The Future: Big Corporations Become Distributors for Small Business Apps

January 21, 2009 at 1:20 am · Filed under Information Architecture, Web 2.0

We’ve seen the future for small business developers of software apps — and it’s having the big guys distribute your app on their platform.

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.

Coworking, Coffee Shops and Entrepreneurs

December 30, 2008 at 2:31 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Web Commuting

There’s a strong connection between entrepreneurs and coffee shops. Entrepreneurs — tired of working in isolation — so frequently head to the local coffee shop that it’s become a cliche.

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.

QuickBooks – The Morphing of Community With Product

December 18, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Collective intelligence

Product forums and discussion boards are as old as the hills (well, maybe not THAT old, but almost as old as the Web, dating back to 1996).  Most companies use discussion forums as part of a multi-layered strategy for providing customer  support — along with email/chat/phone support; online technical specs and help files; and a searchable knowledgebase.

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.

Co-Working Spaces: Cheap and Sociable

December 12, 2008 at 1:46 am · Filed under Collaboration

Kare Anderson writes about the trend toward co-working spaces:

“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” says researcher Laura Forlano. That’s why soloists bootstrapped into being a co-working space in Austin called Conjunctured. Working elbow to elbow around a table or in separate offices often means you are more likely to help each other than those who work alone, they found. Each space has its own personality and rules. Co-work space is now a burgeoning trend in a bad economy.

Co-working basically means shared office space.  Some professions, such as lawyers, have been working in shared office space for decades.  It’s actually been a common thing among attorneys.  They share individual offices within a suite.  Each lawyer contributes toward the overhead, including a receptionist,  law books, a telephone system, conference room space and so on.

But now coworking has hit the ranks of entrepreneurs, who are sharing work space cost effectively.

Kare’s post lists a variety of resources for co-working spaces.  She points out a wiki and a directory.  There’s even a matching service called SuiteMatch to find your match for office space.

How SaaS Might Just Save Your Small Business

December 8, 2008 at 10:43 am · Filed under Web Apps

BusinessWeek has an article up about one small business that is using SaaS (software as a service) to cut costs and be more efficient.  By itself, that is not a new idea.  But what I found striking about the story is that the business laid off three-fourths of its staff, and turned itself around from being $500,000 in debt, to becoming profitable.

At the heart of the story is how the business adopted a couple of online software services that they credit with making it possible to achieve profitability:

After three months of meetings with accountants, consultants, sales experts, and a mentor, co-founder Bret Starr made the painful decision to cut 75% of his staff. “We had a big sales team that was not providing value,” he says. Since sales and marketing would now be managed by just one person, Starr’s advisers suggested two hosted software applications to make that job easier.

Hosted software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), has been around for about a decade. It’s software delivered via the Web rather than residing on a company’s own servers. Companies pay a monthly fee instead of buying the software outright, and don’t have to worry about software licenses, server maintenance, or IT staff to manage complex programs. Robert Mahowald, director of SaaS and on-demand research at Framingham (Mass.) researchers IDC, says hosted software can bring cost savings of 25% to 60% if maintenance and IT staff are factored in.

Here’s what I think is so significant about this example:  it’s the out-sized leverage that software as a service can bring to small businesses.  Imagine a large enterprise being able to lay off 75% of its staff and actually becoming a stronger company, rather than dying a slow death.  It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine that.

I’m not suggesting that it is somehow a good goal to lay off staff — not at all.  But if it comes to down to survival, and you have no choice but to shed expenses, SaaS apps might help save some small businesses during these recessionary times.

In addition to helping small businesses cut expenses, here are 3 other advantages small businesses can gain from SaaS:

(1) Growth without adding staff – SaaS can help you grow a small business without adding extra staff along the way.  During recessions, when credit is tight, positive cash flow is the difference between surviving and going under.  Some businesses slowly strangle to death, because they need more revenue, but get caught in a catch-22 because they don’t have the free cash flows to hire and pay more people to grow the top line.  If you want to grow without hurting your cash flow, some well-placed, inexpensive software services could help.

(2)  Automating existing functions to become more efficient and better serve customers — As a small business grows you can quickly get mired down in business processes that are primarily manual, that have never been automated.  Small businesses tend to grow in a way that isn’t necessarily organized or pretty.   Often you’re moving so fast there isn’t time to even think about automation.  The harried business owner thinks, “Just handle it — we’ll worry about automation later.”  Early on this makes sense, because your volume in a small business is low and in the beginning it doesn’t make much difference.  But manual activities don’t scale well.  Soon the business can’t get out of its own way.  It can stumble badly with customers.  If small business owners look around, there’s often a lot of low hanging fruit to pluck — activities that can be automated to enable more growth, more throughput, faster cycle times, better customer service.

(3) Free up the business owner to lead — SaaS can help the small business owner live a better life and be a better leader. Most small businesses start out with the owner doing everything.  Often the business owner is the nerve center of the business, running too many functions and activities.  It can get to be overwhelming for business owners.  Not only does the business owner end up working all the time, with no down time, but it diverts his or her focus from strategic issues to daily minutae — and he or she ends up working in the business instead of on the business.

Considering Telework? Consider the Person, the Office, the Job

December 3, 2008 at 2:10 am · Filed under Distributed Work, Talent Management

A recent CareerBuilder.com article on CNN notes three different inquiries that companies need to make before deciding on whether to allow someone to work from home.  A company like Aetna insurance, for example, looks at:

• The person – Is the person suited for a work-at-home position?  (Presumably this has to do with having self-discipline and the ability to work without close supervision or constant reinforcement.)
• The location – Is the employee’s home environment suitable for remote work?  Do they have an office set up?  Is the environment stable and business-friendly?  (I am guessing those 14 dogs barking the background wouldn’t be considered business friendly.)
• The job – Is the job one that lends itself to working remotely?  (Some jobs are easier than others to work remotely from.)

Aetna has got to be the poster child of teleworking:  according to the article “10,000 Aetna employees, or 27 percent of the company’s work force, now work from home.”

Teleworking is not an issue reserved for large enterprises, however.  Many small businesses face the same issues in deciding whether to have remote workers. 

Take, for instance, the small business owners who work out of their homes (from 12 – 15 million, depending on whose numbers you believe).  When they bring on employees — or perhaps more commonly, independent contractors — out of necessity, those employees and contractors tend to work out of their own respective homes, too. 

And home-based businesses with employees are more common than you’d think.  For instance, a recent study of home based businesses found that almost half had employees!

Is Cloud Computing Driving Us Toward Small Netbook Computers, or Vice Versa?

December 2, 2008 at 5:00 am · Filed under Web Apps

This holiday season everybody seems to be talking about netbooks — the new small notebook-type computers designed primarily for Internet applications, without a lot of software loaded on the hard drive.  As Zoli Erdos writes:

Hardly a day goes by without another new Netbook announcement, at lower and lower prices. The first baby eee PC by ASUS was toy-like … but the current crop are quite usable mobile computing devices.

These new Netbooks are flying off the shelf, so much so that sometimes you wonder if manufacturers rush to re-label their notebooks to netbooks, just to ride the wave. Whereas the first model had a puny 7” screen, the current standard is a minimumof 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just become blurry.

Despite not being an early adopter, I have to say that the prospect of traveling with a netbook is so enticing that I’ve started looking into one, such as the HP Mini (pictured).

Right now I have a 7 pound Dell laptop that has been with me on many many trips and feels like an old friend. But it also feels like a 50-pound sack of potatoes by the time I get from my car to the gate at the airport.

In the past I used a wheelie laptop bag for long trips — great for my shoulders. But these days, with checked-bag fees, on-plane storage space is scarcer than icicles in the Sahara. A small netbook looks more enticing with each passing day.

To use one of these small stripped-down computers, I am going to have to rearrange how I work. For instance, online file storage will be crucial, so that I can access documents while on the road. It’s also accelerating my evaluation of Google Apps for Business for my email. It’s much more convenient to get at GMail on the road than to have to remotely log in to my office server to check my Outlook.

I think the desire to travel light will drive us toward these mini-computers or netbooks. And once we buy into the convenience factor of these small machines, it will accelerate our uptake of cloud applications — out of necessity.