Foldera Information Now Available

Thanks to Marc over at Foldera for the heads up. The Foldera blog is now updated. I haven’t read the post yet have to run to some meetings but if you read and have some thoughts would love to hear them.

Your Data and SaaS

The topic of ‘trusting’ your data to a third party when it comes to SaaS is sure to be around for some time to come.  While I don’t think it’s a useful topic just from a security standpoint, I think it’s a valid concern in a larger context. I think there are three elements of Your Data and SaaS, Security of your Data, Accessibility to your Data and Backup of your Data. While some might argue these are different elements of product selection, I think they can be grouped into the single element of ‘Your Data’ for consideration.

I’m going to skip the discussion on Security here for the most part. I’ll only link to Phil’s article here and note that if you are unsure if Google’s application security, or that of many of the small players in the industry, is less secure than the laptops of any of your employees (or perhaps even their desktops in some cases) then you are significantly uninformed. 

I do want to touch on the other two.

When you use a SaaS product what do you do if you’re not connected or if the provider is down? How to you get access to your data and continue to work with it? Accessiblity is important and that is why Offline support is going to continue to grow as a key feature in all SaaS offerings in 2007.  If you are a small business considering and comparing SaaS products you should include Offlline support in your selection criteria. If the products your looking at don’t have Offline support now you should ask them when they plan to provide it and, in the meantime, what is the companies system availability like? You’ll want to work with a company that gives you access to your data with high reliability, especially if they don’t have Offline support.

Backup of your data is important. Whether it is provided as a downloadable file or sent to you on CD, you’re going to want to have your own copy for various reasons. The circumstances where your data would be lost by any reputable provider would have to be extremely extensive but theoretically possible and it should be a simple matter to have your own backup of your data. When considering SaaS providers you need to be able to get your own physical copy of your data.

These latter two items are also important in the larget context of Continuity of Business. First, your systems and data are stored in a separate location from your primary business (usually) and second in times of emergency when perhaps your office is no longer available or you must be relocated for one reason or another, using SaaS providers means that your software and data are available to you wherever you are.

Immitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery

As you know they say, Immitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery. BlueTie has offered Free and Pro versions since October and there are some very key similarities, judge for yourself:

Google: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html

 BlueTie: http://www.bluetie.com/smb_content/products/products.php

Foldera…Done for now.

I posted almost two weeks ago that Foldera information was coming soon. I got this information from Foldera directly and had since my original post been keeping a positive outlook. Here it is almost two weeks later now and nothing. No updates on the blog still. The best I can do is to tell you that the email I received noted a “…Public Preview release….” in March. Which means that it is not fully launching in March only a ‘Preview’ is launching in March, I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I’m sure it doesn’t mean “Foldera Launches in March”.

I’ve been trying to stay on this because I know many of you visit looking for this information. Anyway, I can’t be bothered talking about this any more. No more posts on Foldera until such time as a viable product is actually launched. I’m Done for now.

Finally, just to make sure to repeat the disclosure,  I work for what might be considered a Foldera competitor, if Foldera actually had a product that is.

BlueTie Adds 15,000 Small Businesses in 90 Days

BlueTie has added more than 15,000 new small businesses to its’ customer base in the first 90 days of launching it’s free version. The free version, as we’ve noted before, will be monetized via Featuretisements which are tightly integrated, relevant services for small business owners and employees. It’s a level of integration that hasn’t been seen before and it is going to be the monetization model for the future for many SaaS offerings. The days of trying to monetize web-based software by just putting in banner ads are numbered.

Online Tools for Small Business Summary

If you’re a small business looking for online (web-based) tools IT/Redux provides a good summary. I’m not sure why BlueTie is not included in a number of these categories. Also, there does not seem to be any ‘bundling’ information, i.e. you probably don’t get - or want to get - your email, calendar and contacts from three different places in three different browser windows/tabs, you want to those integrated together. Either way it’s an interesting summary and can provide a good list of options for you to investigate.

Foldera Loses VP

I’m trying not to post on Foldera too often but but I know a lot of you are searching for information and ending up here. If you haven’t heard, Michael Sampson has left Foldera (previously the Global VP of Word-of-Mouth Marketing). I don’t know Michael personally but I know many respect his insights within the industry and hope that this does mean he’ll be able to contribute more to the general dialogue and wish him the best of luck in whatever he pursues next.

As for Foldera, how could they hire a VP of WOM Marketing? They don’t have any customers. And what exactly is being marketed? Maybe this was a bit of the issue, how can you measure success in marketing when you can’t give prospects a call to action? In the end Brand awareness has to result in customers.

Firefox to Facilitate SaaS Offline?

We’ve talked about how customer demand for offline support for on-demand applications continues to grow. Part of this years show was to watch who joined the few existing products already with offline support. It appears Firefox may help some companies get to market with Offline Support acording to an article over at Read/Write Web.

I’m not sure to what extent Firefox would be able to support individual application features. Anyone have any ideas on how this might work?

And while that’s interesting, I think the Google / Firefox link is just as interesting, don’t you?

Foldera Information Coming Soon!

You should expect to see some posts on the Foldera blog starting this week or next, that provide some glimpses of the product and maybe some insight into the release plan. I know this is of interest to many of our readers and encouraging for investors. 

I’m still skeptical about the “Beta” as I remain unable to locate a Beta user who is not a Foldera employee. Active Beta users would be a great measure of progress toward an actual product release.

If a tree falls in the forest….

I think we’ve had some interesting posts in the last couple weeks and our visits remain consistent but everyone’s been very quiet on the comments. It’s Q1 and everyone’s probably very busy. Here’s a quick list of the most interesting in case you haven’t had time to read through. Click through to a couple and let us know what you think.

 Why ‘Free-mail’ has a bad reputation

“…And finally, here’s the one I don’t understand: 

“But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.”

I don’t know what this means. Why wouldn’t I want to trust my messages to a free service? What is the opposite of a ‘free service’ and why should I ‘trust’ them?”

Online Office Suite Review and Comparison

“…For those of you who are watching the online office suite marketplace, it also notes that Google and ThinkFree may be in negotiations. Do you think it will happen?”

Microsoft and Online Office Update

“…It’s a nice SWOT analysis of Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It ends with a list of options for Microsoft which I’ve placed into this handy Zoho poll. What do you think?”

Monetizing Web 2.0 - Solved

“…The model that BlueTie is building is beyond ‘Free-mium’, it’s the monetization model of the future. How long before Goolge replaces those ads in Gmail with integrated services like this?”