It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Google Notebook is Google's take at it. (tour)

Also relevant to its merit as a business idea. Your form of a spreadsheet overlay (with a "layer toggle" ?) might be slightly better than Googles. But you're up against a free, quality product from the start.

Heh. This conversation is so common I almost feel like I'm trolling. But it's a very real one today. While we're on it, and I'm getting my fingers loosened up for the day, here's my current thinking about ways to differentiate:

1. Service and Customer Support. If you're not answering all your emails in hours, you're not trying. Customer feedback is Easy Money.

2. Integrating with your customer's ecosystem better. Huge room to grow here these days, with a huge number of different ecosystems. If your app lets me post notes to my Twitter account as I go, while Google only supports Buzz for corporate reasons, and I'm a heavy Twitter, I go with you.

3. Solve a hard, niche problem really well. This doesn't have to be as groundbreaking as you'd think. I know a good number of people who keep talking about upgrading from their Blackberry to a more user friendly phone. But they don't. Because Blackberry, while ugly and unfunctional in my hands, are productivity machines. You know what the feature the last guy I talked about cites? The ability to text message a preset group of people, with easy additions or subtractions. Running a small business, he does this constantly. My Android struggles here. My iPhone did as well. Blackberry figured out what a business user would be doing often, and does all those things well. This allows them to, at the very least, lag behind the bleeding edge in most other areas.

> It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but Google Notebook is Google’s take at it. (tour)

Interesting. Not 100% what I was looking for, but seems decent. I'll play with this some tomorrow.

> Also relevant to its merit as a business idea. Your form of a spreadsheet overlay (with a “layer toggle” ?) might be slightly better than Googles. But you’re up against a free, quality product from the start.

Layer toggle - precisely. I wouldn't build anything like GhostNotes out myself, I've got my next 3-4 business projects and 3-4 books and 3-4 kinds of art to make in the near future already. Just whimsically wondering if anyone knew of such a service, or if it'd inspire someone. Some kind of half-transparent overlay with a toggle would be great, I know I can't be the only person who sometimes is taking extensive notes and control+tabbing back and forth.

The rest of your comment is very good, and deserves more attention than a quick comment. Give me a moment and I'll reply in a top level post to this and another good comment I just saw.

For the same reason I use Evernote + Afloat on a Mac. Evernote is the best note taking system (thanks to multiplatform sync and tags) while Afloat enables window transparency + "always on top" in OS X (it's possible with Compiz on linux out of the box, I think, on Windows there some ugly hacks to achieve the same). No spreadsheet here, of course.

Hey Am - I was looking for something exactly like that, thank you. I'm on Windows, but I'll look into this. Cheers, thank you.