Archive for August, 2008

Here’s an IP monster….

Published by Ben Kepes on August 31, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, New business and Strategy. 0 Comments

I was alerted to new offering Mygazines - which basically encourages users to scan magazines and upload them where the community can access them.

Wondering about copyright issues I checked out Mygazines terms and conditions - front and centre is this clause;

INDEMNITY

You will indemnify and hold harmless Mygazines, its parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, customers, vendors, officers and employees from any liability, damage or cost (including reasonable attorneys. fees and cost) from (i) any claim or demand made by any third party due to or arising out of your access to the Site, use of the Services, violation of the Terms of Use by you, or the infringement by you, or any third party using your account or Mygazines User ID, of any intellectual property or other right of any person or entity.

Anyone want to run a sweepstake guessing how long it’ll be before they get taken down?

I mean who on earth do they think they’re kidding - what a lame concept……

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A start-up reflects

Published by Ben Kepes on August 30, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New business and Strategy. 1 Comment

Billflo is an app to create, manage and email invoices. My attention was drawn to Billflo by their CEO who commented on one of my posts. I’m looking forward to meeting up with them in San Francisco next week, and discussing their plans for the business.

Outside of that they actually do, I was interested to read a post on their blog where they give some observations at the end of 42 days in operation as a start-up. It’s an interesting post - their main points are;

1. Customers are great…but tough

2. We need to sleep!

3. Innovation is not everything

4. Enjoy the ride

Check out the full post and I’ll report back some more on Billflo after I meet them.

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On to it with Intuit

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2008 in Business, IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 2 Comments

As mentioned before I’ll be moderating the Money 2.0 panel at the upcoming Office 2.0 conference.

I’ve just been told that joining the other panelists will be Justin Kitch, the head of SMB SaaS for Intuit. Kitch is formerly CEO of Homestead which was recently acquired by Intuit.

The entire panel now consists of;

I’m more than keen to take questions from the "floor". Leave any you have as a comment on this post and I’ll try to fit them in to the panel. The panel occurs on Thursday, September 4, 2008, 2:15PM to 3:00PM (San Francisco time), and you should be able to follow it from the Office 2.0 website

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Moving up the food chain….

Published by Ben Kepes on August 29, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

Zoho CEO Sridhar wrote this excellent post about why Zoho plays in the office productivity space, but why Google only will do up to a point.

The gist of his post is that for Google, docs is a low margin offering compared to their traditional business. Therefore docs moves Google down the margin food chain and there need to be reasons for doing it other than pure profit generation. Clearly there are some strategic reasons for Google to do docs - anything that lets them eat some of Microsoft’s lunch is a good thing, and they also want to give the SaaS office productivity pace a leg-up to damage MS further.

For AdventNet however (AdventNet is the parent company of Zoho), office productivity docs are a move up the margin food ladder - as such it an especially attractive direction for a business that is purely self-funded.

I’d not be surprised (but have zero way of knowing) if there haven’t been high-level discussions between Zoho and Google - they both have distinct markets and would both benefit from tipping MS off it’s own throne.

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