Ideas Blog

If you are a CIO, CFO, Advisor or Business Owner then SaaS has become an increasingly compelling choice over software. Online accounting is on the shopping list rather than the future wishlist. The questions are increasingly about how to change rather than is it secure. Not adopting SaaS has switched from being viewed as “risk averse” behaviour to one of “please explain why we are spending a fortune on software licenses”. Ask yourself “can I outperform the Cloud and SaaS providers on security if I take that risk on myself in house and manage and host my own software and data?”

SaaS contains a lot of sugar and spice. It turns CapEx into OpEx. It gives you capacity to burst workflow and users. It enables work from home for parents. Small business owners can take that holiday, do the online accounting payrun from afar and keep up to date. It’s liberating technology. If you aren’t a believer ask yourself why every major software company around the world is busily trying to reinvent themselves. They are busy getting their pilots license so they can fly into the cloud.

Choose an online accounting system based on credentials. Being a traditional software company is far from an appropriate credential to do cloud based applications well. Do you want to back an old dog trying to learn new tricks? Choose SaaS providers who are profitable, there are many. Most important of all is to look at their breed. Do they have a history of free tax updates? Do they let you export your data? Do you get stung for high support costs? Many new SaaS providers along with the old software companies fail on this. What’s their motive? Barriers to exit? What are their ethical genetics like in light of this?

Look for SaaS companies that will let you fly like you’re in an A380, that has the scale and all the mod cons and features you expect in this new age. One that you can trust.

Photo by VSZ

I presented at Web3.0 and the Future of Social Media Conference yesterday (see Twitter hashtag #web3).

I wanted to push ahead a few years and get the point across that we need to think about the web in a more naturalistic way. It’s not about silicon, electrons and data. It’s now has a life unto itself and displays the traits of living things.

I also wanted to focus on the way the web application and business space faces consumers. Essentially that we need to change direction and treat each individual as important, be careful with their time and relevent when we give them content and services.

Here’s my slide notes…

Burning Questions

So much technology
:: Why am I so time poor?

Photo: ToniVC

The next big thing
:: Where are we at?
:: Web 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, yada, yada.

Photo by David Prior

The Web Entity

The net is a beast
:: It has developed a life unto itself
:: Relative to natures evolution it’s a mini-beast, amoebic.

Photo by microagua

Primordial Days
:: Quality of info filters builds
:: Good levels of sharing
:: Early sensory control
:: Early utility adoption
:: Start of linked data

Life like
:: Homeostasis
:: Organization
:: Metabolism
:: Growth
:: Adaption
:: Response to stimuli
:: Reproduction

Biotic
:: Consumers
:: Employees
:: Developers
:: Investors

Abiotic
:: Applications
:: Network
:: Platforms
:: Web construct

Devices

Generation D
:: The data generation
:: The device generation

It’s about the data
:: Data surpasses the importance of the digital bodies that it lives on.
:: Data is created about data. A world of linked data.
:: Data lives on the web and Devices are windows into the web.

Data is set free.
:: User permission.
:: Socially permission.

Everything has a brand
:: People, Ideas, Services & Products. Not just companies.

Numerical Brand
:: Algorithm + vote search
:: Social bookmarking
:: Followers & friends
:: Crowd sourcing
:: Content rating
:: Like vs link

Information overload
:: We need better controllers of the data we see.

Restraint
:: We collect and regret
:: Collect = Gather and store data, experiences, apps, tools.
:: Regret = Missing something like news, ideas, experiences.

The Cost of the Habit
:: Time
:: Effectiveness
:: Self expression
:: Quality of experience

Data Addiction
The old addiction
:: Physical Consumption
The new addiction
:: Digital Consumption

Sales Automation

Educate vs Sell
:: Authenticity

Trigger vs Campaign
:: Trigger based email/mail/web

Targeted and relevant
:: Don’t waste their attention

Off balance sheet Sales
:: Community, Customers, Partners & F&F

Data Brokers

Data Brokers
:: Integrate and connect applications and data
:: Examples: WDCI, Boomi, OneSaaS

Web applications will change
:: less device dependent
:: more connected.

Application Constraints
:: Apps that don’t connect and that are feature light weights
:: Applications that are niche require hand holding

Moving data around
:: Too many pieces in the puzzle.
:: Too many connected apps to solve business problems.
:: Too many moving parts.
:: Higher risk of failure

Attention Dollar

Attention Dollar
:: The currency of the web is attention.
:: The attention police is relevance.

Attention Defined
:: 8 hours a day playing Warcraft

Photo by glenn batuyong

The Attention Economy
:: The web beast evolves based on your attention votes.
:: Your time is being absorbed by websites and apps in piecemeal
:: Systems seduce you into giving your time away.
:: Good systems will reward your time

Marketing emails
:: Like the guy at the party who talks & talks *eyes glaze over*

Attention engineered email
:: The new email regime.
:: Email that is exactly relevant to my needs in time, place and interest. e.g. Marketo

Infographics
:: Pictures trump text

by Davvi

Meta Data Driven Content
:: Wikipedia trumps Encarta
:: Twitter trumps Yellow Pages

Digital Soap Box
:: You have something you want to say
:: e.g. walls, tweets, blogs, chatter

Data and graphic rich business apps
:: Replacing numbers/words with pictures

Memetic Engineering
:: Designing business models to produce memes.
:: Capital value is based on the consumer & business Attention acquired.

Ubiquitous Web

Required Elements
:: Data, Utilities, Connection & Computation

The web is evolving based on what works & what doesn’t
:: Small nuances = Big differences

The web is getting judged, naturally selected
…and across many devices

Consumers are mini VC’s
:: Invest small amounts attention dollars

Consumers are natural selectors
:: May the best “web genetics” survive.
:: Facebook is genetically superior to MySpace? Or does it have a privacy cancer?

Do you have an iPhone?
:: How many apps have you tried?
:: Small numbers of apps survive your standards
:: The few that do have common traits

iPhone App Survival Traits
:: Extremely entertaining
:: Create or save time
:: Window into content

Utility Web

Low rather than No Software
:: Software burns time and CapEx from business
:: Software = Rekeying data, upgrade software, buy licenses & maintenance

Cloud applications / SaaS
:: Converts CapEx into OpEx
:: Google, Microsoft, Amazon are re-building the webs architecture

The Semantic Web is a WIP
:: Resource Description Framework
:: Ontology Language
:: Folksonomy

The AI Web
Mechanising our activity
:: Mechanical turks
:: True Artificial intelligence
:: Data collection and connection
:: Collective web intelligence
:: Knowledge coding
:: Recommendation Engines e.g. Apple Genius
:: Rules Engines: Triggers, Rules, Scheduled Events
:: Business Logic Layers that are flexible, learning, crowd sourced

Web Evolution

Darwinian
:: Natural Selection applies

The future will be strange
Strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking
Ross Lovegrove

The future will be functional
its the only vehicle which have the elegance of intelligence, because it’s not driven by marketing, it’s driven by function
Philippe Starck (on military vehicles – his favourite vehicle)

User Designed Applications
:: Behavioural design
:: Relevance design
:: Theme serving

Q: With all this technology why are we time poor?
:: Shouldn’t the evolution of the web help?

A: The web doesn’t let you triage your time very well
:: We are designed to collect, gather & hunt = Quick, while it’s there.
:: We are opportunists by design

A: We are bad at delaying gratification
:: The marshmallow experiment.
:: We are still learning how to do this with financial dollars.
:: What hope is there for us with the attention dollar. It’s too easy to spend.

Web 3.0 will
:: penalise inefficiency
:: lack of connectivity
:: poor relevance

A new kind of Capital Punishment
:: Inefficient, expensive, disconnected will lose the survival of the fittest contest
Failure to be efficient
:: The new “margin squeeze”.

All business are really two+ businesses
:: They are what they normally do and they are technology businesses.
:: Survivors will have embraced this passionately
:: Survivors will ensure tech creates time rather than consuming it.

Saasu calls this
:: Engineer the way you work

Thank You

Marc Lehmann
Email: marc@saasu.com
Twitter: @marclehmann
LinkedIn: marclehmann
Web: saasu.com
Blog: saasu.com/blog
Personal blog: marclehmann.net
Address: 1st Floor, 111 Elizabeth St Sydney, Australia 2000
Creative Commons: Attribution-NoDerivs License

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.

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.

Ever wondered what your content profile looks like? Word clouds can help highlight keywords and other language patterns in your content. Wordle a nifty website lets you generate fun word clouds by simply cutting content from a document or website and pasting it into a window that then generates a word cloud.

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

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 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

What things can you do in your business to make it fun for your customers?

Back in 2000 we drew up some plans to make an accounting system a bit like a Monopoly board. The idea being that as your business assets grew you would see an image of you factory grow. Your sales pipeline would expand into a bigger pipe as revenue grew. We wanted to bring some fun to accounting which can otherwise be a tad boring.

Due to the conservative nature of accountants (a good thing, they are just trying to protect their customers in many cases) we decided to hold off on that approach. Another reason was the difficulty in dealing with animation in web interfaces back then while meeting targets on load time for screens. We were also trying to avoid pagination. Pagination is where you show 1-50 of 7,000 transactions as an example and then provide buttons or links to show transactions 51-100 etc. Pagination can be really annoying for customers as we discovered during our user experience surveys.

In 2004 we started using AJAX (it didn’t actually have a name back then) which gave us the speed and flexibility to create a more designed interface and a better perceived speed experience for customers. We still use AJAX extensively in Payroll where editable data sets are smaller but you won’t see it as much in screens that have large editable data sets because it begins to become cost rather than a benefit in load times. The customer experience might be nice but if the screen load is slow the customer will just want to throw the computer out the window.

AJAX still has issues in this area but they are slowly being worked around. New browser like Google Chrome will allow AJAX to be used right across data heavy applications as it is a very efficient in dealing with JavaScript (the J in AJAX).

Being a fan of WordPress for blogging I really like their spam removal experience. When you click delete it turns red (like slaying the spam dragon) and then slides away off the screen. The destroy feeling is quite good. Gamers amongst you would like it. We implemented this idea back in 2005 into our Payroll and Invoicing modules (without the blood effect).

We are started to work on some UI design changes to give customers a bit more fun in the screens but as always the accessibility will be the controlling factor given our mantra of ensuring the keyboarders aren’t compromised in anyway.

If any of you have suggestions or examples of animation for deletion, creation, edit etc. just post a comment as we will be working up our changes to reports and transaction searching/listing over the next few weeks.

Photo credit: Cowbite

If you’re a business owner I recommend attending conferences. The trick is to pick the eyes out of them. I only go to about three a year as either a speaker or a sponsor. So ruthless choices are required. My picks are Barcamp, Edge of the Web and CeBIT.

Edge of the Web is coming up in November (Perth, Australia), brought to you by the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). It is designed for business stakeholders trying to create next generation business practices that utilise the web. The people behind Edge of the Web recognise that technology and the web are an integral part of the business model. So often I see business people who think their business is “what” they do rather than “how” they do it.

Nearly all businesses are hybrid technology businesses these days,
they are part technology company and part product or services. The “how” is all about technology.

I’ll be at the conference talking on SaaS (Software as a Service) as an Ecosystem for businesses to operate in. Having your business in the cloud is becoming an integral part of an effective “how” component in your business. Some smart cookies (and coincidently good friends and customers of Saasu) will be there also such as the Madpilot, Myles Eftos and Millstreams, Adrian and Rosemary Lynch. I also hear that Jordan Brock and his 5 Senses Coffee with be there. 5 Senses was at a recent Barcamp, and the coffee experience just made it ultra-pleasant between sessions.

If you are not sure if this applies to you then consider a sole trader services business as an example who has a large portion of what they do dependent on technology. Getting the books done, preparing marketing material, email, franchising, scheduling, managing inventory, procurement, network marketing etc. It’s all about technology.

If you want to get to Perth then Saasu wants to pitch in and help by subsidising the trip a little through a cheaper Saasu subscription. Just use voucher code AWIA-EDGE when you renew or signup to Saasu NetAccounts. We will add 3 months to your business file renewal date once we confirm you have registered for the conference*.

Edge of the Web is on 6th and 7th of November, Perth WA. AWIA members $395, non-members $450.

ASIDE: If you aren’t already an AWIA member then get on board. Saasu did and never looked back. We are now on their committee and can honestly say it has been a great expereience dealing with some amazing web savvy members and receiving so much businesses through our membership.

If you have multiple business files in your subscription it will be pro-rata calculated. Offer ends 6th November 2008. One voucher at a time sorry. This offer can’t be used in conjunction with any other offer.