Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

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According to an MIT Technology Review report, they’re not, and as you might expect the discrepancy in byte counts come out in the operators’ favor. The carriers aren’t exactly sticking their thumb on the scale, but they’re billing you for all data they ship you, rather than the data you actually receive, UCLA computer scientist Chunyi Peng told the Review.

Peng and her research group built a custom app for Android that counts bytes actually received on the device and then tested it over two unnamed U.S. operators’ networks. They were billed for 450 MB of data that they didn’t actually consume. Over a typical phone, carriers tend to over-count data by between 5 percent and 7 percent – not a huge number, but a significant one if it pushes you over your cap, triggering either an automatic overage fee or throttling policies that limit your speeds, Peng concluded.

The reason for the discrepancy has to do with where carriers count data. Peng explained to the Review that carriers start tracking usage as it leaves the network core, not when it actually hits the phone. The problem is the fickleness of mobile connections means customers often move in and out of coverage or experience dips and spikes in bandwidth. Not all data requested actually makes it to the phone, but the carriers still charge you for the delivery attempt. The issue is particularly bad with audio and video streams, which keep on coming even if the radio link to the phone disappears.

Considering that video is expected to be the biggest growth driver in mobile data, this problem is only to get worse. Consumers have every right be upset. It’s true carriers are making the effort to deliver that data, and it’s arriving all the way up the base station. But that’s hardly a justification for over-counting. If the network is too congested or cellular coverage is lost that’s ultimately the responsibility falls on the carrier, not the consumer.

Interestingly, Peng and her team also found away to bypass the data toll booth, by disguising application traffic as DNS requests that don’t count against plans’ data buckets – at least on the two operators tested. Peng told the Review that she was able to create an app that exploited that policy racking up 200 MB of data usage that went uncounted on her bill.

Abacus Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Tomas Urbelionis Photo

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The WAC seemed like a good idea when it was founded in 2010. Carriers being were cut out of the exploding application market by smartphone makers, and instead of just playing cutthroat defense and start blocking apps, carriers came up with the idea to actual offer developers something of value — their network APIs — to entice them into their app portals and into revenue sharing deals.

The WAC intended to create a run-time environment, which could support HTML5-based apps that could run on any phone from the most sophisticated Android device to the lowliest feature phone. Those apps would then tap into carriers’ location, presence and billing APIs, making them significantly more useful especially on feature phone platforms. The carriers were promising something unheard of the mobile industry: build an app once and have work anywhere and on everything.

Well, that was a pipe dream. WAC’s failure wasn’t just brought on by carriers’ ingrained inability to cooperate with developers. Carriers couldn’t even cooperate with one another. The organization had just gotten off the ground when it dropped this bombshell: While it would create a common set of technology APIs for carriers it would take no steps toward creating a common distribution framework. Sure, a dev could create a WAC app that would work on any operator’s network, but it would have to negotiate individual deals with individual carriers to gain access to its APIs and then work out a revenue sharing model with each.

Imagine if ever iPhone developer wasn’t just required to submit its app to Apple for approval, but also to 200 separate operators. Apple’s smartphone revolution would have gone nowhere. That’s exactly what the carriers were asking for though, and it just shows how they had learned nothing from the demise of their walled garden content stores. WAC was pretty much doomed from the get go, as my colleague Colin Gibbs wrote when the initiative first launched.

Two years and little activity later, carriers seemed to have realized their initial mistake. In February, a group of nine carriers including AT&T, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom implemented WAC’s first common payments API. In addition to standardizing their interfaces, those nine pushed out a common distribution and billing platform so a developer could submit a single app to a group of carriers in one go.

That step came a bit too late, though, as enthusiasm for the WAC had dwindled. Those nine operators were only a handful of the community’s initial 48 members, and a fraction of the total global carrier base. Why would a U.S. developer build a WAC-based app, knowing it would work on AT&T, but not on Verizon Wireless or Sprint to say anything of Vodafone’s networks around the world?

So what remains? The GSMA may try to pick up the pieces of the initiative, but I doubt it will have much luck. Apigee is a smart company that has done wonders in helping carriers like AT&T simplify their byzantine and proprietary APIs, but for Apigee to become the common link between carriers and developers, then more than a handful of the latter will need to work with the company. The GSMA has agreed to act as go-between among its carrier members and Apigee, but its members may have their own ideas.

Many of WACs most ardent supporters are now backing Mozilla’s HTML5-based Firefox OS. Verizon, Vodafone, China Mobile and Softbank — which collectively have well over a billion subscribers, have been working on their own widget-based app platform for years in a project called the Joint Innovation Lab. When it comes to apps, it’s a fragmented, fragmented world, and carriers seem to like it that way.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Rebelf

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Between Zuora and Vindicia, the broad spectrum of industries is covered. Vindicia focuses on online merchants, whereas Zuora has customers spanning the media, telecom/mobile, consumer Internet, SaaS and cloud computing sectors. Zuora Founder and CEO Tien Tzuo sees the potential for an “explosion of telecom services” in the next few years, stemming from the advent of mobile technologies, although its cloud computing partnerships with Microsoft and VMware could prove profitable, as well.

The sheer amount of activity in what Zuora calls the “subscription economy” is what brought new investor Redpoint Ventures on board, and founding partner Tim Haley to Zuora’s board of directors. As the initial investor in Netflix, Haley has seen the effects of a successful subscription strategy. The activity is also what has Tzuo confident in Zuora’s decision to take so much money despite the success it and other SaaS startups, like New Relic, have had prior to recent funding. Zuora became cashflow positive in the first quarter of this year, during which time it brought in more than a billion dollars in recurring contracts, and New Relic had amassed 5,600 customers before its recent $10 million round.

Tzuo’s strategy is to go big when you have a big idea, which he adamantly believes subscription billing is. “Now is our time to step on the gas,” said Tzuo. “We want to triple our staff, we want to open national offices in 15 different countries. Our customer base is demanding even more innovation, and we’ve got 10 new applications that we would love to launch in the next two years.”

If Zuora can pull off these plans, it will look a lot more like an established vendor than a relatively new startup, which could make it all the more appealing to large software providers looking to round out their cloud or SaaS portfolios with a billing component while adding a profitable, and growing, line of business. Of course, several dozen customers and billions in contracted revenue will command a high price tag.

Disclosure: Giga Omni Media, parent company of this blog, is a Zuora customer.

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MiniBooks comes with the following features:

• Clients: Search for clients and contact them with the iPhone’s phone and email applications.
• Invoices: Create, edit, search, view and email invoices from within the app. You can also view the status of the invoice and record payments.
• Timers: Start and stop timers that can track multiple activities on one screen. Active timers will keep running even if you close MiniBooks.
• Estimates: Create, edit and email estimates that you can turn into invoices.

If you don’t already have a FreshBooks account, you’ll need to sign up for one before downloading MiniBooks. MiniBooks can’t synchronize taxes or give staff members access to FreshBooks, due to limitations on the FreshBooks backend. The free MiniBooks Lite version limits you to three clients, while the full version retails for $14.99.

Do you use a billing app on your phone? What do you use?

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I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well.

The Basics

By default, Bento looks somewhat unassuming. It lists databases that already exist on your computer, whether you were thinking of them as such or not. That includes your Address Book contacts, your iCal events and tasks and your iPhoto library. It also lists a category called “Projects,” which starts out with dummy content for demo purposes. So, out of the box (pardon the pun), Bento is a convenient, all-in-one storage spot for all of your existing work and play-related Mac data that looks great to boot. But it can be more than that, too.

You’ll notice that in addition to the nicely-designed interface, the entry screens associated with items in your databases provide more customizability than their counterparts in the apps themselves. Address book entries, for example, can be browsed in an Excel-like list view, or in a grid-style view that’s reminiscent of one of the ways of browsing your albums in iTunes. Each entry has all the data that your Address Book card includes, but you can customize them further, adding photos, objects, text fields, or many other things.

Bento for CRM

That comes in handy when you want to use Bento as a CRM application. You can include details like known family members, business partners, and associates, all through your own custom fields. Add a preferred meeting place, best time of day to contact, corporate gifting schedule, or whatever else you may need to keep track off. Attach meeting notes or agenda files to keep a record of your interaction with said customer. It truly can be as powerful as you need it to be.

Bento for PM

As project management software, Bento is equally versatile. You can attach the same sort of custom fields to your projects here, and tie them to your address book and other collections for easy, single location access. If you need to open iCal or another app to check or change something directly, Bento can do that for you, too.

Keeping track of complex, multi-staged projects can be difficult, but Bento has a Smart Collections feature which should allow you to navigate even the most treacherous of prolonged endeavors. Set filters to catch all entries under a specific budget, for example, or by end or start date, or by the PM assigned to the task in question. It’s a great way to make sure nothing falls through the cracks without having to manually comb through every entry.

Bento for Everything

There’s countless uses of Bento for those working from home, so I won’t go into much more detail here, but it does feature handy, pre-made templates for time-tracking, inventory management, expense monitoring and issue tracking. It might take a little more setting up than tools designed specifically for those purposes, since it is made to be a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one, but that also means it could become an end-t0-end solution for all of your business needs if you put in the time and effort to make it so.

Bento 3 is available as a free trial from Filemaker. The full version will run you $49.99 U.S. for a single user license, or $99.99 for a five-user family copy. Those who already own previous versions of Bento (either 1 or 2) are eligible for a $20 rebate. The way I see it, $50 is not a very high asking price for something that could easily do the job of three or four other programs, but try it out first to see if it fits your working style.

What programs do you currently use to manage your work-related databases on Mac or PC? Do you think pleasing aesthetics affect your database-related work one way or another?

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WorkingPoint Highlights

WorkingPoint is like a user-friendly version of QuickBooks, without the unneeded trappings that make it complicated for the lone worker or small business. The slick and well-designed interface guides you through the invoicing and billing process without standing in your way. WorkingPoint gives you your own secure login URL, and serves up a home page displaying an easy-to-use and customizable dashboard.

You can import contacts from your email address book. If you have your products or services details in a spreadsheet, you can import that as well. The service can handle the popular Outlook CSV and vCard formats, and contacts from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Apple Address Book. One aspect of the Conatcts feature that needs work is that it’s tedious to delete many contacts, and I didn’t notice the “Find” feature to search contacts until WorkingPoint posted a blog entry explaining how it worked.

It only takes a few minutes to create your first invoice and add new bills. Like QuickBooks, you can add clients and vendors while you do the invoice or bill. If the client already appears in your Contacts list, just enter the customer or company name and WorkingPoint will find it. The intuitive interface doesn’t require you to jump around to create a single invoice, like some other applications tend to do. Just about any new user can get right to work with WorkingPoint with little frustration in trying to figure out how to make something happen.

WorkingPoint lets you create a company profile with a public listing in its directory, a feature not seen in other invoicing apps. You can limit profile viewing to your company or other people using WorkingPoint. The profile can integrate your latest blog entries, reviews from Yelp! and Twitter tweets, but if you already have a site it’s probably not that useful.

VerticalResponse Integration

The service has teamed up with VerticalResponse to integrate email communications with your WorkingPoint account. But really, the two act as separate applications. The only real benefits from the partnership are the ability to move back and forth without leaving the site and the 200 email credits you get with the Basic WorkingPoint account (500 for an upgraded account).

If you think in terms of email newsletters, those credits won’t last long. But the companies envision the email service integration as a way to help WorkingPoint customers connect with their own clients. Despite the integration, you still need to register to use VerticalResponse and it doesn’t grab email addresses from WorkingPoint, nor does it let you select a contact in WorkingPoint to send an email through VerticalResponse.

VerticalResponse also offers postcards, surveys and mailing lists. Not all of these features are free and the service doesn’t explain the costs before you dive in. The surveys do require a subscription after taking a free test drive. The WorkingPoint and VerticalResponse partnership is new, so more features may come down the pike to help these two apps work in harmony.

Costs and Final Thoughts

The service offers one free plan, and three paid plans ranging from $10 per month up to $80 per month. The basic plan allows one user to access the account. Paid services add statement of cash flow, customizable chart of accounts and branded emails plus others depending on the plan. The paid services will come with banking integration and e-commerce integration in the future, which could be important for some folks.

WorkingPoint has the tools to do the job of invoicing and managing bills. Those who want time tracking included in their invoicing app won’t find that here. Instead, you can count on the web-based app to let you do your billing tasks without frustration.

Have you tried WorkingPoint? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

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At first glance, using the press demo supplied, it appears to be a very nicely put together web app. The UI is clean and pleasant, with a typical shades-of-gray-with-soft-edges Web 2.0 color scheme, and a blog-style navigation tree under the header. If I have to be making up invoices, at least I don’t have to be doing it via an ugly interface.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a dashboard in the true sense of the word. It presents the vast majority of important information you’d need on any given day in a very readable, intuitively laid-out style, while at the same time making sure that frivolous or infrequently used features don’t clutter up the space. Only recent invoices, clients and projects are visible via the dashboard, but convenient links under each subsection will direct you to your full lists.
You can also quickly create new clients, projects or invoices with the click of a button, and a handful of helpful navigational links in the right sidebar give you access to more actions, and account and team information. Across the top, you get a quick breakdown of hours worked, unbilled hours, and your total invoices for the month.

Function and Features

Your client list can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like it to be. Personally, I prefer to keep things light for invoicing purposes, so I just enter an organization name and I’m through. If you want, though, you can enter detailed billing information, and additional profile information. This is probably very handy if you’re in a multi-user environment or could potentially be handing over your records to an employee.

Each client can optionally be invited to login and view project and invoice details pertaining only to them, so that they can track what you’re invoicing live, instead of just receiving an end-of-month bill. It’s a nice feature, but one I have a feeling most of my clients wouldn’t ever bother taking advantage of.

Projects and invoices offer similar customization options, with the option of tying projects to a client, though it isn’t required when setting them up. I appreciate that, because I do a lot of quick, one-off projects that don’t merit the time associated with setting up a new client profile. You can also select between a flat or hourly project rate, and edit the default currency, which is a great feature for web workers, who often work with international clients. When you’re invoicing, you just type basic client info directly into your form, saving time in the long run. On your invoice, you can customize everything you need to, including tax rates, issue and due date, invoice number, etc.

Extras

Ronin offers some very nice extra features that should appeal to web workers working alone or as part of a larger organization. You can easily add members to your staff, and Ronin takes care of all the administrative details, like setting up passwords and sending emails. You can also create recurring invoices and prepare estimates using the app, so it really is an end-to-end billing solution. The only thing I missed with Ronin was any kind of automated reports generation, which I would like to see to show client invoicing history.

Finally, you can optionally set up PayPal or Authorize.net integration, so that customers can pay their invoices directly using Ronin. This is a very nice plus for simplifying the billing process.

Cost and Conclusion

While Ronin does offer a free version, it’s a greatly hampered one. You can only have a maximum of two clients at any time, with one contact per client, and only a single staff user. PayPal and Authorize.net payment options also aren’t available on the free version. Paid plans range from $12 to $48 per month, and offer a lot more clients, contacts and staff users than the base plan. You’ll have to pay at least $24 per month for PayPal/Authorize.net features, which is entirely reasonable given that it probably appeals mostly to established businesses, anyway.

Overall, Ronin is a very capable online invoicing app, and the free version could be a great option for independent freelancers who just need something that gets the job done quickly and easily, and can be accessed remotely from any computer. FreshBooks is still probably a more attractive option for most, but Ronin offers another option worthy of consideration, at the very least.

Have you tried Ronin? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

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Last month, Aelgo launched the latest revision of its Manhour time-tracking application for Mac users.

WWD regularly covers time tracking, accounting and billing applications, but Manhour’s new release and its specific support for OS X users makes it a good time to cast our critical eye over this product.

Some of the highlights from Manhour’s latest 1.3 release include:

• Support for varying hourly rates that might apply for different times of day or activities, for example.
• Automated time-tracking and fee calculation, based on the fee structure you’ve defined. Users can even choose to bill down to the second, which could get interesting when coupled with a premium-rate phone support option!
• Integration with the OS X address book, to allow tasks and projects to be directly linked to clients’ contact cards.
• Comprehensive and editable reporting of recorded tasks and time blocks, also exportable as CSV, PDF and plain text.

Manhour does nothing that you wouldn’t expect from such an application, but its integration with core OS X features such as the Address Book and Menu Bar, coupled with a low price of $10 and a 15-day trial period, seems like pretty good value.

Personally, I shy away from working at hourly rates, but I have to admit, I might just give Manhour a whirl for a couple of weeks to track how much time I’m actually spending on work that I generally only bill in half- or full-day increments. Certainly most web workers could benefit from “metering” actual time vs. billed time.

Find out more at Aelgo’s Manhour product site.

What do you use for time tracking?

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Based on the number of time tracking applications we’ve covered here on WebWorkerDaily, and the frequency with which new ones are being introduced, it’s obviously an area that’s in high demand.

Even among the team here we all seem to be on our own missions to find the perfect time tracking solution. Dawn recently wrote about her experience with Harvest and I’ve certainly tried my share of apps over the last few years. But after a couple of months of trialing, testing and tweaking, I’m ready to commit to freckle.

I had the opportunity to talk in depth with Amy Hoy, lead designer of freckle, about what it is and isn’t. It is designed to be simple, easy to use and unobtrusive. It was developed to address what they saw as problematic with the time tracking solutions that they were using.

It isn’t for teams requiring time sheet approval, org chart hierarchies, assignments or permissions.

freckle acknowledges that while time tracking is a necessary task, it isn’t our real work, but rather an interruption of it. The thought is that if it were easy and painless to use, we would be more diligent about our time entries.

With freckle it’s all about the syntax. Once you learn it you can log time amazingly quickly.

The time entry form can be accessed from any screen on the app. It’s just three boxes: time, client or project, task and/or tag and then done. With careful naming, and by taking advantage of the auto-completion functionality, you can do this in just a few keystrokes.

Any new project or customer data I enter here is created for me on the fly. There is no need to go in and create a client, create a project, create a task for a client, and then log the time. In one step I can create, log and tag everything I need. I can always go in and add more detail later when it fits my schedule.

Not only is time tracking critical for billing, but I am also realizing that I need to keep better track of where the rest of my hours are going. A simple asterisk after a tag flags an item as non-billable and the reports make it obvious to distinguish between the two.

A nicely designed “Pulse” page gives a good overview of time logged by day and by project. You can hover over the pie charts for more details.

Like time entry, reports can also be run from any page. You can narrow down your data by project or tag, and then download your results as a CSV file for use in your invoicing application.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make me smile when using an application, and freckle is full of these surprises. For example, as easy as it is to log time, I do sometimes need to go in and add things at a later date. If I start to enter in my time information and realize that I’m on the wrong date, it doesn’t erase what I’ve entered when I choose another tab to make the correction. A little thing but a nice surprise.

Time rounding increments can be set on a per-project basis to reflect the different billing arrangements you might have with individual clients.

Once I had settled on a tagging structure which worked for me, freckle just feels “right” to use. I wish there were more integration options but an API is currently in beta so they should be forthcoming. It is already possible to log time along with code commits with the Beanstalk Hosted Subversion service.

As of now there isn’t a widget or any other means to log time externally to the application, but as I always have a browser open that hasn’t been a barrier to my adoption. I did suggest the ability to log time via Twitter like I can do with tasks using Toodledo. The quick-fire syntax would suit that well.

My big issue with freckle is the cost. For a single user on the $12 per month solo plan I am limited to ten active projects, which just isn’t enough for me. All other plans feature unlimited projects as well as increased users and SSL connection but upgrading to the next tier runs to $24 per month.

Perhaps accurate time tracking will help me recover that difference, but as part of the suite of applications that I use to run my business, an updated Freckle plan would be the costliest. I am finding that with clever use of projects and tags I can make the cheaper plan work, but it is less than ideal.

There is a free one user/one project plan to use to check things out, and all of the plans offer a 30-day free trial.

How are you tracking your time? Would freckle be a good option for you and your team?

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