Security, reliability, and stickiness were key talking points at an Under the Radar session showcasing online business collaboration tools. Presenters included Act-On Software, Magento, Mumboe, and NetBooks. While all presenters emphasized their company's ability to offer software as a service, Magento and NetBooks especially focused on tools for small business.
The Cisco-funded Act-On Software combines Salesforce.com's leads database with WebEx's large-scale conferencing to add invitation and follow-up services and pull data between the two. For example, Act-On runs as a tab within Salesfoce, WebEx, and Microsoft applications, and can show Salesforce data after a WebEx conference. Act-on will manage the invitation to promote a webinar, track attendance, and offer follow-up analysis on a given WebEx webinar.
Magento, an open source eCommerce application, lets clients build online stores to their specifications and even manage multiple stores and retail types from a single administrative interface. Magento also offers promotional tools in addition to SEO support and catalog management. What's different in the market is the open-source aspect, so far unique to Magento.
Magento plans to introduce several more product tiers, including enterprise products for small and medium businesses, professional services, and Magento on-demand, positioned as a software service. It will launch within the next 10 days for users in 20 languages.
Mumboe's on-demand software helps small and medium businesses create, store, manage, and track sensitive legal documents--leases, NDAs, contracts, and so on securely on Mumboe's site. Collaboration is the main feature here, allowing users to download templates, edit documents, and share. Mumboe, which launched on Monday, also integrates iCal feeds and Microsoft Outlook, harnessing its reminder notification system. A Microsoft Word plug-in is planned to release in two weeks.
Mumboe aims its light-to-midweight Web application at corporate consumers, and starts at the reasonable fee of $24 per user per month. CEO Bill Kane tackled the question of competitors as collaborators and complements, including Zoho and Microsoft Live services.
Founded by Ridgely Evers, the person who defined specifications for Intuit's QuickBooks, and a compelling speaker, NetBooks is positioned as a tool for the small business owner. The Web application draws marketing, sales, operations, and finance management tools into a single, simple system designed to be accessible to everyday users. Keeping the tools in the cloud lets users access data remotely.
Their plan of success going forward fiercely relies on big-name partnerships, which NetBooks expects to announce in the near future. Judges questioned the $200 pricing model and how NetBooks would compete with QuickBooks, which will not be integrated into the product.
Per my previous rant on Web start-ups that lack a Big Idea, here's one I appreciate, since it's trying to solve a real problem: NetBooks. This company has built a Web-based suite of interconnected apps designed to run a small business.
It's a noble effort, because the small-business market is murder. It's not that there's a lack of customers, it's just that they are so hard to reach and so different from each other. Building a universal small-biz app is a tricky balancing act.
It looks to me like NetBooks might eventually pull it off, although I'd wait for a Version 2 before I'd recommend the service to my friends who run their own small businesses.
NetBooks: Not exciting, but useful.
In the functions and features department, NetBooks is off to a strong start. If your business fits into the NetBooks target space (product-based businesses, not consultancies), you'll find a rich collection of databases and business logic to manage customers, inventory, shipping, and bookkeeping. For my own demo, I worked a sales order through picking, shipping, and billing. The application correctly moved items from inventory, created shipping labels, an invoice, and so on.
But while CEO Ridgely Evers pitched me on NetBooks as a "complete business operating system," some core functions, such as payroll and e-mail list management, are handled through partnerships (PayCycle and Vertical Response, respectively). Integration with these critical functions seems to be lacking.
And while I'm a big proponent of Web-based applications for workgroups, in NetBooks' case the reliance on the Web doesn't do the application favors. While the architecture guarantees that everyone using it is working on the same data and can get to it from anywhere, the NetBooks UI is archaic: Screens are filled with tiny text and selection boxes, and many rely on drab and uniform tabs for additional info. Navigating from screen to screen is slow. This app needs a UI refresh.
Pretty much everything you need is on the NetBooks screens, but the UI could be more contemporary.
The big difference between NetBooks and QuickBooks Online Edition is that NetBooks is designed to serve all parts of a business, not just bookkeepers. There are lightweight CRM forms in NetBooks, for example.
The suite has only "hundreds" of customers so far, and it is evolving. Evers also told me NetBooks will soon add more features to help its users run a Web-based retail store, and that there will be a cash register (point of sale) module soon, too. However, he's not going to expand the product to serve non-product-based businesses any time soon.
The product costs $200 a month for eight users (you business' CPA, bookkeeper, and marketing professional; plus five others of your choosing). Additional users can be added for a fee. Telephone support from actual company employees is included; Evers says he doesn't appreciate the "deterrent support model" of requiring users to seek other users for support; or for obnoxious hold music that drives customers away.
NetBooks is not yet the killer Web-based office-data suite that Evers wants it to be, but it's a solid app that solves several small-business problems.
See also: NetSuite.
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