links for 2008-01-29
January 30, 2008
-
The question will be just how fast the plugin builders will come to support Firefox FF2 is a terrible memory leaker. FF3 seems better but plugins are essential.
-
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
-
It’s a nice browser but just not good enough for my needs
-
Report on Agresso’s alliance strategy that sees a change of heart about where it wants to partner for CRM.
-
But is this going to work?
-
Hard to disagree with Richard’s assessment. All aboard the gravy train
-
Apple might have to start taking notice of how their latest cash cow is being milked by others
-
Cross border conflict around trading laws is a basic issue
-
I lost count but I think it requires about 71 steps. This is not efficient or for that matter desirable.
Could Shoeboxed work in the UK?
January 29, 2008
Late this evening Ed Kless from Sage US and Verasage turned me on to Shoeboxed. It’s a US based mail receipts mail-in service that digitizes receipts and spits out a spreadsheet for later use. My initial impressions were favourable. The site is clean, simple to use and offers a sensible pricing model. It backs up its value add story with a calculator from which you can see the potential savings from using the service. As a concept it is fine but late last year, they switched focus away from being a business oriented play to one that embraces consumer spending.
TechCrunch thought it was pretty good but a stream of comments about how it has a string of reps and affiliates running around college campuses attempting to sign up users got me worried. But then I thought about Ed’s drawing it to my attention.
My guess is that Shoeboxed didn’t get a ton of takers after its initial pitch to business and despite it getting plenty of press coverage. Right idea, wrong timing. It’s Facebook group only has 543 members. It therefore made the innovators’ classic error of switching course and relaunching. The ever watchful blogs took this as a sign that all is not well and they may be right. WIth a staff in excess of 30 for what is an incredibly simple service, but VC backed, this is not surprising.
The US is still very much postal driven and claims a high delivery rate. The UK’s postal service as we know is another story. That puts up doubt in my mind. As a business idea, it has promise. Pity about the infrastructure upon which it relies and the inevitable need to incur charges for registered or recorded delivery.
links for 2008-01-28
January 29, 2008
-
An interesting idea - give it to the accountant for free, let the user pay. Hmmm
-
Zoli’s comments are right on - it’s hard to get the right talent for startup operations but it makes sense to remember that a pedigree isn’t all that counts.
Open source tax compliance
January 28, 2008
This will get James Governor’s attention. I’ve been having a few Twitter conversations with Phil Hodgen who last week called me from Switzerland but unfortunately I couldn’t take the call. Today in a Twitter post he said:
I’m talking about doing to tax compliance what wordpress did to publishing
Heh - open source tax compliance, I like the sound of that. Unfortunately, I can think of 16,000 tax practices that would hate it. Then I’m thinking but isn’t that where we’re heading anyway? In the good ol’ days you were lucky if you got a transaction engine, today you get that plus some output, then you have to shoehorn it to an accounts production system and then out to a set of tax engines.
We’ve still not cracked reliable online submissions but it’s creeping ever closer.
Prediction time - 2 years max and compliance, at least for the very small business, will be automated to the point where compliance costs tumble to near zero.
BTW - I like this fellow. He comes out with really good advice (although he’d probably kill me for saying so) like:
Pain and agony of doing another form + relatively low tax savings + audit risk = don’t bother. Resolve to spend an extra hour of time in marketing your business and move on. You will make more money.
How many professionals out there would say as much? Very few I’d venture to suggest. We’d rather feel as thought we’d added net present value.
Technorati Tags: tax avoidance
