In New York, everyone “does Biz Dev.” It’s the magic thing that people do that turns little companies into giant empires. It’s what makes great CEOs and revolutionizes whole markets and companies. But what is it?I meet plenty of Biz Dev people who “don’t do marketing or sales because they’re focused on biz dev.” These [...]
I got a call a few weeks ago from a NYC-based foreign language school that was looking for a software makeover. They were using Google Spreadsheets to manage their student, class, and payment information, and for the previous year were happy as can be. After all, Google Spreadsheets offers some awesome collaborative capabilities: simultaneous spreadsheet [...]
It’s a tough time to be a Value Added Reseller (VAR). For those who don’t know, VARs are a breed of IT consultant popularized in the 1990’s and still near-ubiquitous in certain channels. They’re hard to miss: Without going into too much detail, the VAR model is one of selling software licenses for the margin, [...]
So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff. What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, basically rewrote the rules of software releases. [...]
Yes, this is a repost, but it’s just so good we couldn’t help ourselves… The Support, It Is a-Changin’ In the good ‘ole days when software still need installing and executives regularly printed their emails, software “support” was a strange thing. Sure, Microsoft had helplines you could call, and Quicken came with a manual, but [...]
The going is good, and we’re still screwing it up We’ve been helping companies utilize new and powerful technology for just under three years now. It has been fantastic. We’re growing rapidly and seeing the sea-change in how some businesses are using software. But what’s even more astounding is the fact that so few people [...]
A few days ago we received a trial invite to Thinkfuse, an up-and-coming piece of software focused on group communications (read: project status reports). Without going into a full review (Thinkfuse is still in testing mode), suffice it to say that Thinkfuse represents exactly what we *love* about good new products: simplicity, focused innovation, and [...]
We work with dozens of clients, big and small, every month. Sometimes – say once a year – there’s a client whose situation perfectly encapsulates all the tensions involved with cloud computing. We just had that client. Here’s their story. Small company, big needs The company – lets call them Fisher’s Piers – is a [...]
In our quest to find software that doesn’t suck, we’ve been increasingly impressed with Brightpearl, a cloud-based ERP company that’s targeting the SMB market. Based in the UK but with offices opening in San Francisco, Brightpearl combines CRM, accounting, eCommerce and inventory management in one easy to use cloud-based package. At ~$100 USD/user/month it’s an easy sell [...]
Last week Google Docs experienced 24 minutes of downtime, leaving users and businesses without access to their documents. According to TechCrunch, a popular technology news blog, the outage “raised concerns about the reliability involved with storing mission-critical documents in the cloud.” Scary stuff, this. Can’t we trust Google? Can’t we trust the cloud? Is the world ending? [...]
