
It’s time to reconsider, Google
Almost a year ago, Google made an apparently small change to Google Calendar. They started automatically adding Google Hangout video links to every new appointment. And it was bad. I’m sure you’ve all seen appointments like this pop up in your calendar. How do you join the meeting? Do you dial the phone number, or […]

Seeking Simplicity’s Sweet Spot
Albert Einstein, you may have heard, was a clever man. He scribbled equations on blackboards, thought big thoughts, and all of that. But, allegedly, he also said Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. These words have resonated with me recently, as I’ve heard pitches from one company after another, all […]

Wave Updates UI, Rolls out Broad SMB Financial Portfolio
I’ve been following Wave since its founding back in November 2010. The company has an interesting approach to the traditionally conservative accounting software space – it’s product is provided to the user at no cost who, in return, receive personalized “Business Savings”, or special deals offered by businesses that pay Wave Accounting revenue each time […]

Harvest Launches Time Tracking Platform-The Rise of the Real Time Business Application Approach
I spent some time the other day talking with Tom Mornini, founder of Boocx (more on them to come). Suffice it to say Boocx is focused on becoming the accounting platform for web developers – but platform in the true sense of the word – some core pieces of infrastructure that, via API hooks can […]

With WalkMe Software Vendors Don’t Need to Sweat the UX
I spend a bunch of time working with software startups and am always amazed by how much time they spend sweating every little pixel of their site – much of the reason for this attention is an effort to hone the user experience (UX) to the point where even a

Levion and the Promise of Hybrid Accounting Software
As the accounting software industry moves to a general acceptance of the fact that customers demand the sort of benefits that cloud application bring, there are two distinct approaches vnedors are making; Pure-play cloud vendors (FreeAgent, Xero etc) build pure Saas applications and do away with any need for desktop

SuiteCommerce and the Value of End To End
At the NetSuite SuiteWorld event recently the company announced SuiteCommerce an end-to-end solution that ties back end ERP functionality with customer facing e-commerce solutions that are optimized across any endpoint – desktop, mobile, tablet etc. It’s a compelling proposition and one which continues the theme of tying together similar services to provide a complete solution for […]

Bank Simple–Not Traditional Banking But Definitely Not Banking 2.0
I’ve written in the past about Banking 2.0 – a concept that sees the flexibility and openness of web 2.0 bought that most staid of industries, banking. As I see it, like the web we now know, banking 2.0 would involve banks creating APIs that would allow (and yes, after correct authentication of course, third […]
Convergence–Mobile, Web and Cloud Improve Customer Experience at NZSki
Part of my excitement about cloud is that it seems to me to be one of the factors that is enabling a real change in the way people interact with each other and with organizations. Recently and old-schoolmate of mine (from longer ago than either of us would like to admit), Simon Gianoutsos, wrote an […]

Happy Birthday, Personal Computer. Rest in Peace.
Business Insider reminds us that today is the 30th birthday of the original IBM PC: the computer’s brain was a 4.77Mhz Intel 8088 processor (for my younger readers, it’s Mega not Giga) and it had a grand total of 256K RAM (again, it’s not 256 GB, not even MB, but Kilobytes). Yet it was a […]

Old meets new world: enterprise UX
A few days ago, I got a message from Derek Singleton of Software Advice telling me about a survey they’re conducting: Ten Consumer Web UI Themes We’d Like to See in Business Applications is what it is called Software Advice apparently is a company offering free advice for software buyers, and although I don’t have […]

NetSuite Fights Hairball Epidemic with New Release and Edgy Marketing Campaign
NetSuite’s marketing team has been known for their edginess, starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAP’s annual conference to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs. Windows. Today they are doing it again, by establishing the Hairball Institute for Business: (The […]

What is next for computing when people have gone mobile?
Image via Wikipedia If you own an Iphone, an Ipad, an Android phone, or any of the other highly connected mobile devices, you get a very good idea of where computing is going. The problem is that we are still stuck on the same paradigm when it comes to services and work. Chained to a […]
User Interface and Cloud Computing – Part 1
Editor’s Note: Shankar Bharadwaj is an Information Technology professional with more than 16 years of experience in the industry with experience in diverse platforms. He works for Microsoft in Seattle. He will be writing a two part series on User Interface and Cloud Computing. We, at Cloud Avenue, may or may not share his views […]