Tweet Blender Wins Over Twitter’s Own List Widget – For Now
CloudAve readers can now follow the contributing bloggers’ twitter stream in a sidebar, thanks to a cool widget called Tweet Blender. Finding it was not easy: I combed through at least 100 plugins / widgets, all doing essentially the same: follow a person, or do keyword search. Either or.. not both. And definitely not a [...]
The Lego Internet
Jessie Stay over at Staynalive brings up the idea of the Lego internet, where large companies are busy making widgets, API’s and other building blocks that designers and developers can leverage in their own applications. Jessie mentions that the Building Block internet might just be a way to visualize Web 3.0 which is not a [...]
The Web May Not Equal the Cloud But Does Anyone Care?
Over on the salesforce.com blog, Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at salesforce posted in light of the recent problems suffered by Gmail users. Coffee points out correctly that Gmail did not, in fact, go down. Rather users of the web application were unable to access their accounts. As Coffe said; Gmail did not go [...]
SaaS Certainty – Escrow is the Answer
I got an email the other day from Escrow Associates, a provider of software escrow services that has just today announced the release of their SaaS software escrow agreement. For those not accustomed to escrow services, they are a contract where by the IP of a product is held by a third party and is [...]
The Link, the Subscribe and the Open Follow
In case you haven’t heard, the Associated Press appears to be committing hara-kiri under the guise of a “business model.” It would seem (from what I’ve been reading) that they want to require a license with them simply to quote a headline *or* link to a piece of their work. Obviously, they’re trying to go [...]
API Goodness…
I’ve become a little overexposed to applications using the Twitter API of late. If I see another location notifier or automated image poster I’ll scream – so it’s kind of surprising to see me highlight something built specifically atop the twitter API. My bottom line is I like utility – so the recent iWantMyName API [...]
Building Facilitation Instead of Interruption
I ran across this blog post yesterday (”APIs are the next marketing platform”), and it’s really resonating with me. In it, Kipp Bodnar explains that while billboards, and print ads, and blogs (etc) may have been the “marketing platforms” of the past, the future of marketing platforms is the API (the application programming interface). Quoting: [...]
Things You Can Learn at the Glue Conference
I’ve been working on an agenda update, and in doing so, I found myself re-discovering all of the things that I can learn about a Glue. Here’s a partial list: How Facebook is opening up their platform Why REST is the foundation for web oriented architecture Where identity is heading, and why it has to [...]
Sticky Platforms
This blog post about Leo Laporte’s strained relationship with Twitter has me thinking this morning. The post outlines the “dangers” of twitter (using the front men of Laporte and Dave Winer) as a “closed” or “centralized” system. Now, as a twitter user (and fan), I completely get the closed and centralized argument, but I think [...]
The Small Business Web – The Rising Tide of Integration
I alluded yesterday to some stirrings in terms of small business SaaS ecosystems. I didn’t post specifics yesterday as the initiative was somewhat stealth. However at the SXSW conference, attendees were advised of The Small Business Web, a cooperative currently made up of the following vendors. BatchBlue Software Social CRM for Small Business FreshBooks Painless [...]
There’s a Reason We’re Called Early Adopters – That Don't Mean We Should Act Like Fools
The latest five minute maelstrom on the blogosphere was the widespread hacking of Twitter accounts. According to experts, some 700 or so Twitter accounts were hacked such that they appeared to be the property of a 23 year old female “adult entertainer” *ahem*. To their credit twitter fronted up and posted details of the breach. [...]
Platform Level Integration – The Post-API solution?
Late last year Yves Hiernaux guest posted here on CloudAve with a post that absolutely resonated for me. Given my lengthy background at the coalface of small business, it’s not surprising that I have a real affinity for solutions that facilitate the integration of discrete applications and, in doing so, make life a whole lot [...]
More Integration from those Charming Canucks
I reviewed a little while ago IAC-EZ a start-up SaaS accounting offering that leverages the relatively huge and sophisticated FreshBooks customer base. Hot on the heels of that integration comes news that Clarity Accounting, another Canadian SaaS accounting company, has finished it’s integration with FreshBooks also To celebrate, those friendly FreshBooks people are offering Clarity [...]
Adding Value (and Product) to Inventory
The number of SaaS accounting offerings out there is growing by the day already the CloudAve AccountingThread runs to well over a dozen product reviews (as well as a bunch of guest posts and analysis pieces – check it out here). Despite this impressive showing, and perhaps indicative of the fact that the vendors are [...]
Has Best-of-Breed Won?
Let’s face it: enterprise applications will never be cool – and that is part of the reason why small-business focused applications such as Basecamp and Xero get more buzz. But apart from NetSuite and 24SevenOffice, who else is offering all-in-one fully integrated business applications in the cloud? Surprisingly very few. About once a year or [...]
