Buying Cloud Accounting Software?
Fellow Enterprise Irregular Brian Sommer is doing a webinar this Wednesday on The Top 6 Things You Didn’t Know About Cloud Accounting Systems (But Should!). in cooperation with FinancialForce. Brian will cover a number of buying considerations and trends that are being reflected in new buyer perspectives for financial accounting software. The software market is undergoing [...]
iComplete–The World’s Simplest CRM?
There’s been a lot of talk among a new breed of CRM providers recently about finding the right balance of functionality and complexity to meet the needs of very small businesses. While salesforce has cleaned up in the enterprise cloud CRM space, there’s no denying it’s product offering is both priced a little too high, [...]
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out [...]
Telcos Could Be The Future Enterprise Software Vendors For Small Businesses
Having worked on enterprise software product and go-to-market strategy for SMB (small and medium businesses), I can tell you that these are the most difficult customers to reach to, especially the S in SMB. It’s an asymmetric non-homogeneous market f…
Foursquare + Square = Killer Small Business Social CRM
Parker Smith wrote a piece that got me thinking. In Foursquare: Democratizing the Loyalty Program, he posits that Foursquare could be the loyalty program provider to small businesses. I think he’s right. Then I noticed these identical product benefits touted by the companies themselves, Foursquare and Jack Dorsey’s Square: For example, foursquare can tell you [...]
Special Immigration Policy for Startup Founders
Eric Ries over at Startup Lessons Learned has an interesting proposal on his blog about having a special immigration policy for alien immigrants to stay if they start a new company. Eric was recently at Government 2.0 where the proposal was made by Paul Graham. This raises some interesting questions about how immigrants and small [...]
The Challenge of Offline Saas Revisited
Paul Michaud wrote a post here a couple of days ago on the challenge of allowing offline usage in a Saas based system. In his comprehensive discussion, he used the example of a Saas based contact management system and the complexities involved in allowing users to take their data, manipulate it offline, and then synchronise [...]
Websites Obsolete? – Not in the Real World
I came across this post the other day which was based around the line that a static website is pointless in today’s social media/dynamic content world. The authors specific points where that; …“plain vanilla” web sites: have limited impact on your online reputation. Basic web sites, as I’ve defined them, just don’t have as much [...]
SaaS Risk Reduction – Don’t Keep All Eggs in One Basket – A Case Study
Image via CrunchBase This is the sixth post in the SaaS Risk Reduction Series. For a change, I am planning to highlight a problem faced by one of the SaaS customers and explain how it could be done differently based on my suggestions in this series. Zoli gave me a link to one of the [...]
SaaS Risk Reduction Series
Image via Wikipedia My post titled "What is your Cloud Strategy?", where I spoke about the importance of having diversification and redundancy baked into the cloud strategy of any small business, kicked off criticisms from my fellow Cloud Avenue Editors, Zoli and Ben. They did not agree with my argument about not keeping all the [...]
Trust the Cloud, but Have a Backup Plan. Google Lockouts are not Fun.
Just about every few month we get a high-profile case of someone getting shut out of their Gmail and other Google services. Google is notorious for freezing accounts without a warning, often in the users defence, i.e. when they detect probability of hacking. When you’re Loren Baker, Editor of Search Engine Journal and blog about [...]
