November 30, 2007
General
The FT quotes Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister: The “snooty†attitude of bankers and financiers who thought they were cleverer than everyone else is largely to blame for the global credit squeeze “disasterâ€, Ouch! These remarks come hot on the heels of reports that IKB has been bailed out to the tune of some $9bn. On the BBC, commentators were saying that IKB had stepped way outside its core business of lending to mid-size German companies by investing in securtized loans whose assets turn out to be a bunch of dodgy suprime mortgages. The words ‘greed’ and ‘transparency’ were liberally sprayed around. On BBC TV, reporters were blaming the fact that many of these transactions are opaque and that as a result it is almost impossible to say where the next banking crisis will pop up…. This issue dovetails directly to the matter of geographic reporting and the fact there isn’t a workable accounting standard in place. Right now you can’t really tell where a global company is earning its corn (and paying its taxes) unless that company makes a positive decision to reveal the appropriate information…. As these tales of financial woe start to unravel, the very opaqueness with which companies traverse the globe, schlepping assets around for both greed and financial engineering purposes, it seems that sooner or later it comes back to bite them in the derriere.
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November 30, 2007
Featured
Only available in the US market right now (don’t run away UK folks), this latest entrant to the SaaS market is hoping to plug the 2-25 user market…. Unlike NetSuite which goes for power under the hood, NetBooks takes a much more simple approach to the problem of addressing business processes. It’s seamless handling of UPS shipping into the order and billing processes was spot on. Its understanding of the difference between inventory and warehouse goods measures is simplicity itself…. As I said at my ZDN blog, there will be the inevitable comparison with QuickBooks but I believe those comparisons are wrong: QuickBooks was designed to address the bookkeeping problem. NetBooks was designed to solve the whole business management problem: sales, customers, vendors, production, inventory, shipping, and yes, bookkeeping…. Online saas systems lend themselves well to this approach and given the package is priced at $200/month for a 5 user system plus a book-keeper and accountant, cost should not be an issue…. In the UK, any new entrant has to compete with a growing list of newbies plus the incumbents like Sage, MYOB and Intuit. Nevertheless, NetBooks approach is sufficiently differentiated for it to stand a good chance of success – provided it can find the right partnerships.
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