Hosting close to your customers

In pre-industrial times, flour mills were placed close to the points of wheat production and consumption. It was hard and expensive to transport the wheat and resulting flour too far. The technology was hard, but not impossible, to replicate.

In industrial revolution times, factories were placed close to the point of raw material sourcing, canning factories beside farms, since transportation wasn't fast enough to transport the material before it went bad. However once processed it could be sent to warehouses anywhere, using economic shipping methods, for later distribution.

Skipping forward, now we're in Web 2.0 land. Our customers are everywhere, but really we will have geographical hotspots. At least if I split the world into broad geographical areas you'll probably have North American, Asia, and European customers (these being the general areas of Internet user concentration presently).

Connectivity

See this map?


See all those cables in the Northern Hemisphere? Abundant connectivity, short direct routes.

So why would you host content that required traffic to route all the way to, for example, New Zealand? Isn't this the equivalent of shipping logs to Japan for processing into paper, something that is possible but inefficient? Akamai know this, and have provided simple content hosting for yonks.

Fast international connectivity is useful to provide access for a broad base of consumers and to provide content providers a way to distribute their content. However I posit that distributing the content means to get it from the point of production to servers close to the point of consumption. It does not mean you need to host it in the content producer's back yard.

If I had content application with a worldwide focus, then I'd host my test and pre-deployment servers next to my company; but the production servers would be designed to be geographically distributed and my first one would be in the USA. The reason is that the USA gets free international bandwidth (pdf) and this flows into hosting deals you simply can't say no to. 2TB a month for US$29 in my case.

Once the US base, with cheap reliable hosting, was covered I would then target the geographical hotspots. The reason for doing this is not cost since the cost is likely to be higher, but latency.

Latency

Latency hurts Web 2.0 content. We have moved beyond simple pages with a few graphics. Applications now have many many server to client roundtrips, a lot of them sequential.

With a simple page loading some images that allows a browser to use multiple parallel connections and pipelining will get content served very quickly.

A SaaS application that uses multiple XML request/responses, for example a search-as-you-type application, can not use any of these. Latency becomes very noticable.

A local example, from my home computer, gives about ~2oms latency to local content. US content is ~200ms. Ten times slower. Human perception of delays starts kicking in at under 400ms (cf. telephony G.114 standard), and at 200ms per roundtrip without any server processing delay that will be exceeded very quickly.

The result is that a locally hosted SaaS application will "pop" onto your screen and should seem as responsive as a thick client. A distantly hosted application will have noticable (and inconsistent: jitter) delays. Your customers will notice this and regard your product as inferior.

Faster Pipes and Servers Don't Matter
Laying more fibre to your centralised data centre will not solve the latency issue. There are some limited benefits you can obtain by organising more direct peering into other hot spots, but there are things as fundamental as the speed of electrons/light working against it. You can't control the rest of the internet routing.

Faster servers can reduce the latency due to processing the request, but these delays are independent of the geographic location of the user and therefore should already be addressed by local performance testing.

What is next?

PaaS providers, like Google, will probably do geographic hosting automatically for you. I've not had a chance to look closer at App Engine yet, but it is rumoured to auto-spread the load through the cloud. Auto-spreading across geography is the next logical step.

NZ Passports now the worlds most expensive?

Finally someone noticed and wrote in the MSM about the Kiwi passport ripoff.

I'm surprised that there are 14,000 fewer passport renewals this year since travel must be on the increase, although I'm not sure if they're considering people who beat the new system and thereby possibly caused a peak last year. I got my 10 year passport just in time, although my son has a nice new 5 year one. Getting a 10 year passport expiry date will be moot however if the US starts to mandate only RFID'd passports for entry though, as they did for machine-readable ones. Only a matter of time I suspect.

The bare fact is that the price of passports quadrupled, since they halved the lifetime of the password while doubling the price. No other country felt the need to quadruple the price to pay for this technology either.

I can actually agree with the concept of refreshing passport technology for security reasons but what they fail to realise is that a passport effectively has a lifetime less than it's expiry date -- most countries want at least 6 months, and thats 6 months past the length of your intended stay. So you're left with a passport that works for ~4 years, minus the time you get it in advance of your first trip on it. What a bloody hassle.

While I'm ranting about the price of these passports, I also have to add that they're rigid and don't feel like they'll take a lot of riding in back pockets. My old one has come out U-shaped on occasion from that. Considering this is one document you like to keep with you (in some countries) they've gone from something that is reasonably robust -- it attracts interest but still works if you soak it in water -- to something that feels like it will break quite easily. Apparently a working RFID chip isn't required for entry as faults are normal and expected; I would assume that you'll get more scrutiny if it does fail though otherwise certain people would just microwave theirs.

Eureka Clothing, part 2

As posted last, Eureka Clothing, a Wellington-based boys clothing company. They just opened a shop in Vivian Street, and my wife got a chance to visit them last week during their opening celebrations.

I have returned from France to find my two boys clad in a lot of hardwearing Eureka gear. It is good stuff, and the addition of the repair kit really rounds out their story.

I wish them every success.

Holding people to account

I've recently been thinking of the concept of patronage and satire. The Romans had it right; we should have a crowd of satirists around that we can hire to make fun of individuals in cartoon, verse, or in some other form. It should be their job to make fun of people, they should compete to do it best. My old flatmate Stephen Jenkins introduced me to Catullus a long time ago, he certainly had a way with words. I'm sure a Web 2.0 version of this system would be a hit :-)

There has been a general culture of shirking of responsibility in New Zealand over the past years; "I didn't know", "I don't remember that conversation", and other weak responses are in use from the top of society to the bottom. They are not excuses.

Those at the bottom of society are pretty well held to account for their actions, except when excused on the grounds that society made them do it. I can never see this as an excuse; mitigation for small acts perhaps but we of free will and always make decisions and we should have to live with the consequence of those decisions.

I am more annoyed to see the lack of accountability at the top end of our society. Our figureheads should be more accountable than the average bean, but it seems our politicians (HC, DBP, Trev), bureaucrats (Mr Logan) and some of our business people (Fay/Richwhite) are getting away with a continuous series of responses that would be ignored or ridiculed if any person in the street said them.

I'm thinking that the best way to hold these powerful and sometimes untouchable people to account is to make fun of them. It holds them in the public eye where they feel most uncomfortable, shows our contempt, and is amusing to boot. I still remember the foldup Muldoon poster my brother had from the Christchurch Magic Shop; I don't see anything of that ilk any more. Except perhaps the self-produced Helen Clark poster...

Anyway, who's with me on increasing the satirical content in New Zealand? It should be a NCEA-endorsed career choice...

1place respond

Martin from 1place has replied to me personally with an apology although little explanation, but subsequently posted a good comment (scroll down).

It is good to have some feedback finally, well done to Martin for being open about it. I will keep watching for a while and see the improvements and see if they restore some confidence. They have implemented some of the things I wanted already, and the data backup feature promises to at least allow a migration strategy.

Remaining to be fixed is their SPF record. I mean

1place.co.nz. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 -all"

is supposed to mean they never send email with the consequence their mail only just squeaks through my spam filters. Badly configured SPF is quite a bit worse than no SPF.

Eureka clothes for kids, a great kiwi business

A little off the tech subject today, as an offer from Eureka clothing arrived in my mailbox. Eureka are a Wellington based clothing company making robust clothes for kids. I'm getting some for my eldest after we discovered all his jeans are ripped through at the knees. Boys being boys, I remember the same happening to me as a child.

I must say they're going all out, no organic growth for these guys. Their catalogues are top notch, great photos and design. Their website isn't bad either.

Anyway, if you have boys between 4-14, or perhaps rough-and-tumble girls, check them out. I have a limited-use code that will give the first five of you who register a free t-shirt worth up to $30. That's what the coupon says anyway

Sign up here with code R_223784 in the "registration code" field - only five uses are possible, and before the 30th November 2007.

disclosure: I get a $20 voucher if you do all sign up, win/win huh?

Online accounts, estimates and invoices. A NZ-based review as at August 2007

Okay, this one is a long one and has taken me a while to write. I'm happy to correct this and/or revisit this at a later date based on feedback; but these are my views of the various sites (I know I'm criticising people's babies).

I have been looking for a nice, self-contained, at-least-invoicing setup for Latam Design (free plug for my wife). I can't face MYOB or QuickBooks or anything of that genre. Every time I look at (non-SaaS) accounting software I cry internally "I could do better than that with my eyes closed, lets code one up in Erlang/Yaws and take-over the world". The reality is that:
a) I'd get dead-bored before I finished a proto-DB schema, let alone the core or the interface.
b) It is pretty nasty hard-core work that requires more than my cobweb-laden understanding of accounting.
c) It is boring. Oh I mentioned that. I like real-time millions-of-customers "you're down and you're dead" systems.
d) I don't need to be supporting this kind of stuff in my spare time.

So off I go, inspired by Rod's Xero Marketing (heh) to see what's on offer. While I was on holiday in Peru I discovered Cashboard. If you haven't tried any of these, I'd suggest you register for at least a couple to get the idea of what you can do.

Cashboard

Cashboard is pretty funky. All Web2.0'n'everything. It does estimates, invoicing and timetracking, and it can accept payments as well* . The MacOSX (grrr, StuDlyCaPs) widget for logging time is a nice touch, esp. given that side only uses Macs.

It didn't initially do NZD, which was a problem, but the owner added that pretty much instantaneously for me and gave me a double-your-grace period coupon. Great response, but it was the tip of the i18n iceberg...

You can create estimates very easily, although if you want to base them on effort but not disclose your hourly rate it becomes more tricky. If you have a paid account you can customise the format of estimates/invoices and send them as PDFs or links to the site. Nice. You can then turn the estimates into invoices, adjusted as appropriate, and auto-email the client (if you want).

It all works swimmingly from my two brief attempts. Adding new clients while in the invoicing process works just as you'd hope -- you can add them in situ without breaking your workflow.

Cashboard give you a .cashboardapp.com domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access.

The real problems come around the i18n side.

• US date formats everywhere, and I can't see myself sending invoices to clients (or showing them to the IRD) when 1/6/2007 means January not June. Confusion is not something I want to cause when I'm asking people for money.
  
• NZD is supported, although it helpfully says NZD everywhere. I just know someone is going to look unkindly on that...
  
• The only way to get my GST number onto an invoice is via the "notes" feature. This is the recommended way of doing it...
• I need TAX INVOICE on my Tax Invoices. This also has to go into the notes field.
• At the time it didn't do Timezones. It does now, which is helpful since auto-emailing clients with yesterday's dates wasn't appealling.
  

I know that Cashboard is developing quickly and has taken my/NZ i18n requirements on board, but the frustrating thing is that it is not usable for New Zealand until they get around to implementing most of them. I was quite prepared to pay for it, their rates are extremely good for what you get, and the ability to up/downgrade based on your success is fantastic.

* at least for USA'ns. The cascading requirement is that you must be able to accept CC's via a CC processor, which means you need a US bank account, which means a US address. This all ends up meaning "no, non-Americans can't". It just takes longer to work this out.

Xero

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Xero. I might disagree with Rod about what is holding back NZ from being the next Finland/Ireland/China^D^D^D^DHong Kong but I can't fault their product even at this early stage.

Xero aim to provide a complete MYOB/QuickBooks replacement. They're certainly well on their way to providing this although there are some rough edges. I was, for example, surprised to see that we tagged their emails to clients -- free advertising for them but it shrieks of Hotmail. To their credit they are looking at fixing this. The accounting side seems to be a little rough too, sure everything can be done by posting amounts around manually but remind me why we have computers again?

Xero have just reframed their pricing slightly but is still both expensive for small businesses at $50 a month ($600+GST a year for the math challenged), and probably too cheap for larger businesses as the same $50 a month. I'm struggling with the rationale behind this plan; either they don't want the micro-businesses (why not?) or they figure they have something compelling enough for these enterprises to spend more than they do today on accounting software/services.

The integration with local accountants is a clever strategy. The system is admittedly great for accountants that know it (and who will presumably recommend it because of this) as they can easily see the current state of their clients' businesses without leaving their desk. Less boring work for everyone is always good.

If Xero was cheaper then I'd take it by default as it is launching with the NZ-focus and NZ-bank integration. Yes I only care about i18n when it impacts me. Colour me selfish.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks looks like a direct competitor to Cashboard. I only recently discovered it (last week) but it has excellent i18n support and has been around a while . I feel these two things are related...

Freshbooks provides much the same estimating, invoicing and time-tracking capability as Cashboard. It can accept payments, using a wide variety of payment processors, but as far as I can see I'm limited to using Paypal as that's the only one I can get a non-US account from. I'm not asking my customers to use Paypal...

Freshbooks also give you a custom (.freshbooks.com) domain when you create your account. A nice touch and great for your customers should you provide them access, and Freshbooks also allow you to logo-ise this interface. Nice touch.

Freshbooks have an innovative option to send physical mail using an external provider. The cost and delivery time of this option for a non-North American business would appear to make this of little utility. Significantly they do not offer PDF, although you can format for printing (locally) or have them email your customers with an access link so they can see/ad

I really liked that your customers can comment on estimates and dispute invoices sent to them. I'm not so sure I like the focus on doing this all on-line, a number of our customers really need paper copies and I'd rather send them one and have it processed than have our automatic email lost/forgotten and not be paid since "we hadn't send an invoice".

Freshbooks does have a "free" option, eriely similar when compared to the equivalent Cashboard free plan but it appears to ramp up to become significantly more expensive at the high end.

Saasu

The Australians have arrived. It really looks like a traditional accounting package with a web interface. These guys have apparently been doing SaaS since before there was an acronym for what they were doing (1999!). Stability in your provider can only be a good thing...

Saasu NetAccounts is a fully featured accounting package, as a SaaS offering. They also have, listed separately but somehow part of the same system, NetInvoiceIt which is the invoicing only part. This seems to be placed as a bit of a teaser to compete with the other invoicing-only solutions above and also as an easy entry to the whole-of-business system they have.

Non-Australians are allowed to use this now although we are warned that NZ is only in Beta. While the NZ currency and stuff are there there are still an awful lot of country specific (and I mean Australian-specific) things in there too. At least they use G.S.T., but there are many exceptions and rates in Australia and these are reflected in the interface.

Two NZ banks are supported. The rest may be addable, I'll admit to not trying their BSB, but certainly were not in the dropdown lists. Still, two NZ banks are supported. This is far more encouraging than 0. No I'm not going to type Zero, or Xero.

I'm still trying to work out the pricing scheme. It's free unless you want to use it too much, although "too much" has some sort of point system based on the number of things you're doing. 5 invoices with payments, or 10 invoices by itself per month max based on my reading.

The sorta-flat-rate plan is A$228. It's not clear to me if it is a one-off payment or yearly (either way still cheaper than Xero). Ah, I see now (in the browser title); it is annual. Still, fairly good given the broad coverage. It would appear to my non-accountant eyes that this is a complete replacement for MYOB, but it is almost as ugly in places. Not much Web2.0 going on here.

Conclusion

None of these fit the bill at the moment. I was dead keen on Cashboard, and we may return to that if they can just redo all the date handing. They've only been live for 4 months so I'm being understanding.

In the meantime we're evolving our requirements for Latam Design. I think that the more we see of Xero and Saasu, the more we realise that perhaps we do need a little more than Estimates and Invoicing.

It is becoming clear to me that once you start using one SaaS provider then you may not be stuck (you can typically extract your data) but you, your users, and your customers will be slightly shaken if you have to start telling them to use the old system for the old invoices and the new one for new invoices. The retraining alone means that choosing a SaaS provider once is easy but changing mid-stream is much more complicated. The more you push the system out beyond the typical boundaries (e.g. to your accountant, to your customers) the more locked-in you get.

Comments and feedback are welcome, as of course are corrections and constructive debate :-)

Hiring things...

I guess this is old news, but HireThings is pretty cool. I'm not sure that I want to do it, as every time I do a pick-up for an online auction purchase (furniture etc) I kinda feel odd trudging around peoples houses, and I've given up letting people pick up from me. They're all lovely people (esp. the last French couple) but while I'm outgoing I'm not that freaking keen on meeting J. Random person even if they have/want the same goods as I do.

Anyway, back on topic. I was hunting for a decent, cheap, monitor colour calibration device. The bees-knees ones appear to be the i1/eyeOne/ from xRite (formerly GretagMacbeth?). Suffice it to say that none of them appear to have been on the local second-hand market in recent times, much like cheap Eizo LCD monitors...

But... this appeared which is pretty cool. $35 a day to hire one, and they're not something you use very often. And the same guy seems to have some nice Canon lenses to rent (oops, "hire") as well, including the funky slidey Canon professional one. I'm still not sure what this lens does, I need a physics lesson and a diagram. Probably why I'm not qualified to hire it :-)

Anyway, it is nice to know that HireThings exists, although much like the rental tools at Bunnings I'm not sure how much I'll use it.