Mileage Calculator a Life-Saver @ Tax Time
SaaS, cloudave September 29th, 2009
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)
Tags: accounting, irs, mileage, mileage calculator, mileage rate, SaaS, tax deductions, tax returns, tax software, web 2.0, xref
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. 
Tags: A1S, bbd, business bydesign, byd, nasscom, SaaS, sap, zoho
Apple is Just as Sneaky as Microsoft, Dumping Software on Your Computer
Software September 27th, 2009
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 …
Tags: Apple, apple update, iPhone, iTunes, microsoft, quicktime, Safari, windows update, xref
MinTuit: What’s Next After the Intuit / Mint Deal
Business, SaaS September 14th, 2009
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 …
Tags: acquisitions, aggregation, benchmarking, data mining, intuit, intumint, mergers, microsoft, Microsoft Money, mint, mintuit, money management., MS Money, Online Banking, personal finance, PFM, quickbooks, quicken, SaaS, Wesabe, xref
Video Interview with SAP’s John Schwartz
Enterprise Software August 31st, 2009
NBC’s Press: Here host Scott McGrew, TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy and Fortune’s Jon Fortt interview SAP Executive Board Member John Schwartz in this two-part video.
Schwartz came to SAP through their acquisition of Business Objects, and unlike many acquisitions where the “assimilated” CEO gets slowly marginalized, this one seems to have worked well. In fact John Schwartz is becoming somewhat of a front man, especially as his analytics become the growth engine SAP badly needed, with their traditional transactional system being somewhat stale.
Another interesting aspect is that while SAP now has a an On-Demand Tzar in ex-Oracle John Wookey, his team is still largely strategizing – while Schwartz’s Business Objects is a showcase of a formerly traditional software company turning to SaaS aggressively.
Btw, this is not the first time an “acquired” exec catapults fast in SAP: the previous guy arguably started lower and raised to stardom fast… but he is now at a Better Place (pun intended).
Anyway, enjoy the discussion.
Btw, these videos have been online for a week now, but on the first day the were practically unviewable: watch for 3-4 seconds, then wait for long buffering… again… again.
One Customer at a Time is a great principle – in Customer Care, not on-demand video.
Related posts:
- Columnar Data Storage
- SAP Gets Transactional with In-Memory Database: Changing the Game for Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft
- SAP’s Position on On-Demand, Social Networking, and Cloud Computing
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
Tags: acquistions, analytics, business objects, SaaS, sap, schwartz, video, wookey, xref
Simplifying the Gartner Hype Cycle – 2.0 Style
Enterprise Software, Humor August 26th, 2009
Fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani did a good job of un-hyping the Gartner Hype Cycle for emerging technologies.
He points out some inconsistencies comparing this year’s chart to the 2007 version. He should know, he is a Gartner Alumnus himself. But I’ve been wondering if there was a way to further simplify it, i.e. make it digestible to average folks like yours truly .. and I’ve just found it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, here’s the simplified, scobleized, oprahized, too-oh-ized version of the Gartner Hype Cycle:
Courtesy of Geek & Poke.
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
Tags: analysts, Gartner, gartner hype cycle, Humor, oprah, scoble, web 2.0
Google Replaces Beta Tag With Price Tag on Apps
Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS July 7th, 2009
Just a short note:
- After 5 years Google Apps are no longer considered Beta.
- They may not be free for long? The free version is still available, but takes some digging to find – I wonder if it’s intentional…
Guess who will welcome GooGreed with a big smile? Zoho.
Update:Â 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:
- Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises
- Gmail leaves beta, launches “Back to Beta” Labs feature
- Google finally rips the beta label off Gmail and other Google Apps
- Google Apps Premier Demo Accounts
Tags: beta, beta software, freemium, gmail, Google, google apps, googreed, office, Personal Productivity, SaaS, zoho
Two recent posts by Enterprise Social Software vendors Jive and Atlassian set up a huge debate amongst my fellow Enterprise Irregulars. Here’s the money-quote from Jive:
It’s not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "SaaS" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it’s been an industry mantra that it’s simply impossible to have a scalable SaaS business without multi-tenancy.
Both Jive and Atlassian went single-tenant. That’s a red flag with many SaaS purists. But there’s more then just tenancy. What if customer data stays behind the firewall, while the application is still provided over the web? Is that still considered SaaS? Do customers really care about such issues, or do they look for innovation in features and services?
And a bonus: the #1 SaaS icon supposedly delivers on-premise, if the deal is big enough…
Tags: atlassian, cloud computing, data security, Enterprise Software, infrastructure, jive, multi-tenant, On-Demand, on-premise, private cloud, readwriteweb, SaaS, salesforce.com, sharepoint, single-tenant, software architecture, software as a service, tenancy, xref, zoho

Zoho is mostly known for their Web-based productivity and business software, but sometimes they venture into … hmm…
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Gmail Changes
Zoli Erdos