What we missed in our Google Apps Marketplace coverage: the Best Poster Award … drumroll.. goes to box.net:

box google

And while at it, their video isn’t too shabby, either:

Wait… is that an iPad killer with a great virtual keyboard at 0:46?

ipad killer

Bias alert: I’ve been watching Box.net from the humble early days starting here:

through here:

box toilet

..to becoming a successful business.    Just sayin’ :-)

(Update: my secret retirement plan is collecting royalty from Box.net for using Google-in-a-Box )

P.S. On a more serious note, here’s our previous Google Apps Marketplace coverage:

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace.  The site is live now, feel free to browse.  The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners.

The new Marketplace fills an obvious need: Google Apps has 25 million users at over 2 million businesses who clearly need more than just the communication / collaboration / Office type applications Google can offer today.  Here’s a chart of some of the initial Marketplace participants:

Launch cos

As you can see, the list represents a wide range of partners – some are very obvious fit, others bring questions re. future business model. Just picking a few randomly, I can easily see how electronic signature management vendor Echosign, the obviously named eFax or meeting scheduler Timebridge expands Google Apps functionality, and they are all easy to use applications.  Spanning Backup is a brand new product just launched days ago, but they’ve established credibility with the previous product, Spanning Sync.

At the other end of the scale we have fairly complex offerings represented by NetSuite and Successfactors.  For SMB SaaS ERP and HRM (yup, lots of acronyms)  offerings integrating Web based office apps or email is a natural fit, but these companies have a very different sales and implementation model: far from the simple test-buy-click-to-install model they have a longer, more traditional sales cycle, a few weeks of implementation work, training..etc.  It will be interesting to see how their presence at the Marketplace plays out, and which side generates more deals for the otherl.

Then there’s Zoho (dislosure: Zoho is sponsoring CloudAve, my main blogging gig).  On one hand, clearly competing with Google, on the other hand, partnering where reasonable.  My personal opinion has been for a while that Google should have acquired Zoho long ago, offering a killer combo of Gmail+ GCal and the Zoho Business Apps to the SMB space.  Obviously neither Google nor Zoho thought it was their best interest (and not mine, either, why would I want to lose our Sponsor…), but they finally met at the Marketplace:-)  Kudos to Google for playing fair with co-opetitors in the interest of their Customers, unlike that other company that booted Zoho from their Appexchange when they did not agree to kill Zoho CRM…  CRM is now Zoho’s best selling product, and Google Apps users will now have easy access to it, as well as to Zoho Projects. Zoho Meeting will soon be integrated, too.

googzohoTalk about integration, Google published extensive API’s for integration of 3rd party programs to Apps, the Marketplace allows easy discovery of such apps and there’s also a commercial model, eventually offering billing on the software vendors’ behalf, for a 20% cut.   For now the actual purchase transaction takes place outside Google, but once it’s completed, Administrators of a Google Apps domain can simply enable the new apps which will be accessible via Google’s Universal Navigation.

Other then for the obvious reasons – users / customers having more choice, I am happy about this launch because I think if any company, Google has the clout to actually expand the market, and in a way influence user behavior, moving us all, consumers and business alike from the traditional sales-heavy model to a pull-model, where we try-click-to buy.  I wrote about this ’shift’ in detail in the previous post .

Stay tuned for more analysis from Ben who will look at the details as well as competing Apps Markets, and from Krish who will look at some individual offerings.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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According to Goldman Sachs Accounting is now at the #3 spot in SaaS implementations, reports Dennis Howlett.

Not a real surprise, certainly not to Dennis’s readers, or those who follow Ben’s Accounting 2.0 series over @ CloudAve.

Still, seeing the numbers makes me feel good, given that I debated a short-sighted report by McKinsey a few years ago, when they predicted that Financial Applications would be amongst the last to move to the Cloud.

Eat crow, McKinsey :-)

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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SaaS Directory has announced September’s most popular SaaS companies.  The top 5 are:

September’s top 5 US winners are:
#1 – Gogrid
#2 – WebECS
#3 – CariNet
#4 – Rackspace
#5 – American Data Technology

That’s a strange list..or perhaps SaaS Directory has a strange definition of “SaaS companies” since the top 5 are all in the web hosting business. (ASP, anyone?).  Well, it triggered my curiosity enough to dig deeper and look at the full list.  I’m not picking on any business here, simply stating my own ignorance, but I have to admit I haven’t heard of Robson Communications, Younicycle, Apptix or Yuba, just to name a few.   But perhaps it’s just me, so I asked around on Twitter:

How many “SaaS” companies do you recognize in this so-called “most popular” list?

Here are a few responses:

list1

Hm.. you tell me:-)

list2

6 from former Industry Analyst and current SaaS Exec Chris Selland – should say something about the list

list3

Ben makes a living writing about this stuff, and he only recognizes a third of these companies…

There’s one on the list I know by pure co-incidence: Vembu Technologies, whose CEO I happened to meet at his brother Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu’s office (disclosure: Zoho is Cloudave’s exclusive Sponsor).  I guess it proves it’s an entrepreneurial family: but wouldn’t Zoho be a more recognizable SaaS brand than Vembu?

The more I look at the SaaS Directory, the more confused I am.  Or perhaps they are the ones quite confused?  Here’s their definition of SaaS Project Management:

SaaS is an effective project management tool which enables teams to work together towards achieving common objectives dramatically improving the overall user experience while offering increased flexibility

“SaaS is an effective tool”… LOL.  (By the way, for SaaS PM discussions you may want to read this thread, or Andrew Filev’s PM 2.0 Blog)

Clicking further I’ve discovered the SaaS Directory Forums – they all seem to be overrun by commercial  spam:

saasforum

I rest my case.  Awards are a great way to recognize effort, success – but some awards can only harm a company’s reputation. As for the SaaS Directory – well, it’s a directory sans the SaaS part.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )

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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)

(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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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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Just a short note:

Guess who will welcome GooGreed with a big smile?  Zoho.

Update:  TechCrunch has the clarification from Google:

In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.

Related posts:

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