Company.com – It’s All About Community
I’m an advocate for small and medium businesses (SMBs) – coming from a SMB background I’m all to aware of the difficulties that those at the bottom of the foodchain experience. I’ve long been involved in business advisory roles and was part of a team that set up a SMB online community a couple of [...]
Zoho Invoice 2.0 Unwraps
Zoho has just unveiled the next generation release of its invoice product. The two most notable changes are the inclusion of a nice business-logic dashboard, and the addition of expenses to the offering. Generally the UI has been greatly improved – there is nice use of tabs as opposed to separate boxes for further information [...]
Starting with a Virtual Assistant
Starting this week I’m going to be experimenting with a virtual assistant to help me and Chess Media Group get tasks done. Over the past few months I’ve spent far too much time on tasks that can easily be delegated to someone else such as email, basic research, information gathering, and document creation. I’ll admit [...]
Will Zoho Conquer the SMB 2.0 Market?
(See the Editor’s note at the bottom)Online presentations, spreadsheets, word processing, CRM, project management, recruiting, invoicing, human resource tools — WOW! Zoho has it all. Naturally then I wanted to discuss the future of Zoho with Raju Vegesna (Chief Evangelist) as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. It turns out not much – but not for [...]
Wow, the Android App Store Stinks
With all the hype about the Nexus One today, and knowing that I am still in the market for a cell phone, I wanted to see what all they might have that would make this more interesting. The problem is going through the web interface of the Android Market Place simply stinks – only top [...]
WebFinger – Paradigm Changing?
I wrote a post recently about what billFLO is doing for small, Mom and Pop owner of Do it Best stores. This, along with some pretty exciting discussions I’d had both as part of The Small Business Web and privately with some other people, got me thinking about the reality on the ground for SMBs. [...]
It’s About Focus – SMBs, SaaS, Knitting and Dogfood
Awhile ago I posted a bit of a rant about an experience one of my businesses was having with a particular ISP who didn’t seem to understand the concept of customer service. Briefly I told the sorry tale of woe that we experienced with our site hosted on a traditional ISPs VPS offering. I got [...]
Carry The One – E-Commerce Integration FTW
I’ve spoken many times before about the power of integration and what it can bring to businesses. I’ve also whined about the inefficiencies caused by separate, integrated services – one of my own businesses is a good example of this pain – having to receive e-commerce orders, manually enter them into and accounting package, manually [...]
Defrag… And That’s a Wrap
After the recent defrag conference, I traded emails with event organizer Eric Norlin. Defrag was the second Norlin Inc event I’d been to after attending Glue conference in May this year. After defrag I tweeted saying that Defrag and Glue, along with Antipodean event Webstock, are the three best conferences I’ve attended (and I’ve done [...]
billFLO Bringing Services to the Little Guys
I’ve written before about billFLO, a service that enables users to send and receive machine readable invoices straight into their accounting system. They’re announcing this morning a deal which is a great case study to show the value that connected business services can bring to SMBs. It’s a subject I’ve passionately been discussing with a [...]
SaaS, Accounting, Microsoft Money and Hyperbole.
Over on Accounting Web, a right royal stoush was started when Aqilla’s Hugh Scantlebury wrote an op ed piece opining what the withdrawal of Microsoft’s Office Accounting product means and, more importantly, what is behind the move. For those who need the history, Microsoft discontinued its Office Accounting product line, having determined that; existing free [...]
MinuteDock Makes Every Minute Count
Services businesses life blood is their ability to track time. As such it could be argued that any accounting application that is focused on the services market should have time tracking built in as a core feature. Having used SaaS accounting application Xero for years and growing tired of copying and pasting hours from time [...]
Billflo Powers (Almost) Seamless Invoicing
Back in April I reviewed the newly launched service that billFLO provides. In their own words billFLO; billFLO focuses on eliminating invoicing friction for SMBs. We work with the likes of Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Less Accounting, Harvest and Blinksale to enable users to send and receive machine readable invoices straight into their accounting system. At the [...]
The Customers Asked, Xero Answered. FreshBooks Integration…
Go to market strategies are an intensely interesting topic of conversation. In the very early days of its existence, I was a little dubious with the strategy that Xero took – that is partnering with accounting practices and using them as the channel. I had several issues with that – the issues around revenue sharing, [...]
Xero Goes Personal – This Changes the Game
An announcement from Xero today that I’ve known about for awhile but not been able to discuss publicly. From the media release; Online small business accounting software provider Xero (XRO) will launch a personal money manager in early 2010. Xero Personal will allow consumers to have a complete view all aspects of their finances. They’ll [...]
