Mafia Sourcing – How Insiders Game User Generated News for Money
The Web. Open, democratic, leveling, freeing information from closed networks. The wisdom of the crowds. Or so it seems. I originally came from the entreprise software world (for 10 years) and before that I was in mobile & telecoms (8 years) so the last three years of immersing myself in consumer Internet, digital media & […]
Pearl and Rapportive – Helping Email Become the Killer App (Again)
A couple of weeks ago when I posted about the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, I mentioned Appirio’s “PS Connect” offering that embedded contextual data from Appirio, within Gmail. At the time it was an interesting offering, but didn’t garner much attention given the noise that was building around the Marketplace itself. The other […]
MinTuit: a Second Look. (You Will Be Assimilated).
TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start: they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M. Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users. But the big question today is why it made […]
IntuMint – What an Intuit Owned Mint Could Mean
Image via CrunchBase Wow… exciting. Eagle eyed CloudAve stalwart Krishnan posted about the reported purchase of Mint.com by Intuit (disclosure – the Intuit Partner Platform is a consulting client but I had absolutely no previous knowledge of this deal nor any insight into Intuit’s plans). Many of us in the SaaS and personal/business finance software […]
Finding the Hub – A Common Data Model
A couple of weeks ago I roused myself at 1:30am to moderate a radio show in my ongoing series for VoiceAmerica “Kepes in the Clouds”. This time I had the pleasure of speaking with Sunir Shah, Chief Handshaker from FreshBooks, and Alex Chriss, Business Lead for the Intuit Partner Platform (disclosure – the IPP is […]
Moving Beyond RSS (Maybe)
Something weird is happening with me and RSS. I should preface this by saying that I’m a *classic* late adopter (insert irony here) for a ton of things (I don’t have an iPhone; hell, i don’t CARRY a cell phone 90% of the time), but a semi-early adopter for other things. The things I tend […]
SlideRocket – More Than Just Presentations
I had a briefing yesterday with SlideRocket, the company that “provides premium communication tools through innovative and compelling software-as-a-service to let you present the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. SlideRocket gives everyone the power to make great presentations, communicate effectively with colleagues, impress customers and captivate audiences.” I spoke to […]
Twitter as a News Source (RSS)
Twitter is one of the most misunderstood new technologies to emerge and therefore a common refrain I hear from friends, family and colleagues is, “I don’t get it.” So I decided to do a primer with commentary on how I currently use Twitter (July 2009), which will no doubt change. But I hope to help […]
A Place for Everything… Opening the Lid of the Box
I’m a firm believer in serendipity. I get dozens of emails every day from vendors wishing to showcase their wares to me and, unlike other blogs, I respect the effort that has gone into the communication and try to reply every time. Often I don’t end up reviewing the offering, but sometimes something in the […]
Intacct Scores a Coup – A Partner Channel for SaaS Accounting
Intacct will announce this morning an exciting partnership with the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) that will see small businesses enabled by the resources the AICPA has, and will see Intacct leverage the customer base that AICPA members have. Intacct sent me details of the partnership last week and yesterday I was given a briefing […]
On Aggregation (A Recurring Theme)
I’ve talked about BeeBole a number of times before – not because I have any special relationship with the company (I don’t) but because I really like their ethos of building an aggregated platform for business applications. An environment for an ecosystem if you like. I like widgets, I like flexibility and I like simple […]
Plugging BeeBole
Yves Hiernaux posted here last year with what I believe was a visionary post for his view of the future of an integrated application world. A world where “the browser is the platform”. As I’ve alluded to since then, Yves’ thoughts weren’t mere concepts, rather he’s actively engaged in trying to create his vision of […]
SaaS and Telcos – the Perfect Companions?
I have a particular interest in SaaS aggregation. My background is in SMBs so I have (I believe) a real understanding of the time and other constraints within which SMBs work. Given these constraints there are some barriers to SaaS adoption (as opposed to already aggregated shrink wrapped software) due to the time and effort […]
