February 2009

Me, him and her

February 22, 2009 Featured

It’s been quite an exciting week so I thought I’d finish off with a pat on the back to me, one to my pal Vinnie and one to Anne. A while back, Aaron Strout asked if I would answer a few questions and then posts a story in his ‘industry experts‘ series. I’ll take whatever [...]

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Intuit demands Mint's numbers…what?

February 20, 2009 Cloud Computing/SaaS

TechCrunch has obtained letters from both Intuit and Mint. The story goes like this: Intuit, the company behind the well-known Quicken suite of money management software that includes Quicken Online, can’t believe how well its competitor Mint is doing. In fact, they were so bewildered by Mint’s claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day [...]

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Cloud Computing in plain English

February 20, 2009 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Plenty of people get confused over cloud computing. This video from rPath does an excellent job of not just explaining the concept but runs over the economics of the cloud based model. Essential viewing if you’re in any way confused and are still wondering what all the fuss is about.

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Deloitte slapped with record fine

February 19, 2009 General

Another one for the ever growing collection of audit failures. From Report on Business (Canada): An appeal panel of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario has upheld a decision against three current and retired partners of Deloitte & Touche LLP who were accused of making errors while auditing failed theatre company Livent Inc. in [...]

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ERP is so over so get over it

February 19, 2009 General

Ben Kepes discussion about ‘fully featured’ and ‘ERP’ is so full of holes it would make a good string vest. I was going to leave a lengthy comment but realized that if I’m going into attack mode, it ought to be here rather than on another person’s website. Anyhoo. I should preface by saying I [...]

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The burning education question

February 19, 2009 General

This from a guest post at AccountancyAge (via PCW) is possibly the most important question I’ve seen asked about the future of the profession: It is clearly not sufficient to limit our learning to a question of increasingly technical methods and standards. This has been the trajectory of accounting regulation since 1970 culminating in IFRS, [...]

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Xero's hockeystick

February 19, 2009 Cloud Computing/SaaS

This from Xero should put a sock in the on-demand naysayers’ mouths Things are accelerating here at Xero, we’ve added 1000 customers in 50 days. The company also claims to have 1,000+ paying customers in the UK. That is an excellent achievement but as I have said many time before, there is plenty of room [...]

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Facebook's 100K person problem and network power

February 19, 2009 General

The last few days, Facebook has been at the centre of a firestorm over changes it made to its terms of service. Broadly speaking, when you sign up to Facebook, you grant it a license to use your material for the purpose of its business model. For most people that’s not an unreasonable exchange for [...]

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PwC to fail?

February 18, 2009 Featured

I have a bet on with Francine McKenna that PwC will be the first of the big firms to fail. While this may seem like idle and irreverent sport to many, it is a serious issue. Quinn Forensics, a specialist firm of forensic accountant poses the question: Is PwC be about to be barred from [...]

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A razzie for obfuscating PwC

February 18, 2009 General

MayorWatch has a piece that looks suspiciously like a retrodden press release. I make no apology for ripping the entire piece because there are bags of nuggets worthy of comment: Figures produced for the City of London show the UK’s financial services sector contributed an estimated £67.8bn to UK government taxes – 13.9% of the [...]

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