Cloud’s Secret Sauce–Zendesk Delivers Best Practice Analytics and Customer Satisfaction Data
I’ve long said that one of the key benefits of cloud applications is the ability of vendors to aggregate and anonymize data from their users, and to offer this anonymized aggregated data back to users who can then derive insights from comparisons between themselves and other vendors. It’s an area fraught with concerns about commercial […]
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
Google Launches Apps Marketplace
I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners. The new Marketplace […]
It’s Multi-Currency Month
I posted awhile ago when Xero rolled out multi-currency so it’s only fair to do a wrap up of the latest multi-currency entries. Both FreshBooks and FreeAgentCentral announced this month the availability of their multi currency functionality. The FreeAgent offering is really slick, including on the fly calculation of daily unrealized and realized gains and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
OAuth Beginning to Rock the World
OAuth, or Open Authentication is “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications”. Basically it’s a way to allow one web application to utilize another without the need for users to worry about pesky authentication keys or the like. It also allows for data […]
T-Shirt Friday #12 – FreshBooks
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]
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 […]
Adoption – Slow but not That Slow
Yesterday I took part in a meeting for an advisory group that I belong to that’s looking at ways to deliver Government services to small businesses in a more integrated, simple and customized way. At the session, interestingly enough, were the GM of a traditional desktop accounting software product, and the CEO of a SaaS […]
Use of Aggregate Data – It's Not Hidden and We Should Get Over It
Image by crazynd via Flickr News recently that online personal finance application Mint is considering selling anonymized aggregate information. We can see this as a tacit acceptance of the fact that in these trying economic times, free services have no option but to find alternative revenue streams. Zoli commented on this in his post, using […]
The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS
Forget software: it’s all about (your) data. Hyper-growing Financial Management system provider and Quicken / MS Money challenger Mint recently raised eyebrows announcing their plan to sell anonymized aggregate customer data. Some reviewers were screaming, we saw bombastic titles like Personal Finance Startup Mint Wants To Sell Your Money Trail – but in reality the […]
