Going Solo
May 8, 2008
Next week I’ll be presenting in Lausanne at Going Solo, an event dedicated to helping the startup freelancer achieve a solid grounding in the basics of doing business. It’s a very worthwhile event organized by the super smart and charming Stephanie Booth.
Others pitching up include Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, Laura Fitton and Martin Roell. Each brings a certain gravitas and wealth of experience. Sign up, it will be worth it.
FreeAgent gets friendly
May 8, 2008
FreeAgent has signed up five firms of accountants which will act as partners for the FreeAgent service.
Partnerships of this kind are usually regarded as ‘tick on the box’ arrangements designed to show that professionals have some interest in the service. On this occasion, the situation is different.
Each of these firms specialize in or have business units devoted to servicing the freelance community. That makes FreeAgent a good fit for these practices rather than using the scattergun tactics that other vendors choose.
The goal is to assist professionals in providing a streamlined service that shifts the emphasis to value add. At the same time, FreeAgent is engaging in a limited amount of co-development that will see the service improve in areas like error trapping and provide intelligent information for the professional to assess expense deduction validity.
Links to practices:
My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 5th through May 7th
May 8, 2008
These are my del.icio.us bookmarks for May 5th through May 7th:
- E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez » Blog Archive » Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Week 12 - Luis is getting there - 27 emails only in the last week. Now 3 months into the experiment
- deal architect : COST: The New MISO - You gott love Vinnie's invention
- Forrester: Enterprise Mashups to Hit $700 Million by 2013 - ReadWriteWeb - Another monster prediction. 80% of predictions are inaccurate but regardless, it all makes for fun reading
- Apotheker’s 10X Operating Cost Reduction for SaaS Isn’t Enough « SmoothSpan Blog - If you're thinking about operating costs in the internet cloud then this is one to ponder
- Marc Benioff heralds Web 3.0 at DreamForce Europe | Software as Services | ZDNet.com - I don't agree with the definition of Web 3.0 but I'm not sure that it matters.
- Tax Research UK / Aberdeen Asset Management: another departee who doesn’t pay enough UK tax for anyone to notice - What can't speak can't lie. Except when it comes to tax it seems.
- Does Ballmer Need To Go? - There was a time when TechCrunch wrote news. Now it seems desperate to bait for page views and links with this BS story that is top of page at TechMeme. Nonesense of the first order but worth linking to as an example of non story Silicon Valley ad page ob
SAP’s a’changin’
May 8, 2008
Apologies for the near radio silence this week. I’ve been buried under the mountain that is SAP’s 10,000+ user conference SAPPHIRE in Orlando. When not hanging around in airports or going to Eric Clapton gigs. Hard life I know.
Anyhoo - I spent much of my time analyzing the marketing delay in bringing Business ByDesign to mainstreet buyers. Yes, there are technical issues but no, they’re not deal breakers and yes, I believe SAP should be making a much bigger deal of BBD than it is. Any professional out there thinking about developing a new consulting line of business would be well advised to look at this. If you have BusinessOne experience, I’d take a close look. There’s bags of nuanced perspective aorund the topic which I recommend reading.
Elsewhere, I met with the company’s chief marketing officer, Marty Homlish. Some might remember that I took part in a SAP sponsored global marketing experiment some weeks back but this was my first opportunity to see the entire picture. Impressive. SAP has established a miniature ecosystem cum virtual world complete with interactive video and other web 2.0 tools that help marketers be more effective, network, interact and learn from one another. It is an incredibly cost effective way to reach out and allows for instance the opportunity to establish ‘presence’ that reflects real world business scenarios. I was fascinated with Marty’s presentation but unfortunately we ran out of time to do a truly deep dive. I’m hoping I’ll be able to do a ‘part 2′ in Berlin, later in the month.
The same goes for my session with Zia Yusef who leads SAP ecosystems initiatives. It seems the company is at last starting to ‘play more fair’ with the potential partner community. It has set up an environment where partners can discover open ‘white spaces’ for development of new functionality. That’s a big step forward. Vinnie wasn’t there though it seems his off-the-record conversations with SAPpers revealed a certain surprise at the amount SAP’s partners make off the company. I have to giggle at that. Enough has been written about the economics of large scale ERP implementation for anyone paying any attention to realize there’s a massive ERP related services market. That will have to change for the mid-market - yet another possible reason for delay in BBD rollout.
Overall, it was a great conference - as conferences go. It’s always good to see a software company in confident mood and in SAP’s case not just confident but willing to share where there are genuine issues. It still needs to hone internal communications because it shouldn’t take the combined efforts of three executive board members to provide a convincing and coherent answer.
I’d also like to see greater emphasis put on the SDN/BPX communities. They’re doing great work as are the innovators at SAP Labs. Unfortunately, it is proving hard to get funding for certain projects I find interesting. More on this later when I get a deeper dive.
I’ll be going to Berlin for the European version of SAPPHIRE where I hope to discuss other areas - like GRC/CSR and deepen my understanding of the ecosystems play Zia introduced.
More reading below:
