Yesterday morning I visited the world headquarters of Virtual Ubiquity ‐ yes, it’s a name that brilliantly combines unpronounceability with instant forgetability ‐ an 8-person start-up that includes a few folks I worked with many years ago at Interleaf. Virtub has picked up some of the best of the best.

They’re building an online word processor that was one of the three apps shown at the Adobe conference in October that featured Apollo, the Adobe tech that integrates Flash, PDF and HTML in a single client. The VirTub product is like Writely (bought by Google) in that it runs in a browser and stores your docs on its server, but Virtub’s is a slick wysiwyg word processor while Writely (which I’ve been using and finding handy) is more like a textbox enhanced with plugins. (“Virtual Ubiquity” is the company’s name, not the product’s.)

“We wanted to build a word processor that lives on the Web, and not wrap some word processing commands around a text editor,” says founder Rick Treitman. It’s written in Flex to run on the Flash 9 player because no other cross-platform solution let them get past a non-wysiwyg editor. “We wanted full page fidelity. We wanted to be able to manipulate graphics as well as you can on a desktop app. We wanted a word processor that doesn’t make you compromise on the Web.” Rick shows off the fact that the alpha does line and page breaks in real time, bringing back memories of 1986 when that was news. Of course, then Interleaf was doing wysiwyg, realtime, text and graphics pagination on tricked out Sun workstations with complex client software.

Virtub’s word processor lets you work on a page that looks exactly like a printed page. It does not have anywhere near Microsoft Word’s 1,500 features. But it does have a cool UI “pleat”: buttons in the header that slide a ribbon of controls in. Rick shows off numbered lists (a perpetually broken feature in Word) including a “skip-the-numbering button that lets you add a second paragraph to a list item.” It gives a good level of control over list formatting, but not enough automation to enable outlining. Rick says that they recognize the importance of outlining, and because it’s an online app, they can add features at any point.

There’s drag-and-drop insert and sizing of graphics, with controls for relative placement.

Tables resize by dragging. You can add and delete columns and rows by clicking on little icons in the table itself, rather than going up to a menu. No background colors for tables at first ship, probably.

They’re experimenting with the UI for comments. The comments in this build show up as sticky notes on the side, color coded and keyed to colored text. Select one and everything but it and the relevant text are darkened.(This may change, Rick says.) Comments can hold anything a document can, including graphics and tables. You can drag from comments into the body of the document. They’re adding view-by-user, but maybe not for first ship. They keep document versions and histories “so you can crank back to an earlier version.”

The documents are “trickled” up to the server as you edit it. You’ll also have the option to save locally. The software is itself saved locally, transparently to the user. When Adobe’s Apollo ships, you’ll be able to work offline.

So, who is it for? “Our goal is to be term-paper ready when it comes out,” Rick says. The student market is big in VU’s mind, particularly post-secondary. “Kids access the Web from multiple machines.” And he says that many of their documents are collaborative, if only because they give them to teachers who return them marked. (It will have end notes in its first ship. And they’re looking into “cool ways” of doing online citations.) “We’re looking not to go after the enterprise straight away because it would mean going up against Microsoft.” The secondary market, says Rick, consists of small office, home office, retirees, volunteer groups, and others not working in enterprises.

They feel they’re competing against Google Docs, ThinkFree Office, and Word.In addition, there’s a rumor that Microsoft is doing a virtual version of Works, its defeatured Office product.

It’s going to be free on the Web, supported by advertising as well as possibly search. The ads will be “subtle, under the control of the user.” Not popups. For schools the ads can be turned off. And, no, it won’t be inserting ads into the footer of your documents.

“We’re very aware that playing nice with blogs and wikis is very important,” says Rick. It imports and exports HTML, but it’s very much modeled on word processors, not on wikis that let you build multi-page, linked sites. (I think if they added the ability to create pages just by linking to them — in the wiki fashion — and named the resulting inter-linked pages as a web site,it would change the way we think about the product, as well as giving them a feature that differentiates them from Word and its ilk.)

There also isn’t much there to enable a group to build and manage a document. They don’t know if v1.0 will support groups of users. Likewise, they’re aiming at being able to associate documents (e.g., these are 30 responses to a homework assignment, these are the 5 chapters of a book), and expect/hope to have it in release 1.0, but probably not in the first public beta, which they expect to be available in 3-4 months.

It’s a slick implementation. It doesn’t have thefull functionality people expect from a word processor, but for most uses, it’s got more than what people need. With some more collaborative tools, it could make it as a way for a group to work together on a document without feeling like they’ve been thrown into the geeky world of angle brackets and trying to remember how many equal signs create a level 2 heading.

(Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors of Socialtext, a company that might be misconstrued as competing with Virtual Ubiquity.)

They’re looking for a marketing person who can help move this through everything-but-the-enterprise. If you’re interested, send a msg to rick virtub.com. They also need a name for the product. [Tags: virtual_ubiquity word_processors wysiwyg web2.0 tools products ]

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