One of the names that keep coming up was Maria from Aspire Solutions. Her website was heavily branded with her existing software partner and so I thought if we could win her over we’d be doing well.

Maria has been an excellent partner and gave us lots of good feedback into what we needed to do earlier on.

“When approached by Rod last year I was immediately taken with how exciting, innovative and EASY Xero is for the end user. We are regularly approached by software companies looking for us to promote their products and this is the first (and only) new product we have taken on board since the inception of the business in Dec 2005. We think Xero is super exciting and very technically advanced; we love using Xero and find that it is a unique yet simple solution to offer to our clients.

As well as our one on one training and consulting services, we have been running half day beginner training courses in Xero for over a year now from our training room in Paraparaumu, and we are pleased to now offer this training in Lower Hutt as well. Users have the opportunity to practice in a hands on environment using the Xero Demo company, and the half day session well and truly covers the basics you need to know to get up and running quickly.

We have seen a huge growth in our Xero business this year, and we look forward to witnessing the development of the system over time and becoming more involved with Xero users.”

I’m on a bit of a learning curve but now that I’ve officially taken up this role I hope to provide some useful inside input into Xero conversations. Aside from being on Twitter we’re working on redesigning Help Centre to make it more of a community site so you can ask questions, others (or me) can answer them and we can really get that feedback loop going so that you can benefit from the learning and experiences of fellow Xero users.

So exciting times come up – as ideas or developments come along I’ll let you know. Any ideas or expectations you have for a community site send them in. Otherwise follow me on Twitter!

As well as continuing to release new features we’ve taken on a bunch of new developers; boosted our sales and support crew (especially in Australia and the UK); invested in a major upgrade to our hosting environment; entered marketing relationships with telcos in the UK and Australia; introduced new pricing plans Small, Medium and Large; then as you heard this week we announced plans for Xero Personal. And that’s just some of it.

It’s nice to be able to catch our breath (if only for a moment!) to celebrate what we’ve achieved. Today we’ve released to the New Zealand Stock Exchange our financial results for the six months to 30 September 2009. You can read the release here. 

Thanks to all our investors and supporters. We really appreciate you coming on this journey with us. The next six months promise to be just as busy!

I was especially interested to see a small range of Netbooks priced at $0 up front if you commit to a 2 year contract at $69 per month.

These devices have 3G modems built in. Looking at the reviews the model seems to be a $AU30 per month hardware financing charge and a $AU39  data charge – capped as you would expect to a fairly small 400MB download (its about on par with their iPhone dataplan).

Regardless, $30 per month hardware cost looks reasonable alongside data charges.  More realistically you’ll be spending $100 on data. $30 x 24 months of hardware is $AU720 to play with (less finance charges of course).  A Dell Mini starts from $AU499 including Windows 7 and a $160GB disk, so there is plenty of room to pay for the gear.

The description of these low costs PC’s as Netbooks does annoy me.  These are small, low cost PC’s. My definition of a Netbook is a device that simply hosts a browser that boots to the cloud.  This is a significant distinction as they are likely to have an Open Source Operating System (free) and probably doesn’t need a hard disk – as it just needs enough memory for cache.  We expect to see these devices arrive next year and take off fueled by the entry of Google Chrome OS, Android and Intels Moblin. Even if Chrome is not a home run for Google it will absolutely put pressure on Microsofts Windows and Office licensing.

The reduced hardware requirements and software licensing of true Netbooks puts further downward pressure on the base cost of getting online.  The monthly hardware costs could drop quite quickly towards $15-$20 ($360-$480 over 2 years).  Coupled with an increase in data allowance for your data fee (say 5-10GB) and you could be talking about no up front cost and $100 a month for a pretty good service with enough data to be useful.

The point of all this is the cost of the basic device to connect to the cloud and do email, web surfing, social media and basic business applications (like accounting) is trending towards free.  The existence of $0 up front deals by mainstream carriers – even before true Netbooks arrive – is a clear waypoint that this pricing disruption is inevitable.

All the best bakers have lots of little knacks and ways to do things that they’ve learnt over the years to help make their goodies scrumptious. We’ve built Xero so that there are lots of ways that help you make the most of the software and your life easier. A good place to start is the Xero tips.

What we’ve realised is that as Xero evolves everyone has their own nifty ways of using it. For instance Lucid Design use the contact links to help them in Basecamp, the Whitepages™ and Workflow Max.

My best tip is to make the most of the Contact Transactions Report which you can get to by drilling down from the Expenses by Contact or Income by Contact reports to see the list of transactions for the individual contact within either of these reports.

So what’s your best tip for making your life easier with Xero?

We’ve been working on Xero Personal for some time. We need to talk about it now as it’s about to go into external partner testing. It will be available in early 2010.

So what is Xero Personal all about?

One of the first reasons we looked at doing a personal edition is because many small business owners blur their personal and business expenses. Rewards points on credit cards are a good example of why this happens. So a key function of Xero Personal is to allow business owners to separate their personal and business expenses. Personal will work great on its own but it will also complement Xero Business.

The second reason is because this space is a good opportunity – ripe for a new business model. Looking at the state of the personal finance software market it’s undoubtedly becoming a hot space. A recent example is Intuit’s recent $US170 million acquisition of Mint. Personal products generally fit into two camps.

1. Those that are stand alone and require some sort of advertising based model for revenue. There has been some great innovation here but we really don’t like cluttering things up with an advertising based model.
2. Those solutions that are provided inside online banking. The problem with this approach is the difficulty to innovate and try new things as they are constrained by the requirements of working inside the banking environment.

We wanted to do something that hasn’t been seen before. A hybrid that leverages our great relationships with banking partners, while allowing us to innovate on our own platform.  As we discovered with Xero Business – it comes alive when connected to a bank. So we wanted that for Xero Personal. Connecting to banks allows us to do some really exciting things and make it very easy for our customers.

What does Xero Personal do?

In terms of what the software does, we wanted to go past the initial hit of just classifying transactions and seeing the depressing reality of what you spend your money on. We want to create a new service that people use each week to set their goals and track progress. We want to change how people save and how they act with their money. All of us were blown away when our interaction team walked us through the early designs several months ago. We think we’ve built a tool that people will enjoy using again and again.

In New Zealand we’re working closely with the BNZ. It’s been so much fun working with their team. We intend to take Xero Personal to market with other banks around the world over time. We’ve designed it to support bank branding and provide a collection of widgets that can be displayed inside online banking. Xero Personal still works great without a bank connection – but working with banks and getting data moving around automatically will be an even better experience.

Xero Personal is a new code base, but we reused a lot from Xero Business. We’re excited to be able to get many more people to have a Xero experience with this product.

How and when?

Stay tuned for more information over the coming months as we complete testing and get into production.We’ll let you know as soon as it’s publicly available and how you can get it – early 2010. You can register your interest at www.xero.com/personal and we’ll email you updates.

Any questions, please let us know.

Here are my top 5 killer applications that have never been released.

1. Exchange Relational

It always seemed nuts to me that Exchange wasn’t delivered over their SQL database engine. Enterprise email has always just been a collection of mail boxes and doesn’t allow you to ask the basic enterprise questions:

“Who is dealing with that customer?” and  ”What have we said to …?”

Over 70% of your customer data is locked in your email system and you just can’t get it.

Microsoft has announced Exchange over SQL several times but never delivered. Even back in 2004:

the Microsoft SQL Server-based data store, will probably be postponed until the next major Exchange Server version, now due in the 2006 to 2007 time frame

Should have been released: 2000

2. Word multi-user

When writing a document, that document is hot for a few hours or days, then it never changes. Since the beginning of email attachments we’ve sent around documents for editing in series. Routing documents has probably been the single biggest single killer of enterprise productivity ever.

With all the power of an installed application, and the tiny amounts of data required to transport the stream of a person typing, Word should have been multi-user from Office 2003.

Google Docs, the worlds most awful word processor to use, is being heavily used simply because it is (just) multi-user. Collaboration is the killer feature for word processors.

Word MU could be the single application that would make Enterprises upgrade. Instead Microsoft have gone down the crazy path of building the worlds fattest web application that may be delivered as Office 10. Writing documents in a web browser is awful. It’s still not clear to me if Office 2010 will provide seamless multi-user editing – so far Word MU was the killer application Microsoft never did.

Should have been released: 2003

3. Excel multi-user

As above. Imagine how much easier planning would be if you could all work on the same set of spreadsheets at the same time. Maybe Anaplan will be that.

Should have been released: 2003

4. iTunes/iPhoto server.

Apple doesn’t get away either. iTunes and iPhoto just do not work for a family.

iTunes/iPhoto Server, your time has come

Should have been released: 2008 (after the MacMini and TimeCapsule)

5. iPhone with a keyboard or a UX designed blackberry

I’ve lumped these two together because I’d take either/or.

• Email on a BlackBerry works great. Fast and easy. The rest sucks.
• The apps on the iPhone are great. Sending an email through a glass keyboard sucks.

Blackberry is one user interface designer from being perfect. When you see the first menu of an iPhone you get the main apps almost every business person needs after email/contacts/calendar. They are Weather, World Time and Stocks. It astounds me that RIM don’t provide those 3 simple apps like Apple has. The front menu of a BlackBerry is a disaster. Don’t they talk to users?

Should have been released: iPhone with a keyboard 2009, UX designed Blackberry 2007

So that’s my list. What have I missed?

For some energy to start our search we tucked into a batch of freshly harvested witches’ fingers. Disgustingly delicious!

Some Xeroes even got convinced to wear costumes while others donned black and orange (much to Orange Girl’s delight!) to celebrate the ghoulish season.

Some skill was needed to hide around 5kgs of chocolate bars, toffees, sour zombie and gummy lollies and fool super sleuths.

Lolly hunters went to new heights to find goodies that’d been hidden in previous years!

Until next year’s hunt…happy trick or treating!

Last month we announced New Zealand based payroll specialist IMS Payroll was to integrate its software with Xero. IMS is one of New Zealand’s largest suppliers of payroll software systems and has more than 10,000 customers. 

What the integration does is allow you to import a summary of your payroll data into Xero to make bank reconciliation easier. Now that the first stage of integration between IMS and Xero is nearing completion, we’re keen to get some user feedback. 

If you’re an existing Xero and IMS customer and interested in taking part in the beta test (which is tech speak for a pilot), you can contact us here.