FreshBooks

inDinero – one to watch

September 2, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS
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I stumbled across this report at TechCrunch about inDinero in a C round where it hopes to raise $1 million. That’s pretty good for a new vendor in the apps space but reflects the interest in SaaS/cloud apps that are aimed at the very small business (VSB.) Founder Jessica Mah traces here entrepreneurship back 7 years [...]

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Lessons from ClearBooks failure

September 1, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS
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Earlier today I learned that ClearBooks had ‘unexpected downtime.’ Whenever you see that phrase you should substitute: ‘total cock up.’ To its credit, ClearBooks tried to communicate the issue on GetSatisfaction but in doing so exposed fundamental weaknesses of which buyers should be aware. From the GS trail: We are currently experiencing a problem with [...]

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ClearBooks research: even more bizarre

June 11, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Last month I described research being undertaken by Judge Business School MBA students on behalf of ClearBooks as ‘bizarre.’ A few weeks later, the results are in and now I describe it as even more bizarre. At the time I quoted from the blurbs saying: Their goal is to explore the online accounting market, its [...]

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The new dork

March 8, 2010 Marketing

The new generation of entrepreneurs have much to teach us ‘older’ types about the business of doing business in the 21st century. This is a superb example which, as Mike McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks said: Marketing done right …to which I’d add – inventive as well. If we take this as a proxy for the [...]

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Making the SaaS accounting market scale

February 1, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

The SaaS market is at a point where mega growth is not a matter of when but how. The SaaS vendors have to find ways of managing growth. However, to date, they’ve mostly been poor at understanding what needs to be done in order to grab the prize. It’s well understood that the ‘build it [...]

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How do you innovate?

January 19, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Stuart Lynn, head of R&D, Sage mid-market division pinged me to say he’d written a piece about innovation in part inspired by one of my YouTube videos. Stuart took an interpretation of that video content with which I don’t wholly agree but that’s of little consequence. If you’re interested, then check out the video which [...]

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The myth of free and other weird pricing issues

October 6, 2009 General

In the last few years, there has been a noisy group of people arguing that many things should be free as in beer. Later today, my colleague R ‘Ray’ Wang, partner at Altimeter Group will be offering his Tuesday post on the subject of ‘free’ software. It’s ironic as I’ve had one in mind on [...]

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Is community the next step for vendors?

August 7, 2009 Innovation

The notion of ‘community’ has always been something that software vendors want to nurture. In the past they were called ‘user groups’ or ‘forums.’ Many of them still exist but the emphasis has always been on support. Today I see a different trend. The best example I know is the SAP Community Network. I am [...]

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billFLO: an old idea that keeps coming around

April 21, 2009 Cloud Computing/SaaS

billFLO wants to take the drudge out of processing invoices between systems by making invoices machine readable. This is an issue that surfaces every now and again but has sop far proven elusive to crack. billFLO makes the claim that: Vendors simply email computer-readable billFLO invoices to customers who, in turn, use billFLO to instantly [...]

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