Archive for the 'Efficiency' Category

Saasu to New Zealand - it’s only fair

Published by Ben Kepes on September 17, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 6 Comments

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the imminent entry of Xero into the Australian market. In what can only be described as a fair development, Australian SaaS accounting provider Saasu has announced the roll out of some internationalizations of it’s product.

For New Zealand customers this includes New Zealand default tax codes. Saasu is quick to add that the NZ codes are for beta release only (same situation for the UK).

tax-codes-nz

The interesting thing here however isn’t how Saasu will do in Xero’s backyard, neither is it how Xero will do in Saasu’s patch - the real test will come when both of them are fully entered into the UK market. Bear in mind that neither company has any particular brand following outside of their home location - UK then will be a great head to head battle - not to mention the fact that they’ll both be battling Free Agent Central for the smaller businesses and Coda2go for the larger players.

Let the battles (almost) begin.

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How can Apple get away with being evil?

Published by Ben Kepes on September 16, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT and Strategy. 8 Comments

Heard the story of podcaster? Seems a guy had a great idea for an iPhone app - an app that allows the downloading of podcasts independently of iTunes - makes sense huh - allows the users to slice and dice it however they wish?

Unfortunately that sort of slicing and dicing is anathema to Apple who decided in their wisdom to reject the app from the App store - it seems slicing and dicing is fine so long as it doesn’t hurt Apple in any way.

So Alex Sokirynsky, the developer of podcaster, found a backdoor way to distribute his app - using a little known function that was designed for enterprise application deployment - and downloading from a store he set up.

If this was Microsoft - you’d hear the hounds baying all the way from Redmond - but somehow Cupertino tends not to suffer from those sort of repercussions.

Anyway - I reckon Alex should be congratulated - both on the app itself, and on his dogged determination to let the world see it. I’m not an iPhone user (for reasons alluded to above) but if you are - go and check out his site.

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Now this is user-centric

Published by Ben Kepes on September 16, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT and New business. 1 Comment

It was awesome to see what has come from the guy who invented T9 keyboard entry for cell phones. I’ve long been a little dubious of text entry on a mobile device - other than the digital natives who can write novels without watching - for the rest of us text entry is just too hard and too slow. T9 is great but what is the next step that allows even faster input and is customised with the latest must have - a touch screen interface?

Enter Swype - a new startup that is currently focused on text input technology for windows mobile devices. The idea of Swype is to press your finger or stylus on the first letter of the word you are attempting to write, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. When the word is done, then you lift.

The video below shows Swype in action;

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Telecom rolling out some new SME stuff

Published by Ben Kepes on September 13, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand and SaaS. 3 Comments

While I was away Telecom announced a new host of options for SMEs. Basically it seems that Telecom have identified that SMEs in New Zealand are time-constrained and one of the things that gets overlooked in their busy-ness is a complete set of web presences.

To this end they’ve partnered with a bunch of providers around the world in an effort to bring affordable and easy solutions for SMEs.

Some of the stuff they’re doing includes;

  • Business specific broadband (higher caps and better support)
  • Business specific hardware (modems with more filtering options)
  • Web design and hosting (a simple one-stop-shop for domain name registration, site design and hosting

Fact is that most SMEs are Telecom customers, and most could benefit from some of these tools - the attractiveness of a single-bill ICT relationship is pretty compelling.

Yet to come, according to the Telecom press release, is backup, storage and business tool software offerings - all delivered via SaaS - nice!

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