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Fun Video from FakeOffice.org

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:56:43 +0000

Mileage Calculator a Life-Saver @ Tax Time

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:43:00 +0000

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)

SAP and Zoho Come Together

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:02:47 +0000

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.

ToonDooSpaces: Comics-based Social Network for School Kids

Zoli Erdos — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:36:53 +0000

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 one)

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:

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. I often talk about Freemium (more here), and I think this is a perfect showcase.

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).

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

MinTuit: What’s Next After the Intuit / Mint Deal

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:18:33 +0000

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.

Google Replaces Beta Tag With Price Tag on Apps

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:36:56 +0000

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: 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.

Google Finally Ends the Folder vs. Label War – What’s Next? Find the Answer Here.

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:25:54 +0000

Bear with me for this somewhat long post, for I am not only discussing the sweeping changes Gmail made today, but in the end will also tell you what they are going to do next year – or perhaps after that.

Gmail Changes

The Gmail label changes announced today and to be released to accounts slowly (you may not see them yet, I only have them on one account) are ones that I’ve long been waiting for, and that most reviewers seem to underestimate, thinking of them as mere cosmetic or usability changes, i.e. “drag and drop”, “right-side labels retired”..etc. We can always trust good old Lifehacker to call it what it is: Gmail Gives Labels the Folder Treatment.

Folders vs. Labels

Because they are. Folders, that is. Just very few people realize that. The Folders vs. Labels debate is older than the tenancy debates we discussed recently, with two deeply religious camps (apologies for the extreme characterization):

Multi-tenancy, the Holy Grail of SaaS. Do Customers Care?

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:39:57 +0000

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…

Promoting SaaS on eBay?

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:13:08 +0000

This listing on eBay is hilarious, almost makes me wonder if it’s a true listing or carefully planted advertising for Google Apps (and SaaS in general). But the seller appears to be real, has been on eBay for ten years… Here we go, get Microsoft Office w. Outlook for $75, because:

It’s brand new and never been opened. My boss bought it right before I moved the whole company over to Google Apps.
We never looked back, but here’s your opportunity to live it up, 90’s style, with this great, retro piece of Microsoft 2007 software.

Zoho Office for Sharepoint: Use SaaS, Keep Data Behind the Firewall

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:34:31 +0000

One of the major roadblocks to SaaS providers’ entry to the enterprise is IT and Business concerns about corporate security, thinking of the firewall as the last line of defense.

Microsoft SharePoint has a very strong position in the Enterprise as the incumbents behind-the-firewall collaboration server, and for years smart Collaboration and Social Software vendors with better functionality, like Atlassian, Socialtext, Jive Software, Newsgator have been "playing well", adopting their services to SharePoint.

Now Zoho joins, announcing Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, which combines the benefits of a collaborative SaaS Suite with the (perceived or real?) security if keeping data behind the firewall.