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……
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.
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.
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
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.
Xero announced today that they have partnered with Acclipse, the Australasian vendor of Accounting practice software.
Acclipse sells software that does all the back office work for accounting practices – managing their own workflows as well as managing data from their clients. It is to this second part of the Acclipse offering that Xero will bring value.
Currently many solutions require manual data transfer between client side software and the practice software – naturally this is both inefficient and a potential source of error and omission – this partnership should provide for seamless, quick and accurate dataflow.
I have to say that I’m a little skeptical about Xero’s strategy of putting lots of effort into accountants. Xero’s expectation is that this will lead to high levels of adoption of their offering – due to their perception that accountants are in a position to recommend Xero to their clients. My perception – garnered through 15 or so years working in, on and for SMEs and doing a fair amount of advisory work with them, is that the biggest factors influencing the choice of accounting software for a SME are;
cost
what they can pirate
what their mates recommend
As such I think there are better go-to-market strategies for accounting apps than spending time and effort on conservative, risk averse, technophobic and busy accountants. That said we are starting to see some traction gain for Xero – so their early stage strategy must be paying off.
Notwithstanding my views on partnering with accountants, this deal with Acclipse is a smart move for a number of reasons;
New markets
Two heads (and marketing budgets) are better than one. Acclipse is ambitious and obviously wants to spread beyond Australasia. Going into new markets with an integrated offering that supports both client side and accountant side needs is a much more attractive proposition. It’s also easier as they can both leverage off each others resources and connections.
The power of connectedness
There much bigger benefits to SaaS than just it’s online availability. It really starts to add some value when you use it as an aggregator of data from around the ecosystem. Things like benchmarking, industry dashboarding and the like are super valuable and super easy with SaaS products. The one hitch is that clients are likely to feel anxious about their accounting software also being the party who aggregates their data with their competitors. Which is where someone like Acclipse can come in – they can be the arms length, yet trusted, party who provides the mining service that feeds back into the client side information.
It’s obviously a strategy for growth – it gives Xero an entre into Australia (Acclipse are already there), gives Acclipse and entre into the UK (Xero are there but not really gaining much traction) and gives the both of them more clout everywhere else.
Nelson businessman Alan Trent says he is committing more than $1 million to the development and launch of a shopping website, 735pm.com, aimed at New Zealand retailers and consumers.
One of the site’s features is it gets redesigned every day at 7.35pm. While retailing websites including Telecom’s Ferrit have struggled to win significant numbers of customers, Trent said 735pm.com would provide a unique shopping experience and offer significant opportunities for companies to market nationwide.
A look at the site shows that it’s a rip-off of the wildly popular 1-day site. Not only is it a rip-off, but it’s executed exceptionally badly.
1-day was a great idea that spread virally and probably cost around $20k to get going. This idiot plans to blow $1mill on a product that can gain neither early mover advantage nor be seen as a fast-follower.
It’s a dramatically flawed prospect and this Trent fellow should be taken out the back and shot.
I honestly find it hard to believe – comments I’ve heard have mostly been along the lines of "is this a joke?".
With a hat tip to Mauricio for pointing it out, look at the story of Agami, the start-up with the oh-so-novel idea of providing "enterprise-class unified network storage solutions".
After raising $45million from three rounds of venture funding – including big valley name Kleiner Perkins.
Valleywag has a conspiracy theory saying that;
our guess is [the founder] is keeping quiet trying to be a "team player" for the boys on Sand Hill road in order to stay on their roster of cooperative executives ready to work on — and sometimes unceremoniously shut down — future ventures
Anyone prepared to agree with me now that the VCs went through a year or two of funding anything that moved? And in the process fuelling a growth in valuations, and a growth in hype that can have only one consequence for a number of those caught up in the melee?
What WILL however help it along is things like the announcement today (with a hat tip to MF) that Fronde has just been appointed the first Google enterprises partner for New Zealand. Fronde will be Google’s first partner in New Zealand for the Google Security, Compliance and eDiscovery products as well as Google Apps.
Even if Fronde does nothing with Google (and I’m sure they WILL be proactive) someone like Fronde, with it’s enterprise credibility, partnering with Google is sure to see a higher understanding of SaaS in this country.
Well done Fronde and methinks it might be time for a local version of the Office 2.0 conference – New Zealand is seeing a groundswell in SaaS understanding and awareness.
For those either attending the Office 2.0, or in San Francisco next week – just a note that Zoho will be hosting a party to both celebrate their millionth user milestone and to announce a couple of new things.
The party will take place at;
Vitrine @ St. Regis (4th Floor) 125 3rd St San Francisco CA
The party starts @ 6PM on Sep 4th.
If you’re planning on going, fill out the form here.
Salesforce started off with CRM – a product that seeks to manage a companies sales processes. Sales processes are just one form of knowledge management so it’s not hard to see the fit with Salesforce’s latest acquisition, InStranet.
Instranet sell a tool called Dimensions that has a whole lot of potential to make sense of the rapidly growing amount of information that is at hand in business. Dimensions manages and sorts the knowledge base of a company so that when a customer makes an information request, Instranet can sort through the screed of information that is irrelevant to the query, but can serve up the information that is of relevance.
Dimensions allows a business to accumulate masses of data, secure in the knowledge that the information is readily accessible.
Salesforce are pushing Dimensions hard, saying;
Finally: A Knowledge Base that Gives You Just the Answer You Need – and Nothing You Don’t
Traditional knowledge bases rely on matching keywords against every answer in the system. The result: many pages of possible matches that leave your agents and customers lost in a sea of irrelevant information.
InStranet’s patented Dimensions technology organizes your knowledge base in multiple ways to pinpoint only those answers that are relevant to a particular customer. Add the Dimensions technology to the rich customer history in Salesforce CRM and you get just the answer you need—and none of the "noise."
Everything You Need for Happy Agents and Customers
Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support is the fastest-growing application among enterprise call centers and support teams worldwide. This award-winning product delivers a:
Call Center application that makes every agent successful
Customer Portal that makes self-service the preferred destination for your customers
Proven Knowledge Base used by 350,000 global call center agents and millions of self-service customers
Deliver Success in Weeks, not Months – Even for Large B2C Call Centers
Our customers love that they can be up and running with Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support in weeks, not months. The new knowledge base is no different.
Salesforcetimes – ever keen to get a dig in at Microsoft, uses this as an example of the promise for Dimensions;
Head over to this travesty, and type in “office won’t open”. If they were using InStranet combining all of Microsoft’s data about my copy of windows, what updates I’ve taken from Windows Update, perhaps asked for some machine specs, when was the last time I performed maintenance, as well as my Dell support history… well, it might find something of actual use for me, maybe even, the right answer!
It’ll be fascinating to see how Salesforce integrates Instranet/Dimensions into their existing offerings.
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Salesforce started off with CRM – a product that seeks to manage a companies sales processes. Sales processes are just one form of knowledge management so it’s not hard to see the fit with Salesforce’s latest acquisition, 
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