Monthly Archives: October 2010

October 29, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

37Signals Catches FOSS Syndrome

By Ben Kepes

So, the blogosphere/twitterverse meme of the day is the incredulity everyone feels at the alleged price hike that 37Signals imposed on customers. This storm harks back to a similar storm that my friends at Zendesk suffered through a few months ago. I’ll not go into the did they/didn’t they argument

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October 29, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

DataGroup Eases the SaaS Barrier to Adoption

By Ben Kepes

One of the barriers to more widespread adoption of SaaS accounting applications is the high degree to which accounting applications are “sticky”. In other words, the high level of workflow that gets built into application use over time, combined with the difficulty of migrating from one application to another, created

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October 28, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Beauty (and Speed) Are in the Eyes of the Beholder

By Ben Kepes

A press release came over my desk this morning announcing that NetSuite’s ecommerce platform is now integrated with Intel’s API. Huh? Intel, the chip company has an API, what gives? This new API offers up information about CPU, battery life, and network connection for third parties to take advantage of.

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October 28, 2010 Posted in Business 3 Comments

Sometimes Box Size Does Matter

By Ben Kepes

(ummm – any double entendre taken from that title was unintentional, sort of!) Box.net, the cloud content management vendor, is today upping the ante in the war of storage space. They’re moving all plans to a much greater storage allocation, the free edition moves from 1GB to 5GB while the

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October 27, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

FinancialForce Update

By Ben Kepes

I spoke the other day with Jeremy Roche, MD of FinancialForce the accounting application built on top of force.com. Readers will recall that about a year ago Coda2Go, as FinancialForce was called then, was partially acquired by salesforce.com – I wanted to catch up with Roche and see how things

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October 25, 2010 Posted in Business Leave a comment

BudURL–When Shortening Gets Extended to Campaign Management

By Ben Kepes

I’m glad I don’t run a URL shortening service – it’s a sector with rampant competition, vendors introducing their own offerings and difficult routes to monetization. All of which made me really interested to talk to BudURL yesterday about a relaunch that is coming for them today. BudURL is a

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October 24, 2010 Posted in Business 6 Comments

Xero Gets Some Acid on the Blogosphere

By Ben Kepes

Last week Xero announced that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first external investor in Facebook, was investing NZD4 million to “support Xero’s expansion into the US market”. Not surprisingly the move got significant attention both in New Zealand and elsewhere – I have to admit that while I

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October 22, 2010 Posted in Best Practices, customer service management, leadership Leave a comment

Why ‘Following the Leader’ Is More Than Just a Hokey Expression

By Ben Kepes

Leading by example

I believe leadership from the front is the right approach. For instance, the Israeli Army has, since its inception, adopted the theory of Ahrayot. Loosely translated, this refers to the fact that Israeli commanders lead from the front, set an… Read more

October 21, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Technology, The Internet of Things and Doing Good for the World. Technology4Good Barcamp next month!

By Ben Kepes

I’ve written in the past about the internet things and, more specifically, how objects, connected to the cloud can do some really cool things beyond the early adopter examples. I was spurred on by a post over on TechCrunch that talked about an intelligent grid for water systems – the

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October 21, 2010 Posted in Collaboration, collaboration officer, organizational hierarchy, People and Processes, Strategies Leave a comment

Who is Responsible for Collaboration?

By Ben Kepes

Recently on HBR an interesting post suggested that companies need to appoint someone to ensure that collaboration occurs, a Chief Collaboration Officer if you will.
Chief Collaboration Officer is the person (or more likely group of people) who is tasked with“crafting a holistic solution to collaboration; one that involves strategy, HR, product development, sales solutions, marketing, and IT”. So, whose job is it?

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The Author

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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