This is so obvious, yet little known – and although Mark Suster warned us all, I keep on falling in this trap.  Just today as I wanted to announce yet another great post by Mark, I tweeted this:

@msuster discusses how the Ice Age is thawing for Venture Capital

Big mistake.  Had I written “great discussion by @msuster”, a lot more people would have seen it. Why?

Read on to find out…

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http://www.cloudave.com

What tax-time, you may ask.  It’s April 15th, at least in the US. Wrong:  Anyone can get an automatic 6-month extension, which means the real tax deadline is October 15th… closing in on me … ahhhh. No, I am not a procrastinator,  my tax forms are always almost done by April 15th and I pay my dues, but there is this one ugly thing I hate to do every year: calculating business mileage deduction.

The IRS requires proper documentation and I do have it .. well, almost: it’s in my electronic calendar, with dates, locations, purpose of meeting..etc, except for one thing: the actual mileage.   So every year the ugly process that takes several hour is:

  • export my calendar entries to csv format
  • massage them in a spreadsheet (fill missing data, delete non-business ones..etc)
  • manually look up trip mileage for every single line using Google Maps
  • plug in mileage, let spreadsheet calculate claimable $ amount.

It takes several hours, is the only reason why I wait till the last minute and then some.  But this year, it just dawned on me: this is so bad, someone must have come up with a way to automate the process (and if not, I’ll find a developer). That’s basically the mantra of Web 2.0: whatever your (productivity) problem is, likely millions share it, so someone must have come up with the solution.

In this case the magic comes from a very simple site: Mileage Calculator. It does not look like a fashionable app, in fact it does not look like an application at all – you might think it’s just a blog post writing about the real thing.  That’s because it was not created with the mindset of bringing it to market:

It was created by Ade Olonoh who used Google Calendar heavily to track meetings, but neglected to record his mileage for tax purposes. Sure, it would’ve taken him less time to figure out the mileage than create this tool, but that wouldn’t have been any fun.

So yes, it lacks the bells and whistles, pastel colors and rounded corners.  Here’s the one-and-only entry screen:

Yes, no more list, export /import, data lookup:  Mileage Calculator will look up your trips from Google Calendar, fetch the mileage information from Google Maps, presents you with a list and total, then finally saves it as a CSV file to be used in a spreadsheet.   Simple, yet a life-saver – a free one.

Now, after all the praise, let’s be a bit critical: what would it take to turn this into a product?  Fix two weaknesses:

  • It’s not particularly smart parsing address data: i.e. it does not understand “Moscone Center, 747 Howard St, San Francisco, CA‎”, it has to be strictly in the format of “747 Howard St, San Francisco, CA‎”
  • The ugly UI

With those two fixes Mileage Calculator could become a nifty little service, or perhaps a feature that SaaS accounting and tax providers might want to pick up.  In the meantime, it’s a useful little productivity tool.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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SAP and Zoho Come Together

SaaS September 28th, 2009

At least on screen… Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu delivers his keynote @ NASSCOM, and what’s the background?  SAP Business ByDesign.

 

Business ByDesign: probably the best All-in-One SaaS suite NOT (quite) on the market today. smile_omg

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Here we go again: Ed Bott points out how outrageous it is for Apple to install so-called “updates” to the iPhone Configuration Utility on a Windows computer that does not have this software installed, in fact one that has never had an iPhone or iPod connected to.

He is right, this is obviously not an update, but installing new, and in his case obviously unnecessarily software.   It’s also not the first time, I described my  similar experience early last year. Back then I also wrote:

Apple fans are a religious cult who came in hordes to defend Holy Apple. (before you chastise me, just look at how often I point to Apple as a better choice, without becoming blindly faithful)

And boy, did I prove right on that …

Read more here.

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Amazing Sand Drawing Art

Misc September 20th, 2009

From the Youtube description:

Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine’s version of “America’s Got Talent.” She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and “sand painting” skills to interpret Germany’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

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dellz First there was Nokia, with the secretive, luxury, yet-to-be-released Nokia Erdos.  Back then I said:

Come think of it… I think I Open Source my name.  Apple, Dell, Sony, BMW, Mercedes..etc, I’m looking forward to your Erdos models.  Just don’t forget to send a courtesy unit.

Dell listened: they are coming out with the Latitude Z luxury notebook, the first notebook to charge wirelessly.  Whose next?   BMW?  Mercedes?

I’ll be happy to add these brands to My Z-life.  Just remember to send a courtesy product :-)

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Ed Yourdon’s tweet drew my attention to a rather disturbing article: Children Are Sold for Sex in America’s Capitol:

Guest blogger Melissa Snow of Shared Hope International discusses their new public awareness campaign to address child trafficking in street prostitution in Washington, DC.  Child sex trafficking happens all over our nation’s capitol, sometimes only steps from the White House and blocks from a symbol of the end of slavery — the Lincoln Memorial

It is a shocking article, and if indeed is true, then raising awareness is the right thing to do.  But the author stepped over the line with the photo she is using for illustration:

Photo by Ed Yourdon via Flickr

There is nothing wrong in using Flickr images with a Creative Commons licence, and the owner of the photo, Ed Yourdon is properly accredited.

But this is not just an image.  It’s a real girl, a living person with a face and name, who is quite recognizable by her family, friends, adversaries.  Using her in this article places her in the wrong context, implying that she is an (unwilling) child prostitute.   The author has no information about her, and Ed, who took the picture makes it clear he thinks it is the wrong context in a comment to the article.

The sad irony of the matter is that the author is clearly passionate about fighting childrens’ abuse – yet using this image in this context is a case of abuse in itself.

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Zoho is mostly known for their Web-based productivity and business software, but sometimes they venture into … hmm… unproductivity.   In the past year or so close to a million cartoons were created @ ToonDoo, and that number grows by 3-4 thousand every day.  (Hey, even I contributed onesmile_wink)

Today they have announced  ToonDooSpaces, private comics-based collaborative space for classrooms, be it school or kindergarten level.  (Remember when FaceBook – actually TheFacebook at the time – was strictly limit to the confines of actual colleges?)   What can you do @ ToonDooSpaces?  Here’s how the kids at one of the pilot schools explain:

toondoo

Even before this launch, ToonDoo has been used at hundreds of schools including Auburn High School, US, Totino-Grace High School, US, Leawood Middle School, US, Korea International School, Korea, Mount Scopus Memorial College, Australia, Lake Superior College, US and many others -  apparently all the way to college level.  That said I think ToonDooSpaces will be most favored by the younger ones.  Here’s a detailed review by Kevin Hodgson who has been using ToonDooSpaces in his class for months:

All spring, my sixth graders (11 and 12 year olds) were fully engaged in the use of our ToonDoo Spaces site. They would walk in the door and immediately ask: Are we going to make comics today, Mr. H? And they give a little shout of “Yeah!” with a fist pump when I say “yes” (after we do whatever other work we have planned).

Here’s an interactive video showing off more of ToonDoo’s features:

 

But hey, I’m writing a business / technology blog, so let’s get serious here. smile_wink   I often talk about Freemium (more here), and I think this is a perfect showcase.

toondoomatrix

Remember, Freemium takes patience – in this case ToonDoo has been available for over a year, attracting hundreds of thousands of users before the launch of the “premium” version, Spaces.

And here’s something else: I guess the inner child must have died in me a long time ago, how else do I have the most fun on the Pricing Page?  The fact is, we often talk about the need for transparency, and how SaaS should be easy not only to learn, use, but to buy, which includes price information, without having to endure lousy sales calls.  Well, it doesn’t get any easier:

 

Move the cursor along the users / months axis, click anywhere, and voila! – there’s your price quote.   SaaS companies, take notice: you can get rid of the kiddie appearance, but should offer a pricing tool this easy.

Now I am off to create a cartoon(doo). smile_shades

(Disclaimer:  I am Editor of CloudAve, a Zoho-sponsored group blog.)

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mintuit TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start:  they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M.

Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users.   But the big question today is why it made sense for Intuit and what the future holds for Mint and its users.  The consensus is that first of all this has been a defensive move.  Mint started to bite into the Intuit / Quicken pie, and Intuit just had to stop it.

There is some irony in this deal: the playbook had been written by Microsoft, against Intuit.

Continue reading …

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It’s not every day one sees his family name as headline on TechMeme.  Well, if that name is Scoble or Arrington, sure, but for the rest of us it’s a red-letter-day…

Well, it just happened to me, courtesy of Nokia, and the shiny new Nokia Erdos luxury phone.  Last I checked a few years ago, they could not keep up with demand for the $5K Vertu phones in platinum, gold and diamond casings.  The Nokia Erdos will only have brushed aluminum casing, but it’s stuffed with hi-tech, like the OLED display, a rising keyboard, 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, etc.  Here’s a promo video:

(Why is this, and all other copies on Youtube so blurry?)

Anyway, back to Nokia.  I’m a little pi***ed that they did not ask me … but in the end, it’s OK.  I don’t get productized every day, after all.   Just remember to send me a test unit, Nokia!

Come think of it… I think I Open Source my name.  Apple, Dell, Sony, BMW, Mercedes..etc, I’m looking forward to your Erdos models.  Just don’t forget to send a courtesy unit.

Related posts:

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)

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