zfweb

Saas and the city

We've begun our new video podcast on Software-as-a-Service

The coolest website I've seen all year

Not much more to be said. I have no idea what it's advertising or even what language it is, but it's a lot of fun.

http://producten.hema.nl

zf

Welcome to the future

What software is installed on your computer?

Four years ago when I started zfweb my morning routine would be

   1. Start up my G3 Macintosh laptop
   2. Dialup (yes it's true)
   3. Start the 5 programs that I used daily
   4. Make coffee while they took their time to load
   5. Check the Sydney Morning Herald website on a web browser
   6. Start work

In a day I could easily use 15 programs that were installed on my computer. The more I had running, the slower my computer ran Too many and it would crash.

These days my daily start-up involves:

   1. Opening my MacBook Pro laptop to wake it from sleep
   2. The internet is of course already running, at over a thousand times of dialup of old
   3. Email, messenger and skype open of their own accord
   4. Check Facebook and SMH on my "personal" web browser, Safari
   5. Open Firefox my "work" browser and start work.

This is because 90% of the programs I use are now are on the internet. These include:

• Saasu - online accounting software (no more MYOB)
• Salesforce - online client database (no more filemaker pro)
• 88 miles - online time-sheet software (no more excell)
• Brainkeeper - online wiki that we use as an intranet (no more doccuments storeed on hard drives)
• Google Analytics - from which I track all the movement through our websites
• And of course Typepad, from which we write our blog posts

So what does it all mean?

• I can be on any computer with an internet connection and be able to access all our business applications.
• I can generate an invoice for a client from their office and not my own
• It means I can be going to a meeting, and look up the address via the web-browser on my mobile phone.
• That (heaven forbid) if zfweb were to burn down tomorrow, we could all camp out in an internet cafe and carry on as normal.
• Our staff can work at home without needing to cart a laptop on the train
• That I could be posting this blog post from my desk, the airport or even the beach

Online software is not stopping there. This website was the inspiration for this blog post - a website that allows you to design and then download your own fonts.

In the future I think traditional software will continue to die, so that soon a computer will be simply a terminal onto the world. Personally I think it's great but by all means beg to differ.

See we told you so

We've become fans of the corporate blog, and now have our very own facebook profile.

But don't take our word for it, read what the Sydney Morning Herald has to say on the matter.

Can online social media help your business?

Find us on Facebook

Whether you love it or hate it, facebook is here with a vengeance.

And you can now become a fan of zfweb! What more could you want in life?

Just click here

And simply click the "become a fan" link on the top right.

The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

A few years ago I started to comment on the fringes of a "boys only" blog that some old colleagues and friends were authors of. One of them worked out who I was, and managed to get me a login. Like sneaking someone under 18 into a bar, we picked a handle that was suitably androgynous, and I proceeded to post away, simply stripping the gender out of my rants and stories before publishing them.

Someone cottoned on a few months later, the game was up and I was outed. Kindly they still let me play. I am grateful to say I am still friends with my fellow bloggers but the blog itself is long dead.

Why it died I'm not so sure. Through the blog we all became friends - why try to impress someone with your wit and skepticism online when you could do it over a glass of wine?  Maybe we just got bored. Was the internet just too full of people telling us what they thought to compete with our own brand of cynicism?

It wasn't just our little blog that died you see. Darwinism reigned and decent blogs now are the reserve of decent writers. Thankfully. Did the bleeding heart look-at-mes flock to myspace and the everyday readers to facebook?

But the corporate blog is also on the rise, and blogs work well as a way to keep news on a company up-to-date. We like to practice what we preach when it comes to web strategy which is why we're starting this one.  It has also been recommended to help with our google rankings. I'm skeptical of it's effectiveness, not to drive traffic but to convert that traffic into cool clients! But more on my soap box issue of choice later. *

Hopefully we just find something to say that people want to read.

zf

* I need to save up rants and theories for actual posts