The Telework Exchange has a dedicated page for Telework Day, providing:

On June 10, 2009, Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine issued an Executive Order to “green” Virginia – calling for reductions in energy consumption and efficiency in state government operations as well as a statewide Telework Day to save the energy of commuting.

The Commonwealth of Virginia, Telework!VA, and Telework Exchange are encouraging organizations and individuals to telework from home or a remote location on Monday, August 3, 2009 – Telework Day

WHY?
Telework is a win-win-win opportunity for organizations, employees, and the environment.

Telework supports:

• Reduction of traffic, greenhouse gas emissions, and wear and tear on public transportation
• COOP: Business as usual
• Personnel recruitment and retention
• Real estate savings
• Work/life balance and commuter-cost savings

So be green, give your car a rest, and make a pledge to telework on August 3.

As you can tell from the above language, it’s being touted as a green initiative and a way for all of us to reduce our carbon footprint. The Telework Exchange site has a built-in calculator that helps you as an individual see how much you are saving (or could save) in commuting costs, as well as the pounds of pollutants you avoid putting in the air by telecommuting. For instance, by using the calculator (you have to register first), it told me that each year I am saving $1,185 in commuting costs based on commuting to my last job, and 1575 pounds of pollutants.

Government officials like the idea of telework, because it takes pressure off of already over-burdened roads, and has the potential to keep the air cleaner.

For employers it can be a productivity enhancer and cost saver.  According to PC World magazine:

Not only can telework help companies green their processes, but it can also pay off in productivity savings. For instance, Cisco recently reported it was able to save some $277 million in employee productivity costs alone by sending employees home to work.

“Telework Day is an important opportunity to advocate telework as a business strategy that can have a positive impact on the bottom line and improve organization efficiency,” said Jennifer Thomas Alcott, program manager for Telework!VA. “Telework is one of the most effective ways for people to greatly reduce their work-related carbon footprint and demonstrate that ‘work is something you do, not a place you go.’”

When it comes to employers, you’ll get the most benefit if you have systems and applications in place to make it easy for employees to work remotely.  Systems need to be able to support their work so they don’t have to work against the systems.  Remote work requires the right types of IT systems, business software applications, and telecommunications systems.  Employees will obviously need to be able to communicate, access business applications,  share files, and otherwise make it “business as usual.”   While it’s possible for employees to work at home with limited access to company systems on a single day or two, as an ongoing way of doing business you may be required to rethink and overhaul your systems to make them more “remote-worker” friendly — if they are not already.

Telework Day could be a way to “stress test” your systems and see how conducive they are to employees working remotely. By participating in Telework Day — or designating a Telework Day of your own in your business — you can test out your systems and see what you’d need to change in order to make telework more widespread.

Join us for a free webinar on March 11, 2009, from 2:00 to 3:00 pm Eastern time.  I will be moderating the discussion and will be joined by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, and Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade. (In case you didn’t guess, that’s me in the middle of those two fine gentlemen.)

In this webinar we will cover:

1. How to automate what you hate — tasks and processes that are time sucks you never noticed or didn’t know you could offload to new tools 

2. How going virtual can help – prudent outsourcing can make more sense than ever
  
3. Why getting “social” at work is good for business – seek technology applications with social media features and that connect you with communities that can provide speedy answers, serve as “free” extensions of your team, connect you to customers faster

4. Why and how to reframe how you think about your job – advice for doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t

5. How to get your head in the cloud – move more work to the web and save more time and money

We be giving away some copies of our books. Please join us — and be sure to bring your questions too.

The webinar is free, but you do have to reserve a spot — space is limited.

Find out more and register now.

But what I wanted to know was this: what types of software services are companies using? That’s why I found this chart to be particularly helpful, because it shows the categories of SaaS services being used:

The top usage is accounting software (which appears to be used largely by small businesses).  That category is closely followed by sales applications and email applications.  

Interestingly, Web conferencing services did not rank as highly as I expected, falling near the bottom. I would have expected them to be among the more utilized services, especially among enterprises and midsize businesses that need to collaborate.

What the survey suggests is that there is plenty of room for more growth of SaaS, especially among the lower-ranking categories.

You can download a copy of the full Gartner report here.

Larry Halff, the founder speaks frankly in the video below giving a behind-the-scenes look into how Ma.gnolia was run.  As he points out, it may have seemed as if there was a sizeable company behind the site, but during most of the history of the service it was just one person — him.  He calls it a “labor of love” and described how he bankrolled it all.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.
 

Chris Messina, who interviews Larry, says starting at minute 19:15 what you will no doubt be thinking as you watch the video:  that you don’t know what kind of backup and infrastructure and IT practices are being employed in other Web services.

It’s food for thought.  Consider where and with whom to entrust your business data from your small business.

What about those companies trying to build a business on the Web? In the old days (that would be until September of last year) the model was pretty simple. 1. Have a great idea. 2. Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest possible market. 3. If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4. Repeat until you’re bought by a bigger company.

Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they’re still young.

Actually, that was never a business model for a Web or software business itself. The underlying Web application, if it was completely free and unsustainable by advertising revenue, never had a business model.

Sure, there was a business model — of entrepreneurs “flipping” startups.  They were never in the software business, they were in the business of incubating companies and turning them over quickly.  Comparing them to a software business is like comparing a house flipper to a landlord. One is in it for the short term, looking ahead to the exit. The other is in it longer term and expects the property to pay its way.  Two totally different things.

But as Anderson points out, just like after the Dot Com bust of the early part of this century, the current downturn forces us all to reflect once again on the realities of business. Not only is “free” unsustainable as a standalone business model for entrepreneurs, but I would add that free is also risky for end users.

Is there a role for “free”? Certainly — as a marketing strategy that supports your business model:

• Use free as a limited time promotion.
• Use free for an entry level product to develop demand for premium products with a price tag.
• Use free to sell something else with a price tag (the old “give away the razor to get them to buy razor blades” strategy).
• Use free as a strategy to get at startups and young people, to encourage them to “grow into” a habit of customer loyalty.
• Use free as a strategy to sell high-margin add-on services.

But whatever you do, don’t expect “free” to be the end goal for a software application.  That’s crazy.

More at Paid Content and Techmeme.

Actually — I’m surprised that even one third of small businesses know what cloud hosting is.  When I saw the press release, I had to stop and think about it myself.  It’s one of those terms that is hard to get your arms around.

Cloud computing as a general category is easier to understand.  For instance, I can quickly grasp that getting access to software on a “rental” basis via the Web is cloud computing. 

But cloud hosting seems redundant.  I could envision any outsourced hosting arrangement where your website is on a shared server, as cloud hosting.  I am not sure of the difference between a shared hosting arrnagement and cloud computing — after all, aren’t they both “in the cloud?”

Web Hosting Unleashed notes the challenge inherent in the terminology:

The latest trend-maker in the tech industry is cloud computing, a term that is struggling to find a concrete definition. Ask any IT pro to define cloud computing and you’ll get an unrefined answer punctuated by a lot of hemming and hawing. This ambiguity is expected for brand-new computing paradigms, but it makes cloud computing tougher to sell to corporate IT managers. Still, cloud computing — which is similar to grid computing, utility computing and SaaS (software-as-a-service) — is catching on …as a relatively cheap way to access enormous, highly flexible computing resources.

And therein lies a challenge for technology vendors: simplifying and de-jargonizing the message. It’s doubly hard to attract small business customers when your target market has no idea what you’re selling.

You can download the published results from the Rackspace survey here (PDF).

The New York Times had an interesting story earlier this week on this very topic, noting:

“Meanwhile, more experimental but lower-cost technologies like netbooks, Internet-based software services (called cloud computing) and virtualization, which lets companies run more software on each physical server, are on the rise.  * * *

“The day of the Rolls-Royce laptop and the high-end computer may not be totally over,” said Charles King, an independent technology industry analyst in Hayward. Calif. “But certainly the audience for that type of product is getting smaller and smaller.”

Companies have also started to examine what they can do without and what they can do differently, and their choices may alter the competitive and lucrative landscape of business computing. “ 

The Times story points out what happened after the Dot Com bust of the early part of this century. Some high-flier tech companies like Sun Microsystems were dragged down as new players like Google ascended, with lower cost or free offerings.

One of the things that also happened post Dot-Com bust is that businesses started getting a taste for technology that was inexpensive or free.

That’s been a trend over the past decade, and I think it just intensifies during times when money is tight.

I could give example after example of technology on a unit-cost basis going down.  But does that spell doom (or lower sales) for technology makers across the board? Not really.  It’s just forcing vendors to change their business models.

But for small businesses that are end users of technology, it’s a bonanza.

What is happening is that we are approaching a world of disposable technology. We replace technology a lot faster than we used to. I used to expect to get 3 to 5 years usage out of a computer. Now, I start looking for a replacement at 18 months. The improvements are happening so rapidly, and the prices of new computers have dropped so much, that it’s the veritable “no brainer” to upgrade.

Plus, the demand for more and different kinds of technology grows. We just buy and use more technology in the aggregate. Today there’s a software app for just about everything, it seems. I’m like a kid in a candy store when it comes to business technology, because I have seen productivity improvements from automating chunks of my business processes. The costs are low and so my financial risk is low to try new hardware and software.

Consequently, I am much more likely to buy or subscribe to a software application of a type I’ve never used before. The sheer number of software packages I use now is many times more what I used 10 years ago in business. Ten years ago I used Microsoft Office for most of my business software needs — pretty basic. Today Microsoft Office just scratches the surface.  We rely on about 20 different software apps (the majority online apps) in addition to Office. And I consider most of those software apps “essential.”

With hardware, it’s a similar story.  Where once I used one computer, I now regularly use 3 computers with (soon) five monitors — just for me alone.

Same thing when it comes to gadgets — I’m not much of a gadget person (getting no intrinsic joy out of playing with electronic stuff), but I find myself with 3 or 4 times more productivity gadgets than I’ve ever had before. The mobile phone, the iPod Touch, the various Bluetooth headsets, a bazillion flash drives, the digital cameras, the video camera, the business card scanner — the list goes on.  Not to mention all the services I pay for to go along with these gadgets…

Some technology has dropped in price to the point that it almost in ”impulse purchase” range.  I no longer agonize over a purchase, because today it might cost $135, or better yet $9.99 a month, compared with buying something similar seven years ago that cost $1,000.  At such low price levels, there’s no need to think as long and hard about that purchase. If it doesn’t work out, well, you don’t have much invested in it, so each individual purchase is not going to be a financial risk.

So, while the costs of individual items of technology or software applications may go lower and squeeze profit margins for vendors on items where they traditionally expected high profits, our appetite for new technology just grows. We’ll replace hardware and gadgets more frequently and we’ll buy more readily because the financial risk for any single purchase will be relatively small.  And of course, we’ll spring for all sorts of services to go along with everything else we buy.

And the cycle of creative destruction will continue. New vendors will arise that can provide software and hardware at low price points, and who learn to make more of their profit on the services that go along with the base products.

What Wal-Mart did for entrepreneurial inventors of new consumer products … what Amazon did for authors of new books …  and what eBay did for antiques dealers and other small etailers — various companies are now doing for developers of software and media applications.

We are seeing large popular products become distribution channels for smaller “satellite” products, through an associated marketplace.  These are places where small developers of products can go and more easily find customers and distribute their apps without the costs of developing market channels on their own.

Perhaps the highest profile apps distribution platform is Apple with its Apps Store.

USAToday has an article about how application developers are using the iPhone as a way to get noticed.  And it’s more than just getting PR or visibility — they’re making money, too.  App developers are clamoring to get in to the App Store because they get results.  For instance, Pandora, the online radio service, is reported to get 40% of its new subscribers from the iPhone.  And it’s all because Apple makes it easy with its Apps Store — easy for both end users and developers.

But iPhone apps are just a start.

RIM, makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, recently announced that it is accepting developer applications for its new Application Storefront, which will allow BlackBerry users to download software applications to their BlackBerry devices.

Google has a similar opportunity in the works for its Android Market, a marketplace of apps for its new Android phone.

And it doesn’t stop with mobile devices.  No — software apps are also being distributed online through centralized venues.  Of course, we’ve long had places like Tucows and Download.com, where if you had a small piece of shareware or a low-priced software app, you could distribute it.

But now ecosystems are developing, with apps designed to work with particular products such as the iPhone.

The Intuit Marketplace is one of the highest profile examples of a marketplace for SaaS software applications.  It’s more than just a marketplace, but is actually a platform that helps developers cost effectively build hosted online applications.  By participating in the Intuit Partner Progam, Intuit tells developers of B2B software they can “Easily build Intuit Workplace Apps and then sell them to our millions of small business customers.”  Intuit goes on to say it’s … “The fastest & easiest way to build your SaaS business – without the hassle of building your own server, database, and billing infrastructure.”

Intuit allows you to use their QuickBase infrastructure to develop the application.  They make it easy to integrate with the flagship Intuit product, QuickBooks.  They host the application for you.  You pay only for the resources you use.  And they’ll even provide a platform at the Intuit Marketplace so you can sell your app to the 4 million small business customers that Intuit has.

Currently in the Intuit Marketplace Workplace Apps collection there appear to be hundreds of applications available.   For more, read the review by Alex Criss of the Partner Platform and the Intuit Marketplace.

Small businesses have seen the future, and it’s about partnering with the big guys to develop, host and distribute your software application as a service.

In a coffee shop with other entrepreneurs amid the hustle and bustle of activity, at least they feel connected to the rest of society.  For some, it energizes them to have human interaction around them.

Drea at BusinessPundit.com suggests that coworking spaces may displace coffee shops as the workplace of choice for entrepreneurs who are tired of working at home alone, but equally tired of the limitations of the local coffee shop. In Coworking vs. the Coffee Shop: Who Wins? she writes:

Coworking, on the other hand, allows you a range of cafe-like benefits, without the cafe:

-You pay a flat membership fee instead of a daily fee.
-Everyone has a laptop!
-You get the chance to collaborate with your peers.
-The seats are probably more comfortable.
-Cell phone use is more acceptable–it is a workspace.
-The hip factor may not be a factor, although I am not sure about this point.

I think co-working can be a helpful arrangement for some people who work best in an environment with the stimulation of other people around. On the other hand, it might quickly become a negative experience — and distracting.

Here, for instance, is an image of a coworking space from CoworkUtah.

CoworkUtah features a particularly social flavor of coworking — they call it a “social media community workspace.”

To many people this would be an inviting scene.  It’s a warm, relaxed, welcoming work arrangement with other humans around. It feels like you could occasionally bounce a question off of someone, or kick around that new idea you have.

But here are the downsides — people who:

• talk loudly on their cell phones right next to you, while you are trying to concentrate
• want to endlessly chit chat with the neighbors around them
• hog up the best chairs and table space, every single day

You catch my drift — there are a dozen ways others can annoy you in a communal shared space.  To some degree it depends on how the coworking space is set up and how closely together you are all crammed in.

I can see how coworking might be energizing and attractive to some, especially extroverted types who crave social interaction and feed on the energy of other people around them. Probably a good target market for coworking spaces are entrepreneurs who would otherwise go to a coffee shop, but are looking for an experience superior to the coffee shop experience.

For those like me who cherish quiet concentration, an absence of distractions, and complete control over our physical setting, it is probably not our cup of tea.  But, then, I never much liked working in coffee shops, either.

For more about coworking, including resources, read my earlier piece:  Coworking Spaces: Cheap and Sociable.

But one thing that is unusual is to find a product that pulls in discussion threads from the community right into the product itself. 

Intuit instituted this new feature in its 2009 QuickBooks application.  I’ve been reviewing QuickBooks 2009 and find it  interesting to see how they’ve brought the community and the product together.

When you are in the Quickbooks application, to the right side of the screen is a small vertical box labeled “Live Community”:

There’s a question box right there, where you can ask a question without having to leave QuickBooks and navigate to the Community discussion boards.  The answers will pop up right on your screen so you can scroll through them.  In essence, you can bring the Community into the product and to you, instead of the other way around.

This is for the desktop version of QuickBooks 2009, that I’m talking about (not the online version).   But of course you have to be connected to the Internet when using Quickbooks, to use the Live Community feature.