Ok, so almost 3 months ago when TechCrunch wrote that Intuit (the makers of TurboTax, QuickBooks, Quicken, etc) were launching a development platform within QuickBase I signed up. I thought it would be pretty cool to at least see what they were doing and I’m really into Enterprise software (small, medium or large enterprises are all the same to me - business is business no matter the size).
Well, after registering I didn’t get a confirmation email, a “thanks for registering” email or even a “you were rejected, better luck next time”. I figured it was a good try, I guess I’m not getting that 5 minutes back. Then yesterday, completely out of the blue, I get a note from QuickBase that I’ve “been accepted into the Intuit QuickBase Developer Program”. Ok, well that’s cool but you may want to communicate a little better next time. I figured some server troll somewhere ate my application. Good thing you didn’t make me submit my password when I initially signed up or I would have been in trouble.
Anyways, I’ve completed the registration and I’m going to begin poking around what they have to offer. At first glance it seems functional but not as visually pleasing as something I’d expect from Intuit. It is in Beta though so I won’t give them too hard of a time.
More to come on QuickBase in the near future. Maybe if I can find a few hours I’ll get an example application up.
Google and Salesforce announced a partnership the other day that will bring a combined Google/Salesforce business suite to it’s users. The service is called “Salesforce for Google Apps” and touts “powerful yet easy-to-use productivity tools for smarter management of customers, sales and marketing.”
There is the obviously emphasis on collaboration and communication between team/project members. My ’sales’ experience is relatively limited - I managed a newspaper in college and filling in for the occasional employee is about the extent of it - but the functionality seems practical.
One key feature I liked is the fact that email being sent (from the Gmail interface) can automatically be sent to a customers CRM account. This provides you with a worry-free audit trail and allows your boss or someone covering for you (if you’re out sick or something) to quickly pick up where you left off. Likewise, you can send customer emails directly within Salesforce. I also liked the fact that you can attach/create Google Docs directly from Salesforce. The uses for this are obvious and I think it will really be able to help the sales process. Everything from quote notes, sales presentations and final contracts can be created directly from the Salesforce interface.
It didn’t look like the interface was the same between the two systems which is disappointing but I haven’t signed up for a test account yet so that’s just speculation based on the tour. I think that offering a consistent interface between Google and Salesforce is a must and could help adoption among small businesses.
I don’t know much about Salesforce’s push for mobile but Google has mobile versions of Gmail and Docs and continues to improve them. I’m curious to see what kind of mobile sales/business applications they make available to their users. Anything less than full functionality is unacceptable, but that would be a pretty major project. I’d also like to get some information on what the security architecture looks like. ZOHO just announced an enhanced architecture as part of it’s enterprise CRM which is a little more inline with what I see as an SAP consultant.
Simply put, the decision makes sense - Google is trying to break into enterprise business, Salesforce has a great customer base (and from what I read a decent set of applications) and both are competing with Microsoft in some fashion. The partnership allows them to put the full-court press on Microsoft who has been slow to adopt a web-based business model.
It will obviously take time for larger corporations to make the move given the obvious security concerns (mostly on the Google front) and the fact that the majority of business users are still not comfortable with online applications. One thing that could help Google’s case for enterprise applications is the fact that Vista has had so many bumps along the way. The rate at which corporations have been moving to Vista has been slow at best. I work for a technology company and we haven’t even heard rumor’s of a potential migration.
According to several news sources that I frequent - Time Warner is considering a usage based charge for internet services. What a ridiculous notion - that’s never going to fly!
Here is a few reasons this model is absolutely absurd:
Photos: Tons of people from all ages share photos online. One bummer about photos…they tend to do be kind of big files, unless you limit that on your camera or edit them, which is really going to eat up your bandwidth. More bandwidth = more money.
Music: Downloading music from iTunes does it’s damage to your bandwidth as well. With an average size (at least of my songs) averaging between 2.8 and 3.2 megabytes a piece you’re you could be looking at a pretty expensive internet bill if you’re an avid downloader of music.
TV/Movies: With the rise of the internet it’s inevitable that videos and TV will eventually be delivered via the internet. In fact, it’s already in the works. Apple (iTunes) and Netflix are already offering TV and movie offerings streamed directly to you over the internet.
I’m sure that part of the reason they’re looking into this is because of the rise in popularity of online video (YouTube et al) and photo sharing (pick any random website/social network and they probably offer photo hosting/sharing…) which taxes the service providers network. While I’d like to feel sorry for Time Warner (and other internet providers for that matter) and the fact that they feel their network is being used too much (what did they think would happen)…I find it rather difficult given the fact they (Time Warner Cable: TWC) made almost $2 billion in profit for fiscal year 2006. I hope everyone caught that hint of sarcasm.
I already have a problem with what cable companies are charging for ‘unlimited’ (even though it was discovered that Comcast wasn’t exactly net neutral) access to the internet and now they want to put limits or charge you more?!? What is going through the minds of these companies these days?!? Is that what a CEO that makes nearly $9.5 million dollars a year thinks up?
The less-than-stellar mortgage lending industry got a huge show of support yesterday when Bank of America agreed to buy Countrywide Financial for $4 Billion. Obviously this won’t solve problems but it goes a long way in showing that someone believes the housing and mortgage market will eventually recover.
According to a Wall Street Journal article (quoting numbers from Inside Mortgage Finance), Countrywide and Bank of America controlled approximately 25% of the mortgage market during the first 9 months of 2007. That puts their market share at slightly more than twice their nearest competitor which is at a distant 11%. I’m curious to see if this plays out negatively as Bank of America seeks regulatory approval for the acquisition.
Given the state of the mortgage market, the acquisition will probably win Bank of America some bonus points as it teeters just below the 10% limit on U.S. deposits as regulators look to relax this restriction. Bank of America will also be getting a relatively large (I’m assuming some Countrywide members are already BofA account holders) base of potential new business - they’ll be able to offer their new members banking and credit card services which could be a huge selling point. I’ve also read rumors of tax breaks but nothing firm so far.
I think we’ll see some other large mortgage lenders at least enter into discussions, if not get bought out, by suiters. While the mortgage lending market doesn’t look great for most of America, it’s a prime acquisition target while prices are low.
As I’m sure many of you do, I use email constantly at work. There are some days at work that I probably spend 50+ % of my time reading and writing emails. No, I don’t type really slow! Managing a team of off-shore developers just has it’s pro’s and con’s and one of the con’s is that 75% or more of your communication is done via email. Since the majority of my day-to-day communication is done via email and the company I work for is stingy when it comes to email storage (a measly 150MB of storage space…really? I get 6.25 GB in my free Gmail account…but that’s a post for another day), minimizing email size is important to me.
That being said, here are a few email signature etiquette tips that I think everyone can take something away from…myself included. Yes, I’ve broken these rules before but over the past couple years I’ve refined my approach.
Signature Format the Nathan Jones Approach:
Name: I think this goes without saying but I included it for good measure. If you want to make this bold or slightly (and I mean slightly, don’t make me regret putting this in here) larger than the rest of the signature that is definitely understandable.
Company/Office: Many people would make this two separate lines within the signature but I don’t see the need for it. I think it should be combined into a single line with a separator such as a dash (-) or vertical line (|). It looks classy and it keeps the number of lines down.
Contact Information:
Email Address: My thoughts on this are pretty to the point - it’s ok to have your email address listed on your ‘new email’ signature but it should not be present on your ‘replies’ signature. In Outlook you can create multiple signatures and assign different ones to different types of emails. If you are replying to an email it’s a given that the person already has your email address. If you use a mobile phone to send/receive that only allows one signature - including your email address is acceptable.
Phone Numbers: Where do I begin…I got an email the other day that had five different phone numbers in the signature. My first thought is that this person has way too much time, not doing work presumably, to create this signature let alone manage five different phone numbers. I think a signature should have at most - three. A desk/office phone number, a mobile phone number and a fax machine number. If you don’t have a fax then leave it off the signature and make the max two!
Instant Messaging Names: In today’s technology driven world I think it’s perfectly legitimate to place a single instant messaging address in your signature. I do a lot of communicating through instant messaging and it’s a quick way for people to get in touch with me. I’d leave it at one though - it makes sense that it be the name to the instant messaging client you use the most…but that’s obviously up to you.
Office Address: Unless you work in a job where clients visit your office on a regular occasion or you get a lot of mail sent to that address, I think it’s best to leave this address off your signature. If people need it they can always ask for it. More than likely the number of people that don’t need that address far outweigh the number of those that do.
Personal Websites: I think personal websites should be left off of your work email signature no matter what kind of personal website you run. Maybe you just run a blog (similar to this one) but of course there are/will be views expressed that could ultimately upset one of your clients or co-workers and that’s a situation that no one wants to be involved in. I think it’s fine to advertise your personal website on your personal email signature though - I do it!
Color: I’m pretty open to colors in email signatures - they make them unique and can call attention to certain pieces of information. Mostly because most email editors these days will format your signature in HTML whether it needs to or not so whether you make your color bright pink (please spare me the pain) or a classic gray I don’t care either way (geek information: HTML color formats require the same amount of bytes for almost all colors). As for how it looks - I vote you stick with a classic color such as black, dark blue, green, gray or some company color if there is one. Personally, I would never look at your signature if it were bright pink, but that’s just me.
Images: I don’t know how many times I have received an email with the company logo embedded in the signature but it drives me absolutely nuts. First of all, it takes up space. Normally it uses just a bit more space than formatted text but if you receive as many emails as me those extra bytes start to add up…quickly! My personal thought is that an image should never be embedded in a signature unless your company mandates it. By the way, if they do mandate an image I’d like to hear about it and whether they limit your email storage space.
Mobile Note: If you send email from your mobile phone and have a signature set-up I think it’s a good idea to add a small note at the bottom of the signature that indicates that the email is being sent from your mobile phone. It will take up a little space but your signature should be smaller on your phone anyways and a note like this can go a long way in explaining why sentences may be more direct or the occasional misspelled word appears. Personally, I use “Note: This message was sent from my mobile phone.”.
Well, those are just some of my thoughts on email signature etiquette. In summary, keep it short and simple. If you’re a sales person or someone who relies on getting your contact information seen acted upon you can still keep it short and classy and just use a different color or bolded word to get your phone number looked at.
While the post title may be somewhat misleading (and nerdy) I feel the need to discuss Facebook’s recent valuation (and here) - well the valuation it got few weeks ago. Now, I have nothing against Facebook, in fact I used to use it all the time. I don’t login nearly as much anymore but I still maintain an account and think that it offers some very useful tools. I’m still waiting for that hybrid LinkedIn + Facebook social network that I’m sure someone is working on but I’m ok with using them both right now.
Recent investments in Facebook by technology powerhouse Microsoft value the social network at a mere $15 billion. Microsoft invested $240 million for an estimated 1.6% stake in the company. I know Microsoft has some extremely deep pockets and as the world moves to a more web-centric focus (online document processing, business management, personal productivity, etc) they needed to do something relatively drastic…but really?!?
I don’t know about you, but I consider investing in a company and ultimately giving it a valuation greater than the combined GDP of Iceland ($11.38 billion) and Greenland ($1.1 billion) pretty drastic. Of course the GDP is an annual number and Facebook doesn’t quite make $15 billion a year but the thought of it being valued that high blows my mind. Part of that may be because I remember using the site in 2004 just after it expanded beyond just Harvard students and wasn’t anything overly impressive and ’social networking’ as we know it today was relatively young.
I understand that Facebook’s valuation still doesn’t place it in the company of the Google’s, Microsoft’s and Exxon’s of the world with market caps ranging from $210 billion to almost $500 billion, but I still think that it is just slightly over-valued. To put things in perspective, the GDP of Greece is $256 billion and the GDP of Sweden is $290 billion.
Well that’s it for now, I just thought I’d share my thoughts.
Posted on July 3rd, 2008 by Nathan
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