Google has just introduced an online business software package designed to make it easier for people in the same organization to share documents and information.

The free “Team Edition” version, released today, shows the Internet search leader’s latest attempt to attract more users to free applications, which makes Microsoft quiver because of their costly word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and calendar programs.

Most likely Google chose to release the software this week due to Microsoft offering a bid to buy Yahoo Inc. in an attempt to stop Google’s lead in Internet search and advertising.

Microsoft’s bid, said to be $44.6 billion, is from the profit of software.

Google knows that giving away free software cloaks how they make a profit. By users clicking ads on search result pages.

At this time more than 500,000 businesses have signed up to use Google’s applications, according to Google. Some businesses pay $50 extra per user for more features, but the fees are measly compared to Google’s $16.6 billion in annual revenue. Google makes $181 million for software sales.

Box.net has joined Google in offering more collaboration features. The well known online file storage service Box.net has added a new invite collaborators button that makes it easy to share a folder with other Box.net users.

This feature is great for users that have images, documents, and any other files they want to share with another user, all they have to do is just right-click and enter the email addresses of the receiving user(s). The recieveing user will then be able to access the contents sent. There is a feature that lets users specify if the receiving user may edit the folders contents or just view it.

In the future we hope Box.net will offer applications for editing documents and spreadsheets, like Google Docs.

Via Box.net

We have always found it a little annoying to have to have a browser open to listen music via Pandora. This piece of software allows Pandora users to login to their Pandora account and access the streaming music service without having to open a web browser.

We were suprised to find out that Pandora’s Box was created in 2005, that is becasuse we had not come across it. But we fell in love with it at first sight. The program has support for Quick Mix, lets users give songs a thumbs up or down and offers the same features found on Pandora.com.

In the future we hope that the creator makes it more memory efficient and also support for Mac would be nice for Mac users. Overall we found this program to be a must have for all Pandora users.

gDocsBar is a new add-on for Firefox that gives users instant, access to their Google Documents. It features a built-in search and filtering, and browsing online documents is a breeze, gDocsBar is one of the best firefox extensions that we have used.

Once installation is completed, users will be required to login to their Google account. Login is sent using SSL so it is safe.

After logging on users will see a list of all of their Google Documents, including Spreadsheets and Presentations. Users have the option to sort them by date, title, or author, in ascending or descending order.

With gDocsBar it is simple to upload a document. Simply drag and drop a file to the upload part at the bottom of the gDocsBar sidebar, and the file is automatically uploaded. We love this firefox add-on because it is so easy to use.

Twitter Poster, shows users Twitter profile pictures that are sized based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets popular users make. Influence posters are available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan.

It is nice looking but we see no usefulness. People are figuring out how to make their picture bigger, and how they can change this, so it may become a Technorati-style top list for Twitter users, besides that it is just a poster.

Via TechCrunch

Google recently added support for labels to Google Notebook. The addition was needed. Users can use labels to organize Gmail, Google Documents, and RSS feeds in Google Reader. It seems like Google would have added this feature long ago but now we can’t complain.

Labels are automatically imported from your Google Bookmarks settings, if you use Google Bookmarks. You can then sort or filter your notes by label using either the Google Notebook web page or the Google Notebook browser plugin.

Via Google

Mozilla’s calendar programs Sunbird and Lightning have some how become even better. Sunbird is a standalone application for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and Lightning is a calendar plugin for the Thunderbird e-mail client.

Sunbird and Lightning 0.7 were both released today, and they feature a new event/task dialog, a new event summary dialog, and many other new features and bug fixes.

There is also a new version of the Google Calendar plugin for Sunbird and Lightning. The add-on allows you to write data to a Google Calender using your desktop calendar client.

Via Download Squad

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac OS, coming out this winter, has been on the minds of Mac followers since Apple started using intel processors. Plus it has been 4 years since any changes.

Something great that we found was that it is a bit quicker than previous versions. Another thing that’s nice in this new Office is the addition of “object insertion bars” in all the apps, allowing users quick access to objects usually in other parts of the suite.

We are looking forward to it being publicly released. You are sure to be pleased.