This blog has moved and changed to WP

Business Two Zero is alive and well, hosted by Yahoo! Small Business in a new WordPress flavour, using Mike Little's Journalized theme. Come and find us at http://biztwozero.com

Blogging - New media value and SEO

Dennis Howlett and I did a podcast yesterday about the basics of blogging, touching on the good reasons for doing it, Search Engine Optimisation, but also covering websites in general, and the marketing aspects around them.  We moved on to the use of Software as a Service based systems in business and accounting, but ended with the importance of blogging as part of your marketing strategy. Dennis has called it New media value and SEO.  Please have a listen.

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, SEO, websites, media

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Are we heading for a Dot.com bubble?

We definitely have a technology boom, triggered by the lower cost of entry for budding entrepreneurs, but some would suggest that must mean we are heading for a bubble that will burst.  Chris Anderson has written an insightful piece in the latest Wired which suggests otherwise.  He says:

"Companies are once again minting millionaires, but venture capitalists are investing less than a fifth of what they were at the 2000 peak. About 50 technology companies went public last year, but more than 300 went public in 1999."

And at the end of the piece:

"So there you have the recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble: a more receptive marketplace, lower costs, and lighter pressure from investors. Today, the typical exit strategy is to sell your startup to Yahoo! for a few million, not to maneuver for a rowdy IPO and an appearance on CNBC. Highway 101 is jammed with Prius-driving engineers, not biz-dev guys in Beemers. And most New York cab drivers are happily ignorant of what's hot in the Valley, just as they should be."

Please go and read the full article, and relax about the characteristics of the current technology market growth.

Technorati Tags : business2.0, web2.0, dot.com, SaaS, entrepreneur, VC

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Business Two Zero has moved and improved!

I've just reached that point when I've outgrown this free Blogger service, and so have taken the plunge to switch to WordPress on my own domain.  So, Business Two Zero is in a new place, with a new look and feel.

We have moved to www.businesstwozero.com or biztwozero.com - please follow the links, read the latest, and bookmark our new location.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, Blogger, WordPress, BusinessTwoZero

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The best of Web 2.0 of 2005

Towards the end of last year I missed Dion Hinchcliffe's review of the best Web 2.0 offerings he'd seen during the year. There are some I agree with, like Delicious, some I'm not so sure of, like Memeorandum, and some I hadn't heard of - Rallypoint and the online calendar products. I'm particularly interested in checking out the online file storage products.
Technorati Tags : Web2.0, Delicious, memeorandum, writely, basecamp, zoho, storage, flickr, digg

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This week's New Ajax Homepage

I feel I might be catching Listomania, a blogger's disease where you serially post lists from other blogs. I will keep taking the medicine. However, I spotted another list you might be interested in, but which also highlights two trends in the industry. A while ago I posted about the way that the Web 2.0 world has lowered the point of entry for Entrepreneur's to start a business, and related Joe Kraus' story - it cost him $3,000,000 to start Excite in the 90s, but only $100,000 to start JotSpot last year. Consequently we have new tech enterprises beginning at an almost alarming rate, which is causing some people to worry that another dot.com bubble is upon us. One of the new technologies that are being used more and more, in our own and other products is Ajax. There is a particular spate of Ajax based homepage products. Techcrunch reckons that they are arriving at a rate of 1 every 2 weeks. In this piece they discuss the latest entrant Wrickr , but also list 10 others. They are all interesting in highlighting the extra level of usability that is coming in web based applications, and in demonstrating the talent that is being released. It's not a dot.com bubble, but an innovation boom thatis upon us.

Technorati Tags : Web2.0, ajax, dot.com, entrepreneur, Techcrunch, JotSpot, homepage, listomania

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BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Supplemental

For those of you who liked my guide to blogging, I'm planning a supplemental resource when I move off Blogger shortly. I've seen lots of lists recently, but I couldn't resist pointing you at Kevin Pierpoint's 10 Lists of 10 for Smashing Blog Success. There is some good stuff in there, along with some inevitable overlap. But actually there are 11 lists, so 110 ideas for your blog.
Technorati Tags : Blogging, blogs, SEO, marketing, writing, design

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Analysts who really understand Software as a Service

Here's something from Phil Wainewright's Zdnet Software as Services blog:

"There are plenty of industry analysts out there who will rent-a-quote about SaaS and on-demand, but only a handful really understand what it's all about."

So go and read Phil's thoughts on 8 you should listen to.

Technorati Tags : SaaS, analysts, business, business2.0, on demand

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Top 10 Beautiful Physics Experiments

Now this doesn't have much to do with business or Web 2.0, but it's an interesting diversion, that I'm sure will spark an idea for you. Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. This site shows, with nice graphics, the top 10 chosen by those scientists.

Technorati Tags : Physics, experiments

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Zoho - the web based document writer

After Writely and ThinkFree, I've come across another interesting online alternative to Word called Zoho Writer.  This has a very neat interface, which I assume uses AJAX, and some very interesting features.  It looks like a combination of the best components of the other two.  You can invite people to collaborate with you on the document, and it retains full version control.  The service is free and you store your documents in your own folder style storage area.   You can print documents as PDFs and even publish them to the popular blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.

Zoho also has a family of products that do collaboration, CRM, to-do planning and application creation.  I'll be investigating these further over the coming weeks, and plan a fuller review of Writer.   
Technorati Tags : Zoho, Writely, ThinkFree, SaaS, blogging, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress

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Now we have Microsoft Live, does that mean that their old products should be re-branded Microsoft Dead?

This is one of the excellent lines spoken by Marc Benioff, the CEO & Chairman of Salesforce.com, at their European launch of Winter 06 and AppExchange today at the Portman Hotel in London.  It's the first time I've seen him speak in the flesh, and he is certainly a very direct and straight talking individual, commanding the stage and interjecting in to the presentations on several occasions.  He had plenty to say disparaging Oracle, SAP and Siebel for their lack of understanding of the new paradigm, or as he calls it "The End of Software".  By the way, have you seen the great game they've created on their site to attract disaffected Siebel employees - it's akin to the arcade game where you wallop an animal on the head - go have a look.

The session started with a US TV interview of writer and journalist Thomas Friedman explaining that we are at the "Mother of all turning points".  His argument is that the combination of the digital age of the PC, the new world of the Internet, and the availability of workflow software has flattened the World and created the Business Web.  This must be one of the threads in his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which also covers globalisation and the after affects of 9/11.  At one stage he commented that "geeky guys are predicting this is the end of Microsoft", and after the recording Benioff professed to be one of those geeky guys, and agreed that's what he would be doing today!

The rest of the session presented the latest flavour of Salesforce.com and a number of customers explaining how they are using it, and partners demonstrating their add-on applications that are available through AppExchange.  They are trying to make this platform like an iTunes or eBay for applications, both in terms of a development platform for partners, as well as a distribution mechanism to get their products to market.  They even managed to have one of the demonstrators online by webcam and web demo from his base in South India.  I'm sure the organisers were relieved when that worked!

There were some very good demonstrations of how you can integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that have a proper web API, with other applications with a web API, such as Google maps.  These are called mashups, and they can look seamless to the user, as well as being inexpensive to do. 

Overall the key message was strong.  The world of SaaS, or as they call it "no software" is definitely upon us and the old guard better watch out.
Technorati Tags : Business 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Benioff, Friedman, Oracle, Siebel, SAP, iTunes, eBay, mashup, on demand, ASP

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