Web 2.0 Expo – ThinkFree

ThinkFree is formally launching Viewer API's at the Web 2.0 Expo which will allow Web Services to integrate and mashup viewer and editor applications on their Web pages. Visitors will be able to open MS Office files from their browser without the need for MS Office or other plugins.

The biggest news for yesterday was ThinkFree's partnerships with Jive Software, NHN Naver, Coilm Livestart and Amazon live at the Expo.

These partnerships represent a significant acceptance of the company's offerings and the NHN in particular is symbolic of the globalization of ThinkFree's services. NHN is the largest Korean Internet portal, and they signed a $3.2 million contract with ThinkFree to integrate office applications onto their portal back in November.

ThinkFree's APIs can be applied to:

Update forms – From expense reports to spreadsheets users can fill in and save documents to their company servers.

Assigning homework - Teachers (and bosses UGH?) can post homework for their students that can be completed online and saved to the teacher's folder on the school server.

Team collaboration - Documents can be distributed to colleagues with online editing capability, collaborative feedback and storage on centralized servers.

Extended community - Website owners, bloggers and Web service developers can extend services applied to their user base by allowing them to edit MS Office document.

TJ Kang, CEO and founder of ThinkFree has put in place a dynamic team that promises to continue to develop brilliant solutions to the daily needs of customers worldwide. Collaboration between ThinkFree and Sparc illustrates TF's aggressive and comprehensive approach towards these ends.

The collaboration between TF and Sparc brings together one of the most comprehensive and complete set of tools for end-to-end productivity on the Web. If other online startups were to emulate this type of collaboration we would see Web 3.0 much more quickly. I am not great fan of business applications other than when I need one, but ThinkFree represents the kind of innovation and excellence that any Web 2.0 user will find worthy.