Search Results for: billflo

I wrote a post recently about what billFLO is doing for small, Mom and Pop owner of Do it Best stores. This, along with some pretty exciting discussions I’d had both as part of The Small Business Web and privately with some other people, got me thinking about the reality on the ground for SMBs.

The discussion soon got on to federation and OAuth as a great example of what openness can do. Further discussions got on to looking at WebFinger as a continuation of that openness and as a tool that is immensely empowering for SMBs. You see WebFinger is a way to attach meta data to an email address such that authentication, provisioning, billing, integration and a whole host of high value, and high drag, operations can be automated.

From the WebFinger project page:

WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them. That metadata might include:

• public profile data
• pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
• a public key
• other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
• a URL to an avatar
• profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
• whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
• or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

WebFinger could, and should be the holy grail that industry groups like The Small Business Web leverage in order to finally provide a simple, accessible, low drag software platform for small businesses. SaaS vendors in all functional areas should be looking at the WebFinger initiative, thinking about what billFLO is enabling for invoicing, and parsing the two in light of the space they’re in.

Believe me, the software world will be a magic place when this stuff finally happens.

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Awhile ago I posted a bit of a rant about an experience one of my businesses was having with a particular ISP who didn’t seem to understand the concept of customer service. Briefly I told the sorry tale of woe that we experienced with our site hosted on a traditional ISPs VPS offering.

I got a bunch of comments on that post, but one really got me thinking. Ben Reid, Founder of Memia a cloud development company, left a remark asking:

?Why aren’t you eating your own dogfood?

Meaning why aren’t I, as a cloud evangelist, using a true cloud hosting service. I’ll not dwell on the definitional issues here – a number of people commented that a VPS is cloud hosting – that’s one debate I’ll leave aside for now.

What I did want to talk about was Ben’s contention that our business should be using cloud as a philosophical decision.

I responded to Ben saying that:

Oh but we are totally eating our own dog food. The dog food that says “A business should stick to it’s core”. You see Cactus is in the business of making the best outdoor equipment in the world – NOT of being a great sysadmin.

Yeah I’m a cloud evangelist, but first and foremost I believe that a businesses should focus on what is valuable to them. SaaS is valuable precisely because it avoids the need to have in house IT – moving hosting from (supposedly) supported hosting to completely unsupported and self administered cloud infrastructure makes little sense unless the organization in question is specifically in the business of systems administration. We’re not.

This got me thinking about a conversation I had with Ian Sweeney, CEO of billFLO (more on them here). We were discussing the strategy that SaaS vendors selling to SMB customers should use when messaging their products. As Ian said:

As vendors, I think we all agree that Saas works really well for us (easy upgrades, no OS compatibility issues, etc) but we haven’t thought much about what traditional SMBs want. Speaking to traditional SMBs (builders, carpenters, retailers, etc.) they don’t care either way about always on, available anywhere SaaS offerings.  They only care about software that gets their tasks done quicker.

If the Saas offerings (working together) can outperform desktop software in that dimension, then it will hit the mainstream. And I think we can, with our unfair advantage of connectedness and open data.

So… dogfood huh? I’ll see Ben’s original dogfood and raise him a knitting – businesses should stick to their knitting and not try and do stuff that isn’t core to their point of difference.

Oh and SaaS vendors, if you can’t articulate that value in terms SMBs can understand, you’ve got a big problem.

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