NewGround’s web site, including this blog, is created within a web-based application developed and hosted by a company named Squarespace. This service, in my mind, would best be described as a Web 2.0 Content Management System (CMS). From a business perspective, I believe the Squarespace service offering represents a great value proposition. For $20/month, we get a web development and hosting platform that allows us (non-HTML proficient people) to create, store update/refresh, manage and publish our website, including this blog, I mention this because today I noticed this post on their customer service blog describing the recent launch on the same Squarespace service (and servers) of a much larger and much more heavily trafficked website (of former US House Majority Leader Tom Delay). The contents of that post not only raised my esteem for the Squarespace platform capabilities, but also underscore what a great value proposition it is – for Delay a great website/managed traffic service for $100/month versus several thousand to create the same capability for yourself.
Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category
Squarespace
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Easy Money?
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005Fred Wilson comments on a journalist’s observation that we are about to enter "the most furious investing cycle in history" due to the vast amounts of cash raised by VC funds in 1999-2000 that their partnership agreements require them to soon use (invest) or lose (return to limited partners along with management fees that pay their salaries and expenses).
It is true that there is a huge "overhang" of venture money left over from the 1999/2000 fundraising binge. But that money can’t go into early stage deals because those deals take 5-6 years to turn into realizations. So this "overhang" is going into later stage deals. Look at $75 million going into Fastclick or $108 million going into Webroot. That’s where the overhang money is going to go. The early stage market may also be entering a "furious investing cycle" but that’s not being driven by the overhang from 1999/2000, its being driven by Web 2.0 and the realization that we have entered another wave of innovation around the Internet that will result in a lot of interesting companies being created, built, and sold over the next several years.
Financial Supply Chain
Friday, February 11th, 2005While wandering the Web, I stumbled across a company, Prime Revenue, that offers to optimize the "financial supply chain" of its customers.
PrimeRevenue is the key to a financially optimized supply chain. For Buyers and Suppliers.
Our program is an innovative and unparalleled solution that brings the benefits of information technology to the financial supply chain. Our services deliver greater working capital efficiency, cost savings, and revenue growth opportunities for both Buyers and Suppliers.
With our program, Buyers provide Suppliers with transaction visibility and payment certainty around trade payables to their Suppliers, reducing the amount of cash tied up in the order-to-cash cycle. Our services streamline AR/AP processes, link the flow of funds to the flow of transaction data and, by creating visibility into future cash flows, give corporations access to a variety of transaction level financing options at very attractive rates.
Simply stated, PrimeRevenue helps companies do more business with less working capital.
Although apparently not a new concept (there’s a link on their website
to a fairly sophisticated vision of it in an article written in 2000),
the integrated communications and software infrastructure for implementing it are
only now reaching the maturation to support it.
On another Web sojourn, I encountered Wells Fargo’s Commercial Electronic Office (CEO), a proprietary financial portal that claims to provide "cash management, credit, international, and trust and investment services all in once place with a single sign on". Maybe so, but my experience with banks suggest that would be something of a stretch. (Wells had even applied bankers’ bureaucratese to the term e-commerce, turning a concise word into a mouthful of multi-syllabic mush.) My instincts and experience with online media content tell me that a proprietary business model will not stand. For the same underlying economic reasons that it would make no sense for Yahoo, MSN or AOL to limit their available market to that of one communications company (as in cable or telco), it would make no sense for a true financial portal to limit its market to the available market of a given depository institution (even if owned by that institution).
This is worthy of futher "focused" Web wanderings, thought and conversation.
Business Related, for a Change!
Tuesday, November 9th, 2004Time to blog about something else besides politics. EuroTelcoblog opines that Internet and web publishing technologies are evolving in a manner that suggests a new Web-based investment research platform will surface to replace the obviously dysfunctional and outdated one provided by the investment banks.
"the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.
There is a business model here, and whether it’s the financial media who seize upon it (Reuters and Bloomberg have the infrastructure and a lot of data, but are trapped in a walled garden mentality and put their journalists in the same sector-coverage silos that the brokers do), or the brokers (I’m skeptical, because I think they tend to be dismissive of alternative points of view, risk-averse, organized in sector and region silos, and anyway are focused on trying to kill one another), or a newcomer (CNET or something that doesn’t currently exist), I feel certain that it is going to happen."
Makes sense to me. Furthermore, if true, it would seem to follow that almost any research-intensive business would be open to similar disruption. Wonder if Gardener, Forrester, Yankee, et al. have thought of that?