Seesmic's black, orange and red colors are now part of the company's history. As is its attempt to make a full Flash-based interface. As of this morning, the company has launched a re-designed HTML interface that is both cleaner and simpler. Mike Arrington sums it up neatly:

Even though I’m an investor, one thing that has always bugged me about Seesmic is the all black background (its depressing), and the excessive use of Flash on the site (there’s nothing except Flash, try loading it on an iPhone). Having a few Flash elements on a site when necessary is fine. But using it just to use it is so…ugh.

Needless to say, this veiled grumbling following last week's spat between Arrington and Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur ripples on in the video comments they were bouncing off one another. All good entertainment for those who like to watch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at play.

On a more serious note, while in Paris last week, Johann Romefort, Seesmic's CTO told me the new interface was designed to overcome limitations they found in Flash. They were finding it increasingly necessary to make compromises that were hampering the service.

As a technology conference, LeWeb is a strange mix of people from the world of arts, science and business but it is always worthwhile. The quality of attendees and the sessions can't be beaten outside of the US and it is always a fun event.

Who for instance would want to miss Steve Gillmor taking on Microsft's Dan'l Lewin, investor Yossi Vardi being put through his paces by Kara Swisher or listen to Chris Anderson, the curator of TED?

The tech industry may be shivering from the cold bite of economic recession but it will be interesting to get a bead from those who are much closer to the action than I.

Zoho just can't stop churning out software. Today it is launching the Zoho CloudSQL. Put simply, this is the first step to providing a cloud based integration framework that allows developers to pass data between Zoho applications and their own. This is exciting stuff. For the first time, a commercial software vendor is providing an easy way to interoperate with its applications without imposing an entry or exit visa tax.

From the release:

1. It's the first technology that allows customers to interact with their data on the cloud, from another cloud application or from an on-premises one through real SQL.
2. It supports multiple SQL dialects. We support all the major (and even some not so major) ones: ANSI, Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix.
3. With our JDBC/ODBC drivers, developers can access data in the cloud just as easily as if it were stored in a local database.

I caught up with Raju Vegesna to get a feel of what the company intends: "You can think of CloudSQL as a linking mechanism for things like QuickBooks or any application that wants to talk to and from Zoho data." That's exactly where I hoped Zoho would position the service.

Like it or not, cloud based accounting (AaaS anyone?) is a niche area with the world remaining firmly in on-premise land. While I see plenty of examples coming out to address the SMB market, it's going to take time before finance types will trust corporate transaction data in the Internet cloud. Making it easy to consume services in an integrated manner without the distinction of whether the data is on premise or in the cloud is an incredibly smart move. It means that you don't have to throw out your existing accounting applications if you don't want to while opening up the business to other scloud ervices that are gaining traction. The obvious candidate is CRM but it could equally be SCM or talent management.

I also asked Raju what will happen with existing Zoho applications. Right now, they represent a great toolkit but little integration work has been done to turn them into a ready to consume suite of services. "The company has made a start by demoing a simple report demo but yes over time we plan to use CloudSQL as the integration point for all the apps."

CloudSQL is a development environment and not for the end user. Its potential to open up a whole ecosystem category of its own is enormous. The big complaint of all business users is the general lack of integration capabilities between different applications. Taking this step puts Zoho out in front with something that has broad appeal, including the open source crowd.

However, before running off thinking this is some sort of Holy Grail, integration calls for much more than a few SQL calls and a Web API. Orchestrating services and events is where larger businesses would like to be. Even so, it gives the SMB a real chance to mix 'n' match services the way they want to get things done. In that regard, it removes vendor lock-in and allows for the emergence of genuine vertical market applications on a scale we've not seen in the past.

It will be interesting to see how Zoho follows this up and how it supports the ecosystem that congregates around its API.

Taglocity works on Outlook 2003/2007, and works as an Enterprise 2.0 solution, allowing the user to prioritise email, and deal with email in a more productive way. Instead of abandoning and forgetting about email days down the line, this solution allows even the most busy of people to organise, prioritise and deal with email.

Being unique in business practise isn't always useful. Using bad practises of email management has become a social norm, and are more than happy to hit that "reply all" button, even though those people don't need to see it. People are thinking too socially and less business like; replying to everyone so "everyone can get the message plus smiley face", when a single email to the sender of the original message is all that is needed.

This not only clogs up your email, it clogs up your business day. Everyone wishes they had more hours in the day, and at times you'll find you've got more coming in than you have going out. Oh trust me, whilst saving the world in my day job and university student the rest of the time, I know how that feels.

Every time you get an email through, simply create a tag for it and a whole load of options are available for it. You can mark them all as read, set appointments and flags for the message, move them, delete them, and even allow them to "travel with you", so they can be aggregated on other Outlook screens. These can be shared with others, and search all of your tags with smart folders.

From the website:

"From 'push' only to 'push' and 'pull' thereby giving people more control over their own attention and enabling on-demand knowledge discovery and sharing to all stakeholders. In addition to being able to quickly find needed information, information should also 'find' people based on their criteria and terms."

It's a brilliant little tool which uses little-to-no memory, and has saved me hours already, especially with the amount of crap I get in my inbox.

"It serves up an intuitive, comprehensive and fast workspace tailored to meet universal team challenges. Contacts, plans, activities, tasks, documents and schedules, are easily organized and tracked throughout the work flow."

But it's not just that. It feels, from the very beginning of using this application, like an online operating system; a mesh for the masses, or a screen away from your computer. The user interface is fantastic. It has a very Windows-style feel to it, making sure the user feels safe and comforted knowing the environment even before they use it. You can even customise the wallpaper that you have - a very un-business like quality, but gives it that edge over other competing products.

It's a fresh way to look at things; integrated blog management to keep on track of projects and let others know how things are stewing. You can create and manage workspaces, tags, business processes - someone even quoted this as being "like Facebook for business". It also boasts:

"...customer relationship management (CRM), intranet, contact database, content management system and file server requirements."

It runs within your browser with a SaaS element to it, is incredibly easy to set up and worth the cheap cost to run it all. This could well be a user integral part of any organisation - keeping people connected, up to date, understanding and safe knowing their storage is secure.

It's worth looking into at very least. This'll be something I'll personally be keeping in my bookmarks for a later date.

I recently spoke with ThoughtFarmer. They're betting that organizations wanting to replace intranets will be more willing to do so if the offering is built on Microsoft technology. I see the wisdom in that (more on ThoughtFarmer next week.) Despite all the column inches that open source, Mac, Ubuntu and the like generate, the fact remains that Microsoft still 'owns' the enterprise. That may not matter for departmental solutions owned by users or those deployed over the Internet but it sure as heck matters internally. Especially if that means support.

Mike Arrington declares Microsoft's BizSpark initiative as 'brilliant' and when you look at it, that's easy to understand:

What startups get: a free, tech-supported alternative to open source software. Microsoft gets to train a new crop of engineers on their software and services, and lock these guys in after three years when fees start to be charged. Brilliant.

The question for startup developers is whether they trust Microsoft not to gouge them when the deal expires or before they've hit enough revenue to afford the services.Most of the folk I know give a collective shrug but then I only know a fraction of 1% of those in the developer community. As Jason Harris said on CMS Newsire:

In many cases, running Microsoft software doesn’t even enter the minds of those building solutions in a start-up environment.

It will be interesting to revisit this in say a year and see how Microsoft is doing. In the meantime, if you're a startup, would you go for BizSpark?

A guest column over at Sandhill by Elizabeth Cook points up some of the horrors she saw at the recent Oracle OpenWorld trade floor:

• The Slump: Booth staff slumped over, focused intently on their handheld devices. No acknowledgement of passers-by. Some sat hunched in a chair, others stood back to the aisle. A widespread problem.
• The Texting Talker: One representative came to the edge of the booth to talk with me, then repeatedly checked his messages. “Don’t worry, I’m still talking to you” he said as he started texting a reply. Don’t worry – I’m outta here.
• Cell Phone Snobs: Also a widespread problem. No one stops to talk to someone who is clearly too busy to be bothered.
• Eaters: Even if you are the only representative from your company, you don’t eat in the booth during the peak traffic time. If you have more than one person at the show, take turns and eat away from the booth – during a slow time.
• The Huddle: Groups of company representatives, huddled in conversation, paying no attention to passers-by, often with backs to the aisle.
• The Glazed Gaze: Too bored, disinterested, or hung-over to put on a game face.
• The Clearly Uncomfortable: Some people are just not suited for booth duty. Even if you have a technical product, selling to a technical audience, your programmers may not be the best representatives on the trade-show floor.

Keep in mind, these are behaviors I observed during the peak-traffic times. And I couldn’t make this stuff up.

On the other hand, some companies got it right. Interestingly, the market leaders had buttoned up, professional operations.

So true. As the conference season starts to wind down, I see these kinds of thing all the time. They're enough to make any CXO weep. How the heck are you supposed to get a sales person's attention when he's shoving burritos down his neck or yabbering into a Crackberry? That's assuming the person isn't showing obvious signs of recovery from the previous night's party?

Hungry companies don't do this kind of thing. They may not have the best sales pros but they sure as heck know how to give attention. That above everything is what prospective customers want. Whatever your stage in the startup game, don't get into bad habits. They're costly.

Rod Boothby at Joyent (disclosure: Rod is also a fellow Irregular) sent me the above graph showing how Joyent is profiting from the downturn in the economy. The reasons are not hard to fathom.

Despite the economic downturn, organizations still need to get things done and still need data center scalability. However they are turning their attention to providers that can quickly provision and which do not require capital expenditure. In email to me, Rod says: "In uncertain economic times, the move fromcapital expenses into operating expenses not onlymakes it easier to get new projects off the ground, but it also reduces the risks associated with running a new project. If the new application fails, clients can simply cancel their cloud infrastructure."

Also see: Cloud computing: Will the financial geeks give it a boost?

I wouldn’t call these applications exactly enterprise class, but could be useful in the corporate environment.

If we're equating 'enterprise' to the 1,000 person up business then yes, Larry has a good point but if we're talking about the individual, looking to establish a personal business network then I disagree. Huddle for instance is a great application for the kind of crowdsourcing we're seeing in niche networks. Tripit is useful for connecting with those you may have in your network when on the road. From a regional viewpoint, I would have preferred to see Dopplr. But Wordpress.com inclusion just seems lame. What's wrong with Wordpress.org?

I'd like to think this will work but I'm not convinced. I installed some of the apps to my profile and found that there is no discovery process that automatically links to my profiles in other applications. OK - so maybe I need a touch of 'security' to ensure I'm linking to the right 'stuff.' And yes, there are the to be expected performance glitches that a couple of my colleagues have picked up.

But the real downside for me is that LinkedIn requires me to use it as a portal of sorts. That means another application I need keep open on the desktop and probably in its own window. The advantage is that I can aggregate other apps I might use into one place but in reality I don't believe I am going to do that.

I'd like to be proven wrong because LinkedIn is starting to mature into the kind of personal work-life tool that professionals will want to use. As Larry says:

The move (LinkedIn blog, statement, Techmeme) makes sense as LinkedIn can stick to its knitting, maintain its focus in what should be a boom time (lots of folks looking to network and find jobs on the cheap) and the social network can differentiate from the games and other time wasting apps found elsewhere.

Whether it catches the eye of the Gen-Y'ers I see flocking around Facebook is another matter. They don't seem to mind the chaos that Facebook has become. Speaking personally, I got out of there the moment I started getting 'poked.'

SlideRocket is a Web 2.0 application which integrates enterprise relating features, to allow you to create, manage, share and present online presentations. You can import presentations from offline to online, and you can just as easily export presentations from online to offline.

The key features to point out is that you can access your presentations from anywhere in the world. No more will you need to email things to yourself, save things in a server share or carry round your flash drive with you. It's an online presentation service which stores your presentations, and lets you edit and present them afterwards. The website address is all you'll need when going into a meeting.

The entire interface is, dare I say it, gorgeous. It's slick, smooth, gentle on the eyes, and all Flash based so everything works as soon as you want it to. If anything, it actually seems to work better than PowerPoint offline. With all of the features that PowerPoint has, it's a much more economically viable option than buying even a basic version of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.

You can still share your documents with others, setting permissions on slides and objects within your presentation to make sure others can't screw with your work. Transitions, tables, shapes, Flash plugins, other plugins, audio, themes, text, pictures and themes are thrown in there, making this a highly functional web application.

After using this software for the last day, revising and catching up on university work, involving a lot of PowerPoint deck creation and modification - I can honestly say this is something I would continue using. However, I'd want all of the features but I don't want to pay for it.

Regardless of business structure or employee numbers, there are three tariffs which seem to fit most people for pricing. Free, Individual at $10 a month, and Business at $20 per user a month - which all offer more and more, depending on how much you want to pay. There are plenty of demos of the application available on their website, and much more information lying around the place.

On a closing thought, with the recent news that Office 14, the next version of the Microsoft Office system, will come with a set of lightweight web editions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, maybe this start-up won't be lasting as long as I hope it will.

At times like now when money is tight, The Expense Tracker is a good way to help people keep on top of their finances. When you first sign up, it provides a budget based on surveyed information the company obtained from 25 finance specialists. Users can modify the individual expense line items to suit their own spending patterns.

Rather than simply recording expenses, The Expense Tracker sends users a daily reminder to let them know how much is left in the spending budget. "We found that when the family sits down to go through expenses at month end there's always a fight. This way, you can't get away from it." That's certainly true though I wonder whether some people might find that reminder annoying.

At year end, users can obtain an Excel formatted spreadsheet that can be handed over to tax preparers. Tippetts says there is an API so that developers of other services can add this into their own offerings. Assuming the API works well then any number of services like FreshBooks or QuickBooks could take advantage of The Expense Tracker.

Users can choose between a 6 month plan at $59.70 or pay-as-you-go at $14.95 plus a one time setup fee of $9.95. For those amounts, The Expense Tracker guarantees to help you find un-necessary spend.

For the future, the company is going to add in debt reduction calculators: "Making people aware that if they put a little more on their credit cards, how fast things get paid off." Next the company plans to add value by offering opportunities to get essentials at a discounted rate. Finally, they want to trend the nation and states to see how users compare with others in the nation and in their home states. Finally, they are finding demand from other countries and are working on an internationalization program that will include SIP dial-in.

Does this sound like a near perfect solution? The only thing that's missing is the ability to save or copy expense documents and have them managed by an online drop box. The user still has to keep hold of receipts, something we're all pretty ill disciplined at doing. However, as a first step towards pro-active budgeting where the service nags me daily then it might just represent the impetus people need to get serious about expense management.

The key to understanding this comes in the lineup of investors and what they are saying. Per the release: "Goldman Sachs; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners." These are all savvy investors that will have undertaken careful due diligence. Not for these guys the smash and grab that one so often hears about from Silicon Valley VCs.

Doug Higgins of SAP Ventures was quoted as saying: “We made this investment because we believe that when Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium and large companies.” (My emphasis.)

I've been a LinkedIn user for some years but have never really used it although plenty of people have come to me looking for recommendations or connections. However, as the economy strains to find rays of sunshine, I expect to see an uptick in activity on this service.

Where LinkedIn scores (and FaceBook fails) is in the professional nature of the relationships you're likely to create and develop, coupled to the richness of reputation data. This makes far more sense to business people than the indiscriminate friending that occurs on the consumer social networks.

Despite past attempts to write off LinkedIn as an irrelevant walled garden, the fact remains it has been profitable since 2006. Solid business applications usually are and even though the earlier Series D valued it at $1 billion, a figure that now looks like the stuff of fairy tales, raising more money now is a wise move.

As always in investment, quality counts. In business applications, the same applies. Don't be surprised to see LinkedIn turning out as more profitable in the downturn (in contrast to consumer spend based networks) and using its recent round of funding for enterprise style acquisitions.

Update: Here's another reason why LinkedIn will do better than Facebook. What idiot is going to do this on LinkedIn?

PBWiki is a company that everyone kinda knows but doesn't always see. They're not big on the blah-blah circuit because as Chris points out, you tend to see the same faces and these events have a navel gazing quality to them. I was interested to hear how the company is doing, where its focus is coming from and how it sees the future. Bear in mind the wiki market is crowded yet at the same time wiki represents one of the few areas where you can argue that enterprise adoption has taken a reasonable hold.

Asked about PBWiki's approach to market, Chris had this to say: "You have to say that you're going to solve this specific problem for this specific audience. We have a very specific focus for people who are trying to do collaboration across boundaries. Solutions that you bring in house have a very difficult time dealing with people from multiple enterprises."

Chris cited the example of SAP where they together with CapGemini in the UK are using PBWiki to reach out to customers raqhter than using in house existing solutions. He also said there are instances of PBWiki running inside Google: "How long that will continue is another matter," he quipped. Yet another use case is in the mortgage industry where customers who have been rejected try hopping from one provider to another in the expectation that the providers won't share information. All in, Chris claims that PBWiki now has 5-6,000 paying customers from a total of 400,000 who have signed up, paying on average around $1,000 a year.

Chris's focus the last year has been about moving the company from what was once perceived as a consumer play to more of a business specific value proposition. "In the last year we've grown from a handful of people to just under 30. Most of those are in support and sales plus some marketing. We didn't have any of those functions. We did that because it was obvious there just isn't that much money in ad support revenues." Looking at the company website, it is clear they're doing something right because the company is still hiring. Even so, Chris is not sitting on his laurels: "These things take a long time to come hit you and even though we're continuing to do better and better, you just don't know when or if the recession will bite so I'm cautious."

Asked why PBWiki is adopting a more traditional approach to market Chris noted that once you get to around the $500 to $1,000 mark, people tend to want to talk with someone about the product: "The amount of business we get from California is minuscule. Our primary markets in the US are the east coast, Texas, the mid-west and Europe."

This was particularly interesting to me as I have recently questioned the Gen Y adoption argument. Chris said that while it is true Gen Y'ers don't want to talk with people and that they will buy online, we're a long way off seeing that as a mainstream form of activity. "I'm sure over time we'll move to a model where there are less direct sales people per dollar income but that's a long way out," he suggested.

The more interesting part of our conversation though came from a discussion around business models and attitudes to software creation. "Free is not a business model, it's a marketing device. The Bay Area echo chamber believes it can build its own. Trying to convince our engineering team to use outside products is like pulling teeth. There's a strong belief that every product should be free, anything can be done with open source and whatever we do we're smarter than anyone else. I want profit motive because the company that has to support demanding customers is going to put the best product out there. That requires money."

Looking to the future, Chris said the company is focusing on those businesses that have teams of 5-100 people that have to operate in cross boundary environments: "We put the emphasis on hosted collaboration rather than just wiki because we have to think about how does this interact with the primary collaboration environment which is email. How can we make the two work together more effectively."

I admire Chris's 'what's on the street' practical approach and refreshingly honest assessment of what it takes to build a sustainable startup. Too often I hear startups wanting to change the world when you just know that however smart the idea, they're not where their target market is thinking.

Sure, it sounds amicable–which is the norm in these situations–but you can’t help but think that investors were perhaps disappointed with Jack’s leadership of Twitter. After all, three years in and Twitter still hasn’t found a revenue model that matches its Silicon Valley hype.

I’m sorry, but I suspect that it will be only a matter of months before we hear of Jack Dorsey leaving his new role as Chairman to “explore other opportunities” or “spend more time with his family.”

Reading between the lines, it seems that Jack's time at Twitter is already done:

Jack will remain on the board and be closely consulted for all strategic decisions, while I take on day-to-day operations with the support of Biz, Jason, Greg, and the rest of this impressive Twitter team.

VC Fred Wilson who is an early Twitter backer, sounds like he's getting increasingly fed up of the same old question: When will Twitter announce a business model.

I made a boneheaded move this week as well with this quote to Chris Snyder of Wired which he reported yesterday:

“It’s like the stupidest question in the world: How’s Twitter going to make money?," said Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, another investor. "It’s like 'How was Google going to make money?'

The minute I said it, I wanted it back. But it reflects my weariness with getting this question every time anyone asks me about Twitter (as well as the fact that I had flown back from SF the night before and gotten up at 6am to do a board call to London that day). Rule #1, don't talk to the press when you are tired and irritated.

It is not the stupidest question in the world. It's a terribly important question. But I don't think it's the most important question facing Twitter right now. Twitter has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream usage. It's not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter. Search and discovery doesn't work well on Twitter yet. There are a host of issues about the API and the developer ecosystem. Will recent reliability success continue? Can Twitter's architecture scale now? All of these questions loom large in my mind.

Hey Fred, we've all been there and in this mea culpa he raises many of the right questions. But seriously, at a time like now, all businesses need to focus on revenue. It is suicidal to believe that anyone other than Google wins in an ad-sponsored world. I don't care how great your service is, Google has got the ad-search market sewn up and there are few if any viable alternative ad-based business models for commercial software producers. At least none of those I've seen look that attractive.

The possible alternatives are not so palatable either. We've already seen Twitter clones turn up, demonstrating that it ain't that hard to do. At least not on a small scale. It is much harder to build a business from a service that increasingly looks more like a feature. One way around this is to come out the gate with a commercial offering that has genuine business value with a roadmap to match.

I've seen plenty of Tweets where people have said they'd willingly pay for Twitter on a subscription basis but at what price? $5 a month? I forked over for the commercial version of Jaiku but it just didn't have the 'juice' to make it to the mainstream. I didn't renew. Is Twitter that important that I'd buy into a revenue model based on consumption? Possibly. But they'd still have to offer a freebie and I can imagine most people moderating their usage to ensure they don't pay. If ads are a pain then swapping to the currently free TweetDeck solves that problem in a stroke. Unless of course Twitter forces ads on customers. That's a guaranteed death sentence in a market where alternatives abound.

It seems to me that a combination of its own relative popularity, open API and free to use model is likely to prove a significant dampener on any attempt to commercialize. It'll likely suffer from its own success and the expectations of people for 'free.' At least in the consumer world. Even if its first mover advantage plays in its favor, the click through rates are likely too low to make ad-based sponsorship worthwhile beyond a few million dollars.

The way to go is direct to the enterprise where customers will pay for guaranteed service levels, white labeling and integration. Even then I'm not sure how much there is to be had from a market that is 99% oblivious to Twitter. To repeat Fred's words: "It's not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter." That's why use cases are so vitally important and where an understanding of business problems is central to unlocking the value of micro-sharing/micro-blogging services.

But even assuming Twitter overcomes all those hurdles can it really reach Henry Blodget's assertion of a $1 billion valuation? Believe that if you will but revenue pressure is forcing prices down which can only be counterbalanced by way of an uptick in active users. Put another way, you can take the sell-side analyst out of Wall Street, but you can't take the Pavlovian urge to sell-side pimping out of the analyst.

In the meantime I wish that Twitter would put us all out of our collective misery and tell us it's thoughts on business models. Simply parroting the 'lots of opportunities' line is wearisome. But then I've come to expect little more from a company whose reputation for secretiveness on any topic is growing by the day.

After data was released on Koders.com, the leading open-source search engine from Black Duck Software, shows that Ruby is slowly but surely increasing amongst developers. Tens of thousands of people each day use Koders.com to search for code from a variety of open-source languages, and shows that Ruby is being used more and more than ever before.

Whilst many will be stuck using PHP, Python, Perl and ASP, Ruby has climbed the ranks of code search since 2004, fourth in line after Java, C/C++ and C#. From the press release sent to me the other day:

"Ruby, used in combination with the Rails framework, is rapidly gaining momentum and will reach 4 million developers worldwide by 2013, according to Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner Inc. "Moreover, Ruby will enjoy a higher concentration among corporate IT developers than typical, dynamic 'scripting' languages, such as PHP," Driver continued."

Black Duck Software bought Koders.com in April 2008, and the searchable code repository has increased by 33% since. The code repository now surpasses that of SourceForge, CPAN and RubyForge, the dedicated open-source project database for the Ruby programming language.

More information and Ruby statistics can be found from the Koders.com Zietgeist.

Egnyte started out because the small business, which is roughly between 1 and 250 employees is a unique market and sensitive to investments, but generally there seems to be a low IT competence. With the advancements of technology and broadband getting faster, storage seemed less of a commodity. The world is getting more mobile with working from home, tele-working and commuting twice a day. The enterprise and small-medium market is accepting a more on-demand solution, and with this, Egnyte was created.

The service is an on-demand infrastructure with increased mobility, Web 2.0 sharing, virtual collaborative teams and on-demand storage. A unique solution is needed to support complex business needs and expanding business model.

If you read all that and thought, "yawn, you mentioned business related words, I'm switching off", it bores me too. However take this on board instead. It's basically Live Mesh but so much better and will probably always be better. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed using Egnyte, which is something I can not always say about every product I'm pushed.

Egnyte is primarily an on-demand file server. In an ordinary on-site enterprise you'll get sharing issues, backup issues and disaster recovery, security flaws which need patching, remote access violations and all other kinds of crap a workplace doesn't need.

Egnyte eliminates the need for:

• physical servers
• backups
• added hardware
• maintenance overheads, as after all, a small-medium business doesn't need these clogging up the workplace, as well as the financial impact.

It works excellently, if not specifically, for branch and distributed geographic offices, includes secure desktop and web access, has built-in disaster recovery, works incredibly well with sharing large files through direct transfer or hotlink sending and has a comprehensive auditing capability.

SaaS, security and file storage -->

Because it's SaaS, the storage, document collaboration and backup runs entirely online in the cloud. There is a Software+Services side which bridges the desktop to the Egnyte cloud, but it's entirely optional and just makes life a bit easier when working offline. Through rough estimation, it takes an ordinary SME around $7,000 a year for their own hardware and software, whereas Egnyte offers this at $15 a seat per month, which equates to $900 a year; but 3 seats or more comes with unlimited cloud storage. As always, academic and non-profit organisations get reduced rates.

The storage system is custom made from a reengineered version of the ext3 file system. Dubbed eFS, the Egnyte File System, supports file locking, versioning and permissions, caching and compression. The storage is fully searchable with split indexing, and provides a VPN style feel with a LAN across the Internet. In Windows Server 2003 and Windows Small Business Server 2003, there are roughly 17 different access permissions; in Egnyte there are four, significantly simplifying the whole area with read, read-write and read-write-delete.

Keeping on the security side of things, there are three kinds of users to simplify access:

• the power user which has full-feature access for employees;
• the standard user which allows consultants and associates access, with reduced storage space and no ability to backup;
• and administrators which take care of user management and security.

Behind the scenes, the datacenter runs easily 300-400 virtual servers on each physical server, and if for some strange reason a calamity happens, everything is mirrored and backed up in another datacenter 400 miles down the road. With the unlimited storage plan, three or more users, there are no bandwidth or storage space restrictions. You have your own subdomain, so: https://your-company-name.egnyte.com, and the user interface is clean and simple with a Windows-esque feel to it.

The ability to upload your own company logo to the login screen and main interface adds a touch which most SaaS applications don't seem to have. The entire application runs through a secure socket layer, ensuring everything you view, upload, download and modify is encrypted. And for those in non-Windows environments, the S+S aspect is fully compatible with Mac, Windows and Linux, and the online application works just as well in Firefox, if not better in Internet Explorer.

File management and drive mapping -->

As mentioned before, Live Mesh is more of a concept created by Microsoft which is being leveraged across the Live products. Egnyte is very similar to Mesh in some instances, as it has centralised storage, connects your devices together, but the differentiating factor is improving access routes to the data. Egnyte have just introduced iPhone support, allowing a mobile version to those who use the iPhone, with RIM/Blackberry support on the way.

The searching within Egnyte is incredibly powerful; very Web 2.0 in terms of appliance, usage and results generation. You can narrow by file type, user, date range and type. There are some elements of natural language search - for example in the near future, it'll be able to differentiate between two meanings of the same word: "cricket" the sport and "cricket" the small insect which keeps me awake outside of my house every damn night.

Connecting the client to the cloud has long been an issue for people. Live Mesh does it with confusing results, erroneous synchronisations and settings as long as your arm. Egnyte will simply map your cloud storage folders to one single instance of a mapped drive in your Computer folder. The same access permissions apply, the same file names and works entirely seamlessly with the desktop.

Version tracking is automatically generated so you can see when something has been revised, with alerting features to ensure you are emailed the minute a file has been revised, by whom, when and even a link to the file to see the changes.

On that note, when a file is sent from Egnyte, you have the option of two different methods. Considering some servers have email restrictions, it's handy having these two:

1. Send as a link: this way, an expiry date can be placed on it if the document is of a more sensitive nature, and an email gets sent to that recipient.
2. Export them to a zip file at the touch of a button and they can be emailed directly.

Backup and iPhone integration -->

Backup is absolutely vital to a small business. The backup facility is continuous and not just a snapshot. Policies can be created and modified, and there is very little client code on the individual computers. You can either backup everything or individual things, whilst excluding certain files.

As you make changes on your mapped folder, the latest copy of the file is stored on your computer whilst all of the previous versions are stored in your web server cloud.

The iPhone support has now been released, and if you connect your iPhone up to your Egnyte server through the Safari browser, you can access the same sort of thing as you would do ordinarily. You can email out and download into as you could before. Showing a very simple interface, you can see shared and private folders, backups and admin controls for permissions. The tipping point is that you can still browse files and folders wherever you are, whenever you want to.

40% of all Egnyte users use Mac's, and the iPhone support will almost certainly improve collaboration and seamlessness.

To round off, it's an excellent piece of software which would and can significantly improve branch/distributed offices, small-medium businesses and integration with external clients. It's certainly something to try out at very least.

...the longevity of the company is obviously of significant importance - and thus we must reduce costs now in order to establish Seesmic as a solid business and pursue success of the company for years to come.

As recently as June, Seesmic raised $6 million in a Series B funding round bringing the total funding to $12 million. Earlier this evening I called LeMeur:

"We've cut anything that's not core to innovation - marketing, international and design. We are getting back to concentrating on developing a video conversation tool. What changed is that revenue will be much tougher to get, especially advertising. We needed to adjust to ensure we don't need to raise additional funding. We've been extremely careful and it is entirely wrong to say we're running out of money. People will ask why we fired staff. Seesmic need lots of time to develop and in this economic climate that means conserving resources. There was no pressure from investors, in fact I was pro-active and went to them to explain the situation. It was a decision I took based on what I believe is happening in the market. People should expect this to happen but we are now very well positioned to move forward over years to come."

Seesmic has developed a 'white label' version of its service for the Washington Post's political blog, The Fix. By the time this is posted, the site should have gone live. If not then shortly thereafter.

I've long held the view that commercial deals of this kind are one of the primary ways for video services like Seesmic to generate revenue so it's good to see they've finally got their 'enterprisey' act together with this landmark win. From The Fix:

Thanks to this cool technology, you can offer your very own video comment/rebuttal or go the more traditional route and tell us who you think one in the comments section below.

In other Seesmic news, British actor and comedian John Cleese is now on Seesmic. His posts will amuse all those who are Cleese fans, as will his responses in this medium.

What's more, economic factors will bring the topic into sharper focus as the anticipated recession forces enterprises to evaluate capital IT investments. Check out what happened to SAP earlier today to get a feel for what is happening. That should be good news for saas vendors but is it?

Phil Wainewright speculates that Zoho may have developed a model that allows it to take advantage of the freemium approach such that it can outgrow Salesforce.com. In one sense that doesn't surprise me. The SMB market at which Zoho is aimed is huge and in marked contrast to the upper mid-tier and above that, until recently has been Salesforce's focus. Its pricing reflects its focus with the professional edition coming in at $65/month/user for basic SFA, call center and 10 custom tabs.

At first glance that sounds enticing but a number of customers have told me that to get 'real' value, they need to be paying upwards of $100/month. Even then that doesn't sound bad compared to enterprise on-premise pricing which can easily run the equivalent of $200/month for the license fee and then a further $44 for maintenance and support for CRM packages. On that basis, the saas solution is still cost effective after three and a half years before tasking into account data center and infrastructure costs.

That argument doesn't take into account the relative simplicity of today's saas offerings compared to their more mature on-premise cousins. That's an argument for another day. For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming relatively straightforward functionality for an SME. In other words, the vast majority of the market by volume. Back to the plot.

But then along come companies like Method Integration telling me they can offer CRM style integration to QuickBooks as a service for $45/month for the first user and $20/month for subsequent users. That's a pretty good deal but I still think it needs to come down. QuickBooks can be readily be used by companies trading up to $20-25 million a year without much trouble and has the benefit of a low cost add-in payroll. But adding in say 20-30 sales people using Method is going to add $425 to $625/month to the customer's bill. Less than Salesforce.com but will this type of business fork over these amounts of scarce cash? I doubt it.

Just as the number of even $10/month /user services can rise rapidly when scaling to hundreds or thousands of users, this form of flat pricing seems doomed to survive except for all of the smallest or niche saas offerings. Price breaks will have to be metered into the charging equation at the very least.

Already we're seeing pressure build. Only today, Caspio, which provides a 'do-it-yourself database for rapid web application creation' announced an effective 50% price reduction, starting at $39.95/month for small businesses. From the release: "Unlike other offerings which charge per user and create a formidable cost to businesses, Caspio allows any number of employees, partners, members or customers to access web applications at no extra charge."

On-demand/saas systems are opening up a world of opportunity for both buyers and sellers. Custom apps at affordable prices and a cornucopia of choice upon which the SME can gorge are but two of the alluring factors that should drive growth. But when it all comes together, if the cost is too high in aggregate then those same SMEs will make the same tough choices their larger brethren are making. That's why prices need to come down further.

The volume is there for any entrepreneurial vendor to have a good shot at achieving decent market share. But it will require invention in business models and a willingness to trade something other than direct cash.