Business On Software

Note: This was a guest posting of mine that appeared at CloudAve earlier this week.  CloudAve is a great new blog that has been specifically designed to bring you all the news about Software As A Service (SaaS) and ‘Cloud Computing’ in one place.

I am always on the lookout for free or low cost web services that will help me (and my clients) to better organise their day, and to be more productive.

About a year ago, I stumbled upon a free service called ‘I Want Sandy’, which, in a nutshell, is an online virtual assistant.  The way it works is, I can send Sandy an email asking her to remind me to do something or to remember any pertinent detail, and she would do it quickly and efficiently in the background.

For example, I could send her an email saying “Remind me to call Paul to arrange lunch next Thursday”, and lo and behold, next Thursday morning, I would get a friendly reminder email from Sandy to do just that.  Sandy could also remember phone numbers, appointments and various other things.  She had a Twitter interface so you could use it on your phone, and a Jott interface as well so you could even speak your requests to her.  And all this came at NO cost!

Well, unfortunately Rael Dornfest, the creator of IWantSandy, is shutting down the service as of 8th December.  That is less than 2 weeks away.  Rael has been offered a job within Twitter, and they have absorbed all his IP in Sandy, and another web service that he offers.

This is a sad day for Web2.0 and SaaS in general.

Firstly, let me point out that I have nothing against Rael personally or professionally.  He is obviously a brilliant designer and programmer, which is exemplified by the elegant and useful service that he built.  The dismay that I feel is moreso in relation to the betrayal of trust that Rael has shown to his user base.

IWantSandy was always promoted as a ‘life changing’ tool, and an indispensable one at that.  And judging by the comments on the IWansSandy support site, it certainly was so for many, many people.  Unfortunately, the new owners, Twitter (yes, the people who regularly bring you the ‘fail whale‘), have not committed to keeping the service alive.  In fact, there has been no definitive roadmap given by any party as to the IWantSandy service, other than that it will be permanently taken offline in a week and a bit.

The biggest problem I see here, is that the way this whole thing was handled has now tarnished any trust that the general community would have had in Web2.0 companies in general, especially the smaller, relatively ‘unknown’ ones.  This whole saga is going to make it harder for other SaaS companies to convince their current and potential users to trust in them staying around for the long haul.

A lot of people are defending this decision, along the lines of “Well, it was a FREE service, so there is no commitment from the site owners to hang around losing money”.  Ahem, I have to respectfully disagree there.  I would have gladly paid for Sandy’s services (and judging by the comments on GetSatisfaction, so would many other users).  I never saw any attempt by Rael to monetise his service or get revenue in other ways.

One could also argue that GMail is a free service – and what would the uproar be if Google said they were going to shut down GMail in two weeks?  At least with online email, there are several other providers that you could turn to, but from what I can see, IWantSandy is a pretty unique service and no one else seems to offer the same sort of functionality (yet).

In my view you cannot promote a service as a useful, everyday tool, and then revoke all that functionality and convenience on a whim.  People have already bought into the value that this tool gives them.  To me personally, there was great value in the convenience and simple email interface of the system.  This is value that I would have had no hesitation in paying real dollars for.

I cannot understand the business logic behind Twitter purchasing a standout excellent service with a loyal following, and an extremely strong, personal brand, (did you notice how I constantly refer to this service as ‘Sandy’ or ’she’? – I never do that with any other service I use) and then shelving it with really no idea what to do with it.

A hell of a lot of work has gone into building a persona and positive feel about this service, and I would really like to know why Rael didn’t just sell the IP to another Web2.0 company like Remember The Milk or 37signals, or even a new player on the block, who could have taken the service and kept it free, or monetised it – anything, rather than just ‘putting it down’.

But now I am afraid that Sandy has got the sack – another victim of the economic downturn…or was it corporate greed?

I’m going to miss her…

UPDATE 28/11: Looks like Rael has extended the deadline before he shuts the service down.  Exact dates haven’t been given as yet.

UPDATE 29/11: More postings on the closure of IWS can be found here, here and here

The British government has just announced that the VAT rate in the country will drop from 17.5% to 15.0% in order to combat their worsening economy and hopefully kick start consumer spending.

The main problem is that they have only given local businesses about a weeks notice to make the changes.

Given that I was right in the trenches during the changeover to a Goods & Services tax here in Australia in 1999/2000, I can appreciate the implications of this.  While a change in the tax rate will not be as drastic as a change in the whole underlying tax system, I have still seen too many software systems where the tax rate is ‘built in’ as a fixed constant and is not user editable.

Most reputable accounting systems will let the user just go to an options screen and change a ‘Tax Rate’ field or change a line in a tax data file somewhere, but users of old systems may not even know where to find these system option screens.

Here’s hoping that the Australian Govt. does not see the need to change out GST rate from 10%.  Ben Kepes over at Cloud Avenue has an article on how online accounting systems will handle this change with far greater flexibility that traditional software systems.

I think that for most business owners, the visit to your tax accountant is on par with a trip to the dentist, or to your childs PTA meeting…

I am not sure what it is – but personally, I always get the worst feeling of dread before a visit, and am moody for a whole day before my appointment time.

It’s not that I really have anything to fear.  All my accounts are currently up to date (unlike a few years ago – that is a whole other story that I might dissect on here another day).

Also, Angie, my tax accountant is one of the loveliest, smartest, gentlest people you can meet.

Come to think of it – I wouldn’t dread my appointments quite so much if she actually yelled at me every now and then.

I think I know what it is that causes me so much discomfort.  It is just that Angie is so thorough in everything she does.  She has that typical accountant’s implacable patience.  She can ask me a simple question such as “And where did such and such a figure in this expense account come from?”, and then she will just sit back and wait…and wait…and wait.  Until the sun turns into a cold, dark white dwarf.

The thing is, I know I cannot try and escape using my usual pathetic excuses.  She is too darn clever for that.  I mean, I am supposed to be an expert at this sort of thing aren’t I?  I pretty much wrote most of the accounting systems I use, and the reports that I give to her, so I should be able to explain every last oddity to her shouldn’t I?  Problem is, it is exactly under these sorts of conditions that my brain disengages and my mouth babbles incoherently for minutes on end.

Ah well, at least I provide tons of amusement for my wife, who accompanies me to most of these meetings.  She cannot believe how I turn into a quivering mess under Angie’s cool stare.   I think she is taking secret lessons on how to disarm me.

You might know that a vast portion of my work constitutes the selling of my time to my clients.  From support calls, to research, to programming and other diagnostic tasks – most of our business income is from time.

And time, as you know, is the one finite resource that everyone has.  It is also one of the hardest to track, and that is not just because I am a professional procrastinator, or like getting distracted by nice shiny things on the web whilst supposing to do work!

Over a year ago, I came across a nifty little tool called SlimTimer.  I actually came across this during an online discussion with it’s developer, Richard White, who is a brilliant interface designer and Ruby on Rails guru.  I was trying to learn Ruby and…well, that is another story that is outside the scope of this particular blog.

Enough to say, that I signed on for the SlimTimer service back then, and then promptly forgot about it.  About a week ago, I rediscovered it again, and decided to start using it properly.

I must say that I am very impressed with the service.  It basically runs in a tiny, unobtrusive browser window, and lets you create tasks on the fly and start stop a little timer to record just how long you are spending on those tasks.  You can then log onto the SlimTimer website to run various reports and adjust your timesheets so that you know just how much to bill your clients.

The basic service is free.  I’ll say that again in case you missed it – Free!  That is ZERO cost.  Apparently there is a premium service available which lets you backup your data or export to Excel, but get this – YOU get to nominate how much to pay each month of the premium service.  Certainly an interesting concept, and I will be keeping my eye on this innovative pricing scheme to see how it all goes.

SlimTimer is highly recommended for anyone who needs to see where their time is going, and for analysing just how you spend your day.  Warning – you will be very surprised!

Heads Up: In the next few weeks, I will be talking about another fantastic website, also by Richard White.  Currently, I am in the process of setting everything up, and once I have tested it with my clients, I will report back on my findings.

Apologies for the long winded post title, but recently I have been amazed by astounding bits of simple technology out there that have made a huge difference in my work day.  I’m talking about things, that when I first heard them, I thought “Yeah, whatever!” and never bothered to follow up on.

Let me give you a specific example.  About 3 months ago, I was contacted by Trudi, my local rep at our telco provider Telstra, who told me about a new service that they were launching on their mobile services called Voice2Text, which basically was an automatic service which converted your voicemail messages to an SMS.  I must admit, that when I first heard about it, I thought “Yeah, whatever!”…as if such things were going to improve my life.  Surely it was a gimmick and nothing more?

But there was no dissuading Trudi, she was well and truly on the war sales path.  My ears finally perked up when she mentioned she could give me a 30 day trial on the service to see how I liked it.  Sure, I said.  Couldn’t hurt.

Now, 3 months later, you will have to prise this service out of my cold, dead hands.

Simple as that.  What I should explain is that my mobile phone is pretty much my lifeline with my client base – a lot of them (and I mean a lot, probably too many) use it as the single point of contact with me.  Now, the nature of my work means that I am often doing work with a client on site, or else locked in my cave programming some arcane system for them and cannot really be disturbed.  At these times, I leave my mobile phone off or on silent ring to alleviate any intrusions on my concentration.

All well and good, but I didn’t realise how much I used to dread checking my voicemails, finding a pencil to jot numbers and other details down, and generally spending time listening to long, rambly messages.  Not that any of my clients ramble on – at least, not those that read this blog!

Now, within a couple of minutes of my phone ringing and a voicemail being left, I get a nice little SMS with a text translation transcript of their message.  I am truly amazed at how accurate the transcript is.  There are only ever a few words here and there which don’t come across correctly, and these are mainly people or company names which are really out of the ordinary.  Another bonus on my Treo, is that anything that looks or sounds like a phone number in the SMS is automatically converted into a hyperlink that I can click on to immediately dial the number.  No more scratching around for a pencil and paper or trying to remember long numbers!

This now means I can have my phone on silent during a meeting or seminar, and then every few minutes or during a break I can quickly scan my text messages for any new voicemails, and choose to respond or not right there and then.  Compare this to dialing my voicemail box, listening to a string of messages etc. whilst sitting at a meeting table (not polite!) to just quickly glancing down at my SMS inbox discreetly – there is no comparison.

Also, with SMS’s, I can forward them to other team member phones or Inboxes to deal with if need be.  All in all, this little piece of technology is one of those amazing little things that I didn’t know I couldn’t live without.

Note: I am not getting any commissions, discounts or kickbacks from Telstra for this post.  As with everything on this blog, there are no hidden strings attached.  I simply report on things that I find helpful or unhelpful to my business in the hope that it can improve your business.

Telstra’s Voice2Text service costs from 55 cents down to 25 cents per transcribed voicemail, depending on the monthly plan you are on.  More information can be found on their website.

Most of my clients and readers will be aware that we are a small development shop.  And I mean small.  There is basically only myself as the lead developer/analyst, plus I have two other programmers on contract who help me out from time to time on various projects.

Being a fairly disciplined and organised sort of programmer, I have always used some sort of software version control and bug tracking tools to ensure that our development cycle works at it’s best.  And being an Aussie company, I also love supporting local businesses, especially one that has a high profile and excellent customer reviews as Atlassian.

So this month, after out internal open source development platform (CollabNet Enterprise Edition) crashed for the nth time and we lost some data, I decided to look for a commercial equivalent.  Note: I believe that Open.Collab.Net is no longer distributing CEE these days – correct me if I am wrong.  Note2: I actually loved CEE, but it was always too unstable for my liking.

So I decided to check out JIRA, from Atlassian.  Whilst browsing their site, I noticed that they had a JIRA Studio product, which was a totally hosted product that included their excellent JIRA bug tracking, plus a wiki, plus Subversion hosting.  Excellent – just what I needed.

I had a look at their pricing, and it said US$50 per user.  Fantastic – certainly within our budget.  But wait…the fine print said 5 users minimum.  Minimum??  We only have at the most, 2 developers working on any one project.  What am I going to do with the other 3 licences?  US$250 per month is well outside of our budget.  At todays rate, that works out to around AUD$4900 per year.

Hmm, the average project we work on is around AUD$2000.  That means that we will need to bill at least 3 projects every year before I can even start putting food on the table.  Not Good.

Then I browsed the rest of their site.  Guess what?  I noticed that they give free licences for their JIRA bug tracker and Confluence wiki for personal developers.  Great, they must do the same for JIRA Studio too?  Wrong!  I couldn’t see anything.

Note: Yes, yes, I know – the personal licence is for non commercial use only, which excludes us.  But hey, I decided to check on this and to email their sales team to verify.  After all, I am a software developer as well, and I can understand these sort of licencing requirements.

So I shoot off an email to the JIRA sales team:

Good Morning,

I am very interested in the Jira Studio product, however being a small
2 person development shop, the pricing of US$2500 per year is outside of our
budget.  I was wondering if you had a personal/individual licence option
as with your non-hosted Jira product which may be affordable by smaller
companies such as ours?

Thanks,
Devan

A day later, I receive this very nice reply from Douglas:

Hi Devan,

Thanks for the email

Sorry to hear that JIRA Studio is outside your price range.

You might want to consider using one of our free JIRA Personal Licences.
These licences enable you to use any JIRA edition for up to 3 registered
users.

I hope this is helpful - please let me know if there's anything else I can
do to help out.

Cheers,
Douglas

OK, it was worth a shot.  Douglas’ suggestion however caused some ethical issues with me, so I decided to clarify:

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for your email - the only thing concerning me about the personal
licence, is that it states it is for 'non commercial, personal use only'.

Seeing as I actually do 'bespoke' software development for commercial
customers, I did not want to be in breach of the licence terms.

Is it still OK to use the personal licence in this instance?

Thanks,
Devan

Ok, I realise I am clutching at straws here…A day later, I get a reply from Nicholas:

Hi Devan,

Thanks for the update and the additional information.

As per my voicemail you should not use a JIRA Personal license in a
commercial environment such as your bespoke software development.
I recommend you look at purchasing a JIRA Standard license for Blaze.

Thanks Devan.  If you have any queries feel free to get in contact via
return email or 02 xxxx.

Regards,
Nicholas M
---
Please note I am located in our Australian office

Hmmm…Ok, another nice reply, but has anybody realised that I really wanted JIRA Studio?  Also, I had to giggle a bit at the signature tagline on Nick’s email – at least I wasn’t talking to anyone in Atlassian’s Guatamalen office!  But not being one to give up, I thought I would give it one last go:

Thanks for your reply Nicholas - but this leads me back to my original problem,
in that we are a small 2 person development house, and we like the features of
JIRA Studio.  Ideally we would like to use this solution, but the pricing is too
high for our needs.  We really only need 1 developer and 1 collaborator licences,
but having to purchase 5 minimum is a deal killer for us  

I can justify a spend of even $100 per month for such a service, given our size,
but $250 is prohibitive.

Cheers,
Devan

Pulled out the violins…weeping angels and all the stops.  Alas:

Hi Devan,

I'm sorry to hear the pricing for JIRA Studio is prohibitive for your team.

If you have any other queries feel free to get in contact via return email or
by calling 02 xxxx.

Regards,
Nicholas M

That’s it.  A 2 line ‘go to hell’ response.  Oh OK, perhaps not a ‘go to hell’, but a fairly final notice nonetheless.  I must admit at feeling a little bit deflated at this stage.  I thought that a company with a reputation for good customer service, and an easy going corporate nature might at least have turned around and said something like ‘we’ll check with the boss and see what we can do’…but perhaps not.

It looks like other people out there have had their fair share of similar experiences with trying to purchase from Atlassian.  Rob Di Marco from Innovation On The Run has written an article, as well as Zoli Erdos from Cloud Ave.

Ah well, looks like it’s back to evaluating Project Locker and Code Space, who seem to offer the same sort of services, but at prices friendlier to our business.  If anyone out there has any other recommendation, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment.

One piece of new that oddly seemed to slip under the radar here this week, was the announcement by Microsoft and Telstra regarding their new alliance in Australia.

This alliance will basically see Microsoft deploy their applications and mobile services to businesses and end users in this country via the Telstra network infrastructure.

Microsoft have been making a lot of announcements lately about their improvements to collaboration, communication and wide are networking in their application software, and this alliance is a logical step.  The timeline for the first services to be rolled out is as early as mid next year (2009).

Read more about the announcement via the company press releases from Microsoft and Telstra here.  I expect local reaction to this news will be quite low key for a while, until the first services begin deployment.  Then I expect most small business in Australia will transition across to these new platforms.

I have just found out about the winners list in the UK Software Satisfaction awards, which is a roundup of the most popular accounting systems in the country, as voted for by the users.  I was very interested to see that the overall winner, KashFlow, is a web based system – and it topped other established players such as MYOB and Quicken.

Other winners were NetSuite and Really Simple Systems – also web based systems.  The UK based AccountingWeb magazine also has a more detailed write up on the winners, and the implications of more web based systems taking out the gongs.

Interestingly, a lot of the winners were not even around when the awards started back in 2006.  This is quite astounding, and shows a lot about the rate of innovation going on in this space (not to mention the rate of acceptance and take up by end users).