Xero Raises Another Round and Acquires WorkFlowMax
Exciting news today from Xero ahead of their user conference tomorrow that spans two important announcements. I’ll cover them individually. $20M Raised from Existing Shareholders Existing shareholders have reinvested to the aggregate tune of $20M. Sam Morgan, Sam Knowles, Craig Winkler and Peter Thiel’s fund Valar Ventures have all taken
MinuteDock Launches on Intuit’s Partner Platform
Exciting times today for the team from MinuteDock (more on them here) the neat little time trapping application from my own hometown, Wellington, New Zealand. Formerly a product that was primarily intended for users of the Xero accounting product, MinuteDock is broadening its approach and is now tightly integrated with
FreeAgent Eases Life for Freelancers and their Expenses Conundrum
Like many freelancers, I incur significant expenses in the course of my contracting work and have to on-charge these expenses to clients. Ideally I’d tick a box in my accounting application and that would allow that cost to flow through to a client invoice without me having to enter it in two places. One of [...]
The Path to the Cloud is Paved…. With Jagged Rocks…
It’s always interesting to watch companies looking to move from their “traditional” approach of software delivery to living in the cloud. One company I’ve had a first hand glimpse of making that shift is MYOB (see disclosure). In its home market of Australia and New Zealand, MYOB is facing a small, but growing, and increasingly [...]
SaaS Accounting Roundup
I’ve been travelling for the past couple of weeks and haven’t kept up to date with news from the SaaS accounting companies that I usually watch closely. Here’s a summary of stuff that’s happened of late. Quick general disclosure though, I have consulted to a number of the companies below – more information here. Xero [...]
Flawed Analysis–On Clouds “Playing Nice”
The other day someone alerted me to a new report put out by IT news that lauds itself as a “technical study of the integration and extension options offered by the largest 20 software-as-a-service vendors serving the Australian enterprise.” The report looks at a few different dimensions including; Can I get my data in and [...]
Wave Nabs Funding–On Free vs Paid
The other day SaaS Accounting vendor Wave announced that it had just closed $5 million in funding led by well respected VC, Charles River Ventures. While yet another vendor raising a series A wouldn’t usually be cause for comment, this is an interesting case in that Wave, as I’ve written about before, is a free [...]
FreeAgent Nabs Series B
News just in that UK SaaS accounting vendor FreeAgent has nabbed GBP2M in investment from SM Trust and Torch Partners. It’s an interesting development given the other two main players in the UK market, Xero and KashFlow are both currently well funded – Xero via an IPO and some subsequent private investment and KashFlow from [...]
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 [...]
On Bootstrapping. And Big Bucks. And Organic Growth
Recently there have been a few posts about growth through funding and growth through organic means. Tony Hsieh from Zappos told his tale of woe about the expectations of VC’s in terms of good exits. On the other hand, Sridhar Vembu, Founder of Zoho (disclosure – Zoho is exclusive sponsor of CloudAve) wrote an excellent [...]
Integration is Good… When You Actually Do It (Part Two)
A month or so ago I wrote a post critical of the integration one vendor had made with the Google apps marketplace. Yesterday I was perusing Twitter when I came across this tweet: I’m actually a user of Xero for three of my businesses, so I was looking forward to seeing what their inclusion on [...]
It’s All About Support – Granular Is Good
The other day I had one of those nightmare situations that only those who are similarly detail-focused (some would say retentive) as myself can appreciate. Now I’m a stickler for detail – it really offends my sensibilities when things aren’t stacked in order, when things don’t match and, most of all, when the numbers in [...]
Differentiating in a Commoditized World: On Syncplicity and Expanz
At the Cloud Connect event in San Jose, Allister Croll gave an excellent presentation, actually as an aside, Croll ran close to half of the Cloud Connect sessions and really did a sterling job of managing the conference. Anyway – in his session Croll was talking about the opportunities for investment in the cloud and [...]
Xero Now Hosted by MYOB
It’s not Friday, but it’s time for a Friday funny… A couple of years ago, Xero got hold of the URL relating to MYOB’s new (at that time) SaaS product Business Basics Online. I posted about it at the time saying: But in the craziest turn of the story, check out this link –www.businessbasicsonline.co.nz. Yes [...]
