I’ve long thought that if I were Google, Amazon or any company that has very powerful brand or product base you should have retail presence. Stores build brand, create a feeling of solidity for E-tailers and most importantly are an effective alternative to traditional media marketing spend.

This all comes back to customers buying and experience rather than just a product. Apple proved the theory and many will now follow the strategy.

Asia shouldn’t be underestimated, it is growing so quickly that it will rival the power balance the West holds in this very generation. In this revealing video from TED India Hans Rosling depicts Asia’s Rise.

There is clearly a rise of infographics going on in the web. Just like meta data gives us information about data (data about data), infographics enhance what would otherwise be very vanilla looking graphs. Infographics appeal to humans because we are visual creatures.

In his video’s on GapMinder or TED you can see other examples of how Hans adds a new dimension of time to create dynamic infographics. The result is that he can get the data across in ways that static words and numbers can’t.

Every piece of communication you send to your customer demands their time. There is an equation that roughly says the more you demand then the less attention the customer will probably give your demands. If you annoy them too much, they stop listening and reading. So logically you can attribute a cost to each piece of communication. This attention economy is all about treating this attention like a commodity. Every single email, letter or phone call is an exchange of value. If you are selling something and not giving anything then you are spending a large piece of the attention dollar the customer affords you. If you give education then it is lower. If you solve a problem or save their time then you will probably be adding to the attention piggy bank you have with that customer. They will want more.

So you can design this relationship so both you get more attention and the customer gets more value. If you can monitor customer behavior and reaction so as to understand how they would like to relate to your business rather than how much, then you can grow the attention piggy bank. The customer will give you more time because you have created a bespoke or targeted approach to their communication needs, to solving their problems or giving them the actual information they want rather than fire the 12 gauge information shot gun at them. The catch is that this costs time or else money to automate it.

There are many approaches to move to a communications profile model and some very interesting business models are springing up to help businesses achieve this. Companies like Datarati are dealing with medium enterprise in this area using bleeding edge technologies like Marketo. It’s a data driven approach that at the end of the day will have a robustness above the implied or gut feel approach that most business owners currently rely on. Other simple things that can be done by small business are forms that asks customers what they want from your business when they become a customer. Many inexpensive email systems now have features built in to give you insight into customer behaviour so you can provide them with just what they want and when they want it without even asking them.

This is all about the customer deciding rather than the business. Put the customer first, then the business and sales will follow. Listen and watch their behaviour or ask them what they want rather then serve up an overload of communications and information.

All business will be done this way in the future so it really is just about how fast you get there.

Photo by See-ming Lee

Themes are about Saasu’s Community

Saasu has a long history of developing a mix of community ideas into our products. At the same time we like to apply some of our own ideas as an innovator where we see the opportunity. After all, we are a research and development company.

Introducing CrowdTheme™

Soon you will see stage one of Saasu’s CrowdTheme™.

CrowdTheme™ will support themes for your invoices and statements. You simply apply a theme to each template you have in Saasu (or create and submit your own). What’s more exciting is that this allows you to build a raft of workflow documents such as remittances, packing slips, purchase orders and print labels to name a few. Really it’s only limited to your imagination.

CrowdTheme™ will also be used to cover themes for Reports and Customer Self Service screens in a future release.

We will write about CrowdTheme™ in detail at our Product Blog in coming days.

Innovation background

At the moment Saasu crowd sources ideas from our blog, websites and application into our development candidate list. One such popular request was multiple templates for invoices. Many of our customers wanted to send invoices and quotes using more than one brand for their business. Slight changes between invoices and quotes for specific circumstances are another reason.

In essence the request we receive are what our customers want to do rather than how they want to do it. So this is where Saasu comes in with the innovation twist. We work out ways to solve the problem but at the same time create innovative approach that we think will add a whole new layer of benefit. We have to do this as it’s in our company mantra to create extremes in price relative to competitors while also creating extreme benefits.

Not wanting to let an opportunity go we decided it was time to use a themes approach we have wanted to put into Saasu that goes back to when we started blogging in 2003.

It was also a result of identifying that there is a vast complexity of international reporting and documentation requirements in accounting. We always felt that in the end only crowd sourcing themes and templates solves this issue. New document themes can be quickly added by the whole community and shared in a social service model and then applied to individual Saasu templates. This reduces the development cost and thus the cost of our communities Saasu subscription. More features for less cost = win win for all.

What’s this mean for the future of accounting?

We believe that Web3.0 is now starting to form it’s foundations. Companies like Saasu will increasingly allow users to design web applications by their use or by their own design (or a combination of these approaches). Themes are one mechanism that allow this. They will start to extend beyond Content Management Systems.

We also believe the web is becoming more and more organic as it gets a life of it’s own above it’s many tiny masters, the people who use it and the people who build on it.

This advert for the RWE found on Vimeo is another example of how the problems seem quite small but also the solutions are here and quite do-able when looked at from the giants perspective.

How could you change your perspective when looking at your business?

I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.

Saasu.com/about Word cloud by Wordle

Saasu use a couple of the tools mentioned in the video (below) which is the third in the series. It was nice to see we think alike. One tool is tech related but the others can be applied to most business models.

Got a video about what technology or services you use in your business? Let us know.

The following presentation on this topic is from my talk at CeBIT Webciety this year. The topic was What web Web3.0 will look like. This is all about the "Data" and the "Data Generation". Concepts such as the Semantic Web, Data-on-Data and more recently the Datarati have evolved in recent years to deal with the concepts.

If you are interested in the data area and how to use your business data to influence your business then Will Scully-Power’s blog is a great read. Previously of MarkSydney (part of the M&C Saatchi Group) he is seeding a new business in the data space.

We generally upload our presentations to Slideshare. See ~ Saasu | Marc Lehmann | Peter Cooper

The Webciety pavilion focuses on web-based society. It features SaaS web applications like Saasu, mobile web, wikis, web communities, blogs, microblogs and other interactive Internet services which are making our lives increasingly digital and ever easier.

Webciety is a major success born out of CeBIT in Germany. All the Webciety participants are speaking at some point over the 3 days at the Webciety Pavilion. See the webciety speaking program for details. I’m speaking at 11:00am on Thursday the 14th on the topic of:

What will Web3.0 look like?
Web3.0 is in early stages, but the picture isn’t clear. Web3.0 is bigger than the sum of it’s parts and accordingly we have trouble seeing what it is.

The first step is to get online to create access, convenience and remove tasks that you otherwise have to do such as backups, upgrades and installs.

Secondly, and more importantly, you need to change your thinking to “generating” your accounts. You accounts can be a smooth, automated pipeline of transactions. It doesn’t have to be data entered.

Many businesses I meet still “do” their accounts while they should be generating them. This is about connecting and automating your accounts using a variety of techniques that are NOT limited to bigger businesses. The reality is that there will always be an element of data entry but it can be massively reduced to a small fraction of your work-flow.

There really is only 3 ways of generating your accounts. Most other methods are a variation on these themes or a hybrid of them.

We are interested in our customers saving time so if you have any questions post a comment or get in touch. We are firstly in the business of selling time savings, secondary to that is the accounting software.

REAL TIME – Straight through processing

“Are you serious Saasu? I’m a consulting business, it can’t be automated.”

Even a consulting businesses where you would think it’s hard to automate you can achieve 60-80% automation of transactional work flow. If you think about it (look at your statements), you pay for the same things over and over. Mobile, phone, internet, rent, electricity, wages etc. Often the frequency is consistent and it may only be the amount that varies. These transactions can all be automated to the point where there is no data entry (constant amount) or a followup edit (change amount). Expenses on credit cards can be captured by importing credit card data and bank statements. You simply clear what isn’t needed and apply account codes to the remainder.

This is the best by far on a cost per transaction capture analysis we’ve done of the variety of methods. We call this “exceptions based accounting”.

Highly transactional business models should automate as much as they can using recurring Sales and Purchases for all your normal recurring revenue and fixed costs. If applicable, connect your point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce website, project management and CRM systems to Saasu via the API or using a Connector. Transactions can occur in real time automatically. Contacts can update across systems. New customers can be created, invoiced, payment processed and emailed paperwork automatically without human cost, resources and risk.

Saasu provides customers with shopping carts, software connectors and payment gateway connections to assist in creating a straight through processing business model.

NEXT DAY – Feeds and Import

This method works well for micro enterprise but starts to fall apart as you grow the business or as your business becomes more technically complex. e.g. inventory, time and project based businesses. It doesn’t scale for complexity or compliance.

Under this method you export you bank statement from online banking and import it into your accounting file. Nearly all accounting systems have this feature including Saasu, Sage and Quickbooks. Systems like Banklink and Xero have taken it a step further by providing a service to do this import step for you on a next business day basis or weekly basis. For micro a enterprise this is about an extra $360 per year above Saasu’s pricing. Bank fees may also be charged by your bank account on a per-transaction basis for data feeds. Feeds aren’t real time but they are convenient and close enough for micro businesses. To a degree you are trusting the bank or card company’s data to be correct.

DELAYED – Data entry

Data entry is by far the most expensive and unfortunately the most common. Data entry should be about exceptions so bookkeeper and accountant skills can be reserved for advice and higher level tasks. A good bookkeeper is the difference between order and disorder, fear and anxiety. Automate as much as possible and have your bookkeeper or admin staff be you assistant CFO to your business rather than spend your dollars on them just doing mundane data-entry that can be done by a computer.

This was highlighted recently when I was looking around for Ben10 Watches for my two boys, Mr3 and Mr5. The US Dollar (USD) price I would have to pay when converted to Australian Dollars (AUD) at an e-commerce portal was almost the same. The two currencies were nearly equal. Within weeks the AUD had changed dramatically versus the USD by 40% as the commodity markets imploded. Accordingly my online price to buy in USD had nearly doubled when I calculated the AUD price equivalent that I would be paying.

At the same time the Kmart retail price in AUD’s was unchanged and on a currency adjusted basis was extremely cheap. So Kmart, the offline retailer, was giving consumers the opportunity to avoid that foreign exchange loss. You could be simplistic about this and say that Kmart buys and sells at the same price and is currency neutral but the reality is quite different. Kmart is in competition with online shopping e-commerce portals. While currency makes Kmart prices cheaper then consumers like me will buy in person at their stores but if the reverse occurs I wouldn’t hesitate to buy online via an e-commerce transaction.

Accordingly Kmart is allowing consumers to cherry pick their prices. It is the right but not the obligation to buy at the cheaper price. In essence, a free option while stock lasts. This produces a negative pricing environment as they keep giving away this free option to consumers. Maintaining static pricing in the face of volatile currency movements is now a significant issue for them. While currencies moved 1% it wasn’t noticeable.

The big problem for Kmart and others like them is two-fold. Firstly they need to decide how much currency they need to hedge against their purchasing. In effect they are increasing their activity in a non-core business called “currency trading” which historically most businesses aren’t all that good at. It’s not their fault it’s just not their core business.

The second issue is that the technology to deploy and implement price change on the store floor isn’t implemented in Australian stores that I know of. You can’t simply swap out millions of RFID Barcode prices attached to garments, CD’s and Ben10 watches.

So the online stores have a distinct advantage over the offline stores born out of their capacity to adjust prices quickly as FX rates change. The online stores will continue to out-compete Kmart and the likes in volatile FX markets by facilitating this retail price arbitrage now made possible by e-commerce.

What does this mean for your business and what it is that you sell?

We have launched a new Saasu Product Blog in order to help our customers and followers get the specific content they want from Saasu. You can find the Product Blog at productblog.saasu.com (subscribe). Our soapbox opinion and ideas around business, technology and simplification in life will still be found in our Simplify Life Blog at saasu.com/blog (subscribe).

The Saasu Product Blog Will Contain

1. New features and upgrades
2. Voucher Codes for Saasu and Partner products
3. How to’s
4. Connector previews
5. Case studies
6. Using Saasu in the web ecosystem

Why not just have one blog?

Blogs and their content are becoming targeted so consumers of content can choose exactly what streams of information they want to receive. It’s a time poor world we live in. If you want all the Saasu content then just subscribe to both using your Blog/RSS Reader of choice. (What is RSS? | Don’t have a reader?)

Many thanks to AWIA for a great event and inviting me over to speak and attend. My talk was about ecosystems, and if there is one ecosystem you must join if you use technology in your business then it’s AWIA.

Here’s my preso I did at the conference which I have posted on slideshare.NET

Saasu was one of the Top 10 Web 2.0 businesses mentioned in Smart Company magazine and website.

It’s always always nice to get a mention but when it’s along side some great companies we look up to like Atlassian and RedBubble it feels great.

The article points out Saasu’s strong growth in new business from offshore. Australia is where we began but as we internationalise to support more zones this is changing very quickly to be an global software as a service business in online accounting software systems.

I have never believed in that philosophy. My late mother, Robyn Lehmann, taught me the lessons as a teenager about customer service. She ran a bakery/newsagency (interesting business model for another post) and I have a photo which I keep close to me of her in a business suit behind the counter serving customers. She raised the service bar beyond most people I have met in business and that bakery was a screaming success. She spent time with her customers and it was authentic time, not time to get sales. A genuine interest, the sales just followed accordingly. Her influence extends deep into the Saasu service ethic.

1. The net has had a huge leverage effect on the power of word of mouth

In the old world if you upset a customer they might tell a handful of people. This new world can result in them telling 100′s or 1000′s as they post their upset on a forum, blog or comment section of an online article. The reverse good word leverage also applies. Happy customers will tell the world through email, blogs, forums and the old fashioned way in person. In essence they have more leverage to spread the word than ever. Good and bad. They are your new age sales team.

2. Service is a Sales Channel

I have written about this before but in summary service allows you to have conversations. These conversations are an opportunity to learn about your customers experience in dealing with your business, it’s people and it’s products. Companies spend lots of money trying to find this information out through market research, surveys, focus groups and the like. You have the power to turn what is often thought of as a cost into a learning experience and a sales channel.

3. If business is about problem solving where do your find out what problems exist?

Customers will tell you their problems, they hold the keys to your business success. Just one little idea or problem can highlight a big business opportunity that can be used across your customer base. Your customers are smart and savvy. They operate under a commercial survival strategy. They see the world through a different set of glasses, from the other side of the counter. Their problems are often different to what you perceive them to be. Customer service is a channel into ideas and problems that you can solve for one customer which then could be leveraged and used for many.

4. Keeping it fresh

Continual contact keeps your business relationships alive. Much like calling a relative every now and then. People love to be loved. People are more likely to think of you and your products or services when you keep in contact at that next point of referral that comes along.

5. Just because you should

Life isn’t just about the money, it’s also about doing the right thing. Money is a bi-product of doing the right thing. Sometimes it isn’t, but mostly it is.

Sydney finally has her own Apple flagship store. It is enormous. Right on one of the city central intersections it looks like a lighthouse at night. You can’t miss it.

Sydney is the world’s best city by brand (2 years in a row on ABC), lifestyle (8 years out of 10 on CNN) and especially so now for geeks and business owners since it is also home to Saasu HQ.

The lessons here for marketing any business are fascinating. Focus. Quality. Clarity. Consistency.

Only days after 5,200 Apple geeks meet in San Fran for their WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) when Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 3G (watch video) will be 36% faster than the latest Nokia and half the price of iPhone today ($199 from $399), Jobs also confirmed that 98% of iPhone users use it for the web, as predicted in this blog ages ago the iPhone platform is a major structural change to the world of web access.

In case you didn’t already know Saasu works on the iPhone and the iTouch, it is the full web application, not a cut down one. So you can do everything on the iPhone that you can do on any desktop or laptop.

Jobs also announced that iPhone 3G will be in 22 countries on July 11 and a total of 70 by year end. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the current 6m iPhone users go up to circa 100m+ by end 2009 (another blog on why another time).

If you go to the Apple Sydney store opening it is 5pm tomorrow (less than 36 hours ago the construction boards were up, now there are loads of apple geniuses running around and customers sleeping outside in line so they are first in tomorrow. TV and other media are already circling. The saasu team will be there of course to answer questions and do the odd demo. While I was there recently the kind apple crew gave umbrellas to those waiting in impending rain outside – well done gang.

Saasu.com is the best value accounting SaaS on the Mac in the world, we love the Apple iPhone too.

So we are offering 3 months bonus FREE to anyone signing up to a paid saasu netaccounts subscription for this week only. Just type APPLEROCKSSYDNEY when you sign up.

Note to Apple environmentally aware staff, please lobby your light house marketing guys to use efficient bulbs (if you don’t already) or turn off those lights when you go home pretty please.

Oh, and a bit of gossip to finish, something else is happening at 5pm tomorrow too. BRW the esteemed business review weekly magazine is launching their special Web 100 edition. Saasu might get a mention…

A big thanks to all the customers and partners who have helped us build an even better application over the last year. Your subscription dollars are hard at work in Saasu Labs.

What CeBIT had to say

The Software as a Service business model swept major categories in the prestigious CeBIT.AU Business Awards 2008, taking the most contested categories and marking SaaS as the hot technology currently in the sector. Saasu.com was nominated for three awards and won the CeBIT.AU Business Advantage Award – arguably the most prestigious of the event – with its Saasu.com accounting package. Saasu.com was also a winner in 2007, with its integrated Net-based financial system that has seen enormous growth since the company exhibited at CeBIT Australia last year. Full CeBIT press release.

More SaaS ecosystem winners

Our friends over at eWay took the CeBIT.AU Excellence in Technology Services Award. eWay is a payments gateway provider. Congrats to Matt Bullock and his team. The eWAY payment gateway service provides secure Online payments and Mail Order processing of credit cards in real time via the Internet.

IPscape won the CeBIT.AU Excellence in Communications Award. IPscape has a Software as a Service product for contact centres. Congratulations to Simon Burke and his team. IPscape provide a SaaS product for contact centres typically less than 100 seats. Like Saasu they take care of upgrades, hardware and maintenance. Services that simplify the way contact centre technology is priced, delivered, and supported.

Kiva help developing nations from the ground up. They don’t donate cash, they lend it to entrepreneurs (we relate to these guys!) to help them start a business. Teaching them to fish for themselves (so to speak) rather than throwing them a fish.

One of our first loans on Kiva was recently repaid. Kiva is a great service if you want to make a difference. The best thing is the funds are repaid and then recycled so the model is not only proven to work (impressive statistics on field partners) but it keeps on working.

Kiva is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the US.

Saasu further supports the non-profit, education and health communities. So if you know anyone in those segments tell them to give us a bell so they can get their free or discounted stuff. We don’t have a formal program we look at it on a case by case basis.

I did some work in Cambodia (in Takeo province outside Phnom Penh) a few years ago as part of some other stuff and they have had a rough time over the years so it is nice to see some progress. Although, with only 3 in every 1,000 people having internet access, that progress is very slow (read about it on Reuters AlertNet).

But don’t just take our word for the fact Kiva do a great job, they also recently won a prestigious Webby which is very cool.

Saasu also had some more praise recently. Our good fortune continues in the form of customer feedback and and also globally recognised industry awards.

On top of the many great comments we get every day for our latest release(see below), we have also been nominated for and listed as finalists for three awards at CeBIT 2008 some of you might remember last year we won the big one

Three of my all time best customer testimonials recently are (paraphrased) -

• We chose Saasu over Netsuite on price (mid market customer)
• We chose Saasu over Zoho on features (small business customer), particularly Saasu Catch
• We chose Saasu over MYOB on ease of use and because it is online (small business customer)

This demonstrates at the coal face the Saasu productivity and cost benefits. Our unique delivery model is really performing for businesses and individuals.

Now for the fun stuff. Saasu has made the finals for three CeBIT 2008 awards –

• Business Advantage Award – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 5
• Excellence in Technology Services Award – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 4
• Platinum Award for Export Excellence – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 2

Thanks to all of those who support the Saasu foundation via our products. Congrats to Kiva and Boun Kim Loun. Oh, and fingers crossed for the CeBIT 2008 awards.

One of our much admired customers, Working Solo’s Leah Maclean* posted on the event and made some good points so we thought it was time we let you know our thoughts on the topic.

What can you do when the Net goes down?

There are a surprisingly large number of ways to deal with the Net being down. It’s interesting how humans quickly find efficient solutions to problems that face them in business. Being a SaaS company, web connectivity is very important. If the net does go down it isn’t totally crippling, it’s just inconvenient because there are lots of options to deal with it these days.

If local wired internet access fails in your business try these steps -

1. Go wireless, most businesses have a USB wireless internet dongle or a WiFi internet account for sales purposes anyway
2. Go to the cafe, most businesses have a cafe nearby that offers their own (or sponsored) WiFi access or an internet cafe as per those used by the backpacker community
3. Go home, most people have cable internet at home now or if not at home then a close family member
4. Go to a partner, most businesses have close trading counter-parties that they deal with who wouldn’t mind you using a desk for a day
5. Go to a serviced office, spend a few dollars and get access at a bureau or a few weeks at a serviced office, they are surprising inexpensive
6. Go to your IT provider and ask them to lend you a desk and a net connection or recommend somewhere

Your fault or theirs? Thank goodness for SaaS

The above list translates to many alternatives as a result of having your data with a high quality SaaS provider because it is usually the subscriber (i.e. you) that has the problem. Sometimes, very rarely it is on the SaaS provider’s end because one of the connections to the NOC (network operations centre/center) fails. This is usually not an issue though because most of the tier one NOC’s have redundant links into them from different directions by different carriers in hardened cable carriers to different Telco’s and then once it gets to the Telco each of them has multi routes to their peer Telco’s too.

A good SaaS provider has meshing resilience. This meshing prevents any single (or multiple even) breaks impacting the total service. We wrote about our amazing strengths in this area recently.

As Transaction Cross Docking (TCD) becomes more common place (because it makes so much sense) this stuff is crucial because it will be global distributed connected communities of millions not just thousands that are impacted.

All this compares well to the old world where you had stuff on your local server and a power or Telco outage to your premises meant no business no email and moving your server the old way – with a forklift!

* Working Solo’s Leah Maclean works with small business to grow their confidence and their success. Leah is a design and technology advisor to clever business women who want to do more and know more in the online world.

The saasu blog is now in the top 0.32% of all blogs on the planet.

Our site is in the top 1.84% by traffic globally.

We have also popped into the first page on Google globally for some search terms.

In return, please accept our humble ‘video link gift’ below in addition to our earlier free CeBIT tickets.

Google strategy insights

It’s definitely worth watching this little gem. A unique bit of insight about how the gurus at Google are thinking on business strategy, product and customers. It came out some time ago but it’s still completely relevant for nearly all business owners today. It’s not just a tech thing.

It’s a video of Seth Godin speaking to a bunch of Google insiders on some strategic topics close to our heart. Seth is one of our favourite bloggers. We have written about his other important work previously.

Thanks again for your support. You are helping us build a truly global product that makes lives better. We can always do better though, so help us by giving feedback on what you want us to do.