Business On Software

I have been talking a lot on here about having a dashboard to get a quick overview of your businesses key performance indicators.  I never really thought about having a personal dashboard though, until now.  I have come across a site called Pageonce, which will give you all your critical information such as your bank balances, favourite websites, social networking profiles (i.e. Facebook, MySpace) all on the one, easy to navigate screen.

Their service has been optimised for the iPhone, but they have a web interface for it as well.  I must remember to grab my wife’s iPhone and create an account to give it a whirl…if she will let me.

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

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.

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).

Microsoft have this week announced that they will be releasing a version of Microsoft Office which is entirely web based.  The new edition is not designed to compete with their desktop based Office products, but rather to complement it, and allow you to get to your documents and information anywhere in the world.

From early news, it looks like their web based Office offering will be available in straight HTML/AJAX, and also a version that runs under Silverlight for an even richer client interface.  This product line has been designed to work in with their upcoming Office 14 desktop software, where they will be showcasing some truly impressive real time collaboration tools.  This is not your daddy’s Office suite!

Eran Kampf over at CloudAve has a post which goes into a bit more detail, and asks a few questions about Microsoft’s revenue plans around this new offering.

New Zealand based online accounting vendor Xero have recently launched their product for Australian businesses.  This means that our local GST tax laws and conditions are (hopefully) supported.

From a brief look at their online tour, their system looks quite aesthetically pleasing, and should be quite easy for users to learn and understand.  I am hoping to set up a test account on their system so I can have a more in depth look and report on here.

Their service costs just $49 per month, with any additional companies adding $29 per month on top of that.  Cheap as chips when you consider that you do not have to install anything, and any future upgrades are automatically done for you without even thinking about it.

Readers of this blog will know my passion for online based systems, but my biggest question with online accounting systems is the quality of training that the end users will get.  From many years of experience, we find that the level of training the end user has obtained in the early stages will have a great impact on the quality of information going in and out of the software – even true for those ‘easy to use’ systems such as MYOB and Quickbooks.

I will keep you updated with my findings.

UPDATE: Ben Kepes over at CloudAve has done a thorough and informative review of Xero.  Check it out!

I have just heard that Quicken is now providing their online version of their personal finance service for FREE!  I believe the service previously used to be around USD$9 per month.  I think that the powers that be at Quicken have realised that there is some serious competition from other players in the market for free web based financial recording tools, and have reacted accordingly.

At this stage, I believe that this service is only available in the US, but I will do some further checking and let you know.

Olympic Dashboard

With the Olympic hoolabaloo now dying out, I found this very interesting link whilst reading the Zoho blogs.

As you know, Zoho is an up and coming provider of web based productivity tools such as spreadsheets and word processing amongst many others.

They have showcased their online database and dashboard tools by creating a custom Olympic dashboard, showing medal tallies in several ways.

Feel free to mosey on down to their site and customise these dashboards to suit. You never know, if you are from one of the smaller countries, you could change the medal weightings to show your country on top of the medal tables!