Company says payroll for small and medium companies is an area ripe for innovation. Current leaders ADP and Paychex are too pricey and many companies have yet to automate the process at all, says ZenPayroll CEO Joshua Reeves. Read more »
Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here are some noteworthy segments to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to apps to wireless networks. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intuit is taking a key step in its competition with Square and other payment rivals by integrating QuickBooks Point of Sale product with its GoPayment mobile payment product. That means that customers will have an easy way to combine a traditional POS experience with mobile payments. Read more »
Changes in the power market are rippling through the Internet industry, altering both the location of data centers and their sources of power. There are many factors in picking a data center location beyond the geographic location, such as how to procure energy and green-energy models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you’ve ever wondered what big data means at an individual level, this realization about sums it up: “I could either keep dying my hair or retire a year earlier.” It’s those types of realizations Intuit hopes its heavy big data use will help uncover. Read more »
Intuit is plunking down $423.5 million for software firm Demandforce, in a bid to build out its services for small and medium-sized businesses. The deal provides Intuit with an automated marketing and customer communications offering that complements its existing business and accounting software. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new survey from Intuit QuickBase shows an increasing number of tech-savvy employees are building their own solutions without going through official IT channels – some even despite official IT opposition. Is this good news or bad for IT? For workers? Read more »
Intuit is pushing harder into the mobile payments market by building off its existing business ties. It just struck a deal to make it easy for AT&T small business customers to get started on GoPayment, and it’s trying to leverage its QuickBooks customers to compete in mobile payments. Read more »
Are mobile payments the new speech recognition technologies? One of the bigger stories in mobile this year has been the growing investment a… Read more at paidContent »
It’s still too early to say when they Year of Mobile payments will happen. But the important lesson is that mobile payments can’t rely on payments alone to sell itself; it will take a lot of new valuable services to convince consumers and merchants. Read more »
Mobile payments — payments initiated by a phone for a transaction at a physical point of sale or online — will total over $750 billion worldwide by 2015, and many predict they will soon begin to replace a typical credit card transaction. This report analyzes and forecasts the mobile payments industry, from its current technologies to the companies implementing them and the trends we can expect in the coming months. Much of the near-term growth of mobile payments will be driven by near-field communication (NFC) technology, but QR and 2D bar codes, mobile POS systems and SMS transactions are also important platforms for companies to consider when creating business models and strategies. Meanwhile, services from the likes of MasterCard, Nokia, Amazon and Google offer examples for others to follow and clues into the future of the industry. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Research in Motion, T-Mobile, Zong and Groupon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud-computing insurance has long been posed as a solution to the problem of cloud users assuming too much risk of failure in the wake of things such as lengthy outages, data breaches and Lulzsec attacks. But it seems the idea of off-loading some of that risk ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Brainstorm began as an internal innovation management platform at Intuit, but it’s now available as an external offering following extensive customer testing. Tad Milbourn, product manager for Brainstorm, walked me through the application’s role in the company’s own innovation approach. Read more »
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Square credit card reader for iOS devices is now available online at the Apple Store, and will soon be available at brick-and-mortar Apple retail locations. Official Apple Store availability is a significant step in the ongoing rise of Square’s success. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intuit is positioning its GoPayment mobile service to compete with Square and others by offering a free version of the service for a limited time. The move may only be temporary, but it underscores the growing attention to mobile payments from companies across the mobile ecosystem. Read more »
In Silicon Valley, history often repeats itself. Most often it’s the tale of a startup that captures the attention of millions and topples its bigger, incumbent competitors. Then it becomes hated monopoly, despised for the control it wields. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, this ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Even as developers accept that people want to conduct business, manage their finances and even pay their taxes on their mobile phones, Omar Green, director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives at Intuit, says mobile developers need to think even deeper and add context to apps. Read more »
The convergence of cloud computing, more empowered employees and on-demand infrastructure is driving adoption of technologies — from workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Cetnral Desktop to customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction — that foster high-impact collaboration and with that, innovation. Read more »
You can’t innovate without collaboration, and without innovation, companies fail. There is now a whole new world of collaboration tools available to enable what can best be termed “high-impact collaboration.” These break-through tools — workspaces like Box.net, Huddle and Central Desktop or customer-powered support communities like Get Satisfaction — are made possible through the convergence of cloud computing, social software and the ubiquity of mobile technology. With these new technologies, employees can channel their passions and work together more effectively — regardless of where people are located — to accomplish their mission. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, Apple, Twitter, LiveOps and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Intuit has partnered with mophie to provide a credit card processing solution that uses Apple’s iPhone. The hardware, created by mophie and available today, is aimed at small business owners — especially those who use QuickBooks and are looking for a simple transactional fee structure. Read more »
I chose to run Quickbooks Premier for PC under Parallels on my MacBook. This sufficed for a year, despite an underpowered machine and major inconvenience. Recently, I gave up on the desktop version of Quickbooks and transitioned onto Quickbooks Online. Read more »
In response to a variety of criticisms, Intuit has publicly announced plans to enhance Quicken Essentials for Mac during the course of the year and has also lowered the price, offering a rebate to existing customers. Read more »
Big media events don’t come along every day, so when you’re betting the company’s growth on driving traffic to your web site from a single exorbitantly priced Super Bowl ad or a trail in a popular TV program, it pays to make sure that your IT ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
AT&T’s CEO says that the carrier handles half of all data traffic generated in the U.S. Being a good samaritan, I abandoned my iPhone to ease the 3G network. Did you know you can port away a number and get a new one for the iPhone? Read more »
I spent the last week or so playing with a copy of the new Quicken Essentials for Mac from Intuit and I can make this review really short for you. If you’re a die-hard Quicken user, you will hate (I mean really loathe and despise) the […] Read more »
The week marches on and today being Saturday means it is time to recap the recent happenings in the world of Windows Mobile. Version 6.5 has only been officially out for a short while but upgrades for existing phones are already starting to appear. Owners of […] Read more »
[qi:115] Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe is hooking up with Omniture and Intuit with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for […] Read more »
