Google constantly reinvents the way things are done in business. Re-invention in all aspects of their business is a fundamental part of Google’s culture. It’s not just about online solutions and the cloud.

On the way to work I spotted a Google Maps Real Estate promo done with LJHooker. Essentially it highlights the ability to search and view houses for sale or rent using Google Maps. You can explore the area where you are looking to buy or rent with Google Street View. Even check out the neighbours houses next door to your prospective property before you even get in the car to have a look in person.

This is interesting for many reasons. It is a classic leap in customer experience we see often thanks to the web. Mashing up a relatively new tool, Google Maps with a time consuming problem of house hunting. Further monetizes Google’s investment in the Maps technology, which was developed in their Sydney, Australia office. The same team now building Google Wave.

What I also like about Google’s approach is the physical marketing device (pictured). It’s different to all the other marketing devices used in the building. The "placemark" symbol has become synonymous with Google. It was also a tangible and sculptural presence. Typically the advertising device of choice at this site is plasma screens, perspex covered billboards or freebies handed out to passers by. I noticed a lot of people stopped to check it out. I think it has a quality that can be very valuable in marketing. It’s "curious". Curious is good, curious is usually a consequence of innovative thinking.

I’ll be speaking at the International Business Review Web 3.0 conference on the 3rd of June this year about what I call the Naturally Selected Web. Some of the topics covered in my speech I touched on in my speech at CeBIT last year about the Data Generation but at this event I’ll get into more detail about how Web 3.0 is in part about participants selecting brand and product variants in what is literally a Darwinian Natural Selection process.

Quote voucher code SAAS-WEB3 if you want an extra 10% of the 31 March early bird deadline price.

I attended Tech23 in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and posted some tweets of key comments made by panel members made up of various industry leaders. Some didn’t make it to twitter, so here’s the content from my notebook.

I like attending these events. You can get insights (and insight reminders) at most events by sitting, waiting and snipping them from the conversation as they appear. Most content at these events isn’t dramatically new but there is usually outlier comments. It’s the context that they are made in and how it my apply to your own business model that is interesting.

It’s extremely important to watch other industry’s. When you cross pollinate ideas into your own industry or business model you can create new products and even new markets where they didn’t exist before.

Getting to critical mass. What is your critical mass? Chunk it down to micro market and get intensity.
Alison Deans from Netus

If it takes you 4 minutes to sell something you have a costly customer acquisition strategy.
Sue Klose from News Digital Media

We measure the life of an iPhone App in hours, not even days.
Sue Klose from News Digital Media

The lifespan of tagging is as long as humans can do it better than code.
Alan Noble from Google

Auto-magical (Alan describing a system that does something well automatically).
Alan Noble from Google

Don’t give concrete forecast numbers. Better to talk about the tech you have.
Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian

They need to be careful and respectful of the users desktop space (In reference to desktop apps).
Phil Morle from Pollenizer

Patents stop you shaping your IP. People usually patent IP to early.
Mark Bonnar Cleantech Ventures

Patents should be used to ring fence a commercial space.
Roger Price from Innovation Capital

Young people will open up more online.
Didier from Cultureamp.

Building culture means give better feedback daily to your staff.
Didier from Cultureamp.

You can scale culture with software in your company.
Didier from Cultureamp.

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.

One of the most important things we can do as a human species is take a step back or change our perspective when we look at a problem. In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, Robin William’s character, has his students stand on their desks in order to change their perspective.

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?

Service Seeking is a Saasu customer who’s business is getting businesses competing head to head to try and win work from a buyer. Service Seeking produced a Start Up Online series of videos. Saasu was included in one of the videos – thanks Jeremy and Oliver for the mention!

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.

Ever wondered what Web3.0 is shaping up to be? There are two things generally agreed in the technology industry. It’s not clear and it’s complex.

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

I often get asked how a business can minimise the time spent (and thus money) “doing” their accounts.

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.

One consequence of the Global Financial Crisis or as they now are calling it the Global ‘Economic’ Crisis is that Foreign Exchange (FX) rates are now very volatile. 10% movements are now common replacing 1% movements. This brings about interesting opportunities for consumers.

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?

I attended a fantastic EOTW conference in Perth, Australia last week (Twitter hash tag #EOTW08). I met some inspiring people like Derek Featherstone the FurtherAhead.com accessibility Gu (A leading Guru) who is also a keen triathlete. I also did a workshop with Google JS/jQuery Gu Cameron Adams (aka The Man in Blue). It was also great to meet Matt Patterson from Freshview (Saasu’s email marketing system). Thanks Matt for the T-shirt!

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