it can help to make companies successful, why not go for integration with Adobe’s many other high-quality, powerful applications? Photoshop for editing photos, Illustrator for digital drawings (etc.), InDesign for print layout, and other Adobe desktop software, are already staples of designers and publishers everywhere, and present in many classrooms. In fact, a separate Adobe word-processing product, InCopy, is actually designed for workflow processes that feed into InDesign. If the company can find ways to integrate Buzzword in a useful way with other Adobe software, this would at least partially counter the usefulness of integrated Google Apps.

Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.