I honestly didn’t (and still don’t) think I said much that was interesting, but when it was published I got lots of great feedback from people. So I thought I’d share it here too. (No comments on the shirt please!)

Whilst I’m at it, here is another video interview I did with Knowledge Peers. You have to register to view the video, which is a PITA, but it’s worth registering for all the other great videos on their site.

Finally, here’s an audio-only interview with Alex Bellinger of SmallBizPod, with the lovely title “SaaS, Drugs and Rock’n'Roll”

I think that’s enough narcissism for one day.

This stuff long ago got more technical than I have the patience (read:competence) for, so I’ll hand you over to Tim McOwan, our CTO.

One of the key benefits of using KashFlow is that we take care of things for you, so that you don’t have to lose sleep worrying about things like “How secure is my data?” and “What happens if disaster strikes and one of the servers fails?”

We’re proud to say we’re hosted with Rackspace, the leading provider of manged hosting solutions. Yes, they’re expensive – but we think they’re worth every penny. They guarantee 100% network uptime and can replace any faulty component in our servers within an hour. We’ve been with them for two years now and have just signed up for another two.

Hardware Failure

Let’s say a component on one of our servers goes bang. Under our contract with Rackspace, and because they’re very good at this kind of thing, they’ll have it replaced, whatever it is, in less than 1 hour.

What if it’s a hard disk that goes bang, where is the valuable data kept and how up-to-date is that data? All of our servers use what is called “RAID“.  So if one hard disk goes pop, you wouldn’t even notice. Rackspace would put in  a new disk within the hour and KashFlow wouldn’t even sneeze.

Back Ups

What if a Bad Thing happens? Perhaps all the disks fail at once or the datacenter explodes? There’s only one thing more agonising than doing your books, and that’s having to do them twice. So we have lots of backups of your data:

- We take (and verify) an offsite backup of the database every night as a matter of routine.

- We also take a backup of the database every 15 minutes and immediately send that data off-site to a separate datacentre at the other end of the country for secure storage.

- Additionally, we have an expensive bit of software called DoubleTake. This software replicates in real-time all of the data on our live servers to another server on the other side of the country. So if the worst ever happens there would be absolutely zero data lost

Getting back up and running

If the server or data centre has exploded – it’s great to know your data is safe. But what about accessing it and carrying on working as normal?

We have additional hardware on stand-by with our software installed on it. This can be brought online very quickly and use the data copied to it by DoubleTake.

The only problem is with DNS; it can take up to 24 hours for your ISP to redirect your request for our site to the new server.

As a work around, if we ever had to switch over to our back up servers then we would publish a new address so you can quickly access it. This address will be published on our Twitter feed and on this blog. We’d also send an email to all of our users just to be sure.

Testing

The best plans in the world can look great on paper bur fail miserably when they’re implemented. So as you would expect we regularly test our recovery procedures to make sure they actually work and do what we expect them to.

Hopefully this demonstrates to you how seriously we take this stuff, but if you have any questions at all then please email support@kashflow.com and we’ll do our best to answer.

For more of Tim’s techie stuff, see his personal blog at devballs.com

Sure,  if you’re posting about how great that skunk was that you smoked on Friday night or you’re tweeting homophobic or racist views then it’s going to get you into bother in all sorts of ways as well as ensuring you don’t get that job interview.

But the alternative of total radio silence or private profiles can also be damaging.

We’re currently recruiting for a Digital Marketing Manager (yes, it’s an old post – we’ve had some delays). Imagine I’m looking at two CVs of two individuls that are equally qualified for the role.

One name returns no hits on Google. But the other reveals a Twitter feed. Firstly, just the fact that you’re on Twitter shows you have a real interest in the internet and being involved with technology in your personal life as well as your professional life. Your tweets give me an insight into your interests and your personality. You’re now a real person as opposed to two sheets of paper and the prolific phrase “I work equally well unsupervised or as a part of a team”.

If I have only one interview slot left, guess who’s getting it?

So please, don’t be afraid to tweet/poke/post!

If you’re selling to a non-technical audience then pricing your product on gigabytes of data storage is a really bad idea. They don’t know or care how many documents they can store before they hit your 1GB freemium limit and then have to start paying.

The same applies to competitors selling online accounting software like ours.  I see so many people saying in big text on their home page that they’re a “SaaS solution” – what does that actually mean to Steve the sparky or Sarah the pie maker?

I spotted a blog post at OpenView recently that linked to  this readability calculator.

Essentially you give it a block of text and gives you an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading.

Useful for sanity checking your gobble-de-gook.

Augmented reality is straight from the books of William Gibson
Submarines from Jules Verne
Satellites from Arthur C. Clarke
- the list could go on and on.

Anyone that’s read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would expect their iPhone/iPad to have the words “Don’t Panic” stamped on them.

I’ve just started reading Containment by Christian Cantrell (eBook for $1.16 here, or free here) and came across the concept of ELP’s or End of Life Plans:

[the] concept of “End of Life Plans,” or ELPs, was adopted by most of the industrialized world. ELPs were simply instructions included with absolutely everything bought or sold that explained what should be done with the item and its packaging in order to discard it. There were, of course, strict guidelines as to what constituted a valid ELP, and strict oversight of those guidelines. Legitimate ELPs included things like returning the item to the manufacturer where it could be refurbished, dropping the item off at a local ELP station which specialized in recycling its components, or, if the material were benign enough, the right colored bin to toss it into.

Consumer adherence to ELPs was also strictly enforced. Anyone caught violating an item’s ELP faced fines or community service, and sometimes even very imaginative forms of public punishment involving bright green jumpsuits or yard signs with short shameful slogans. No item could be bought, sold, or imported without a valid and approved ELP which meant that even countries that weren’t particularly interested in saving the world needed to comply in order to have access to markets that did. Consumers started selecting products based on the attractiveness of their ELPs which meant that as much thought and engineering had to go into the disposing of a product as producing it. Products that weren’t easily recyclable, reusable, returnable, renewable, compostable, convertible, or biodegradable languished on shelves beside their more eco-friendly counterparts. People wanted to feel as good about getting rid of something as they did about acquiring it.

It goes on

It was initially feared that ELPs would ruin the already-fragile world economy. The theory was that raising costs associated with research and development would cause the prices of goods to increase beyond what the market could bear. In reality, however, ELPs ushered in an entirely new era of sustainable economic growth and prosperity.

Even the sharpest and best paid economists underestimated the guilt that the media had gradually installed in consumers for buying goods that were designed to exist in landfills for centuries, but only function for anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe a year. It was true that prices rose, but temporarily; costs were more than offset by the dynamics of guilt-free consumption, and by manufacturers’ ability to refurbish and resell end-of-lifed goods. Entirely new industries sprang up around ELP stations.

Manufacturing costs gradually decreased as more recycled components were used and fewer raw materials had to be purchased and converted. Many manufacturers transitioned into what became known as re-manufacturers. The quality of products even increased so that their components could be reused in future versions. It was common for electronics manufacturers to build very fast processors for their devices, but underclock them so that when they found their way back into their factories through their ELPs, the chips’ constraints could simply be removed, and the entire device resold as the next generation, new and improved. ELPs allowed even the biggest and most powerful of multinational corporations to participate in sustainable and responsible manufacturing practices while still feeling like they were being suitably devious.

To me this seems a great idea to help combat global warming. It doesn’t even require any new technology, just political will.

You thoughts?

I just finished reading Grumby as an e-book on my iPad via the Amazon Kindle software.

The book was a good read and it was a pleasure reading it on the iPad screen. Perhaps the best thing was that I could start reading it mere seconds after deciding to buy it. Instant gratification!

But here’s the problem. As soon as i finished it i thought, “Tim would perhaps like this, I’ll give it to him to read”. And there’s the “gotcha”. With a traditional book you can pass it on to whoever you like and they in turn can pass it on. So that over it’s lifetime a book is probably read by dozens of people.

With the e-book, I can’t do that. Once I’ve finished it it just sits there in my device doing nothing. It’s dead money.

There’s no incentive at all for Amazon and the like to make it possible to pass on an e-book once you’ve read it. They’d obviously prefer Tim went and bought it himself.

Given that most books are the same price or more expensive in the e-book format than they are in paperback, I think for now I’ll stick with dead trees over dead money on my next purchase.

We’ve got a few customers and partners joining us – so we decided “The more the merrier”. So here’s an open invite to you all.

Don’t expect suits and business cards, a reserved room, a tab running, a spread of nibbles, etc. This is very informal and unplanned.

We’ll most likely be on the tables outside smoking vast quantities of Marlboro Lights.

If you have problems finding us then contact me on Twitter, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

I hope to see you there.

Would you like to manage people in the same way you’d like to be managed?

The knee-jerk answer is a simple yes.

But here’s the thought provoking follow up to a ‘Yes’:

So do you think that everyone else is the same as you in terms of their motivations and how they respond to different management styles?

The obvious answer is no, which shows immediately that you shouldn’t manage everyone in the same way you would like to be managed.

Bottom line: everyone is different and needs to be managed differently to others.

He included this great diagram showing all the different products he uses, with arrows showing the integrations/data flow between the apps.

For the full post from Ben, click here.

In the past I’ve always tended to randomly check in on the blogs when I got a free moment. But free moments are few and far between these days and I felt I was possibly missing out.

So I decided to get my act together and be more structured in how I keep track of these blogs. For the web-heads among you, you can probably stop reading now. There’s nothing ground-breaking here, this is all stuff you’ve probably been doing for years.

Consolidate Everything

I wanted a one-stop shop to see all the blogs in one place. Enter Google Reader, a free service.

Most blogs have RSS feeds. RSS is simply a data feed of content that’s updated when ever a new post is made.

Paste the blog URL into the “add a subscription” section of Google Reader and it’ll automatically find the RSS feed (if it can’t find one, it can still monitor the page for changes for you).

Repeat this for all of the blogs you have an interest in.

Finding free moments

The most common time I’m likely to have a free moment is on the train in to, or on my way home from work.

You can get free RSS readers for your iPhone that connect to Google Reader and download all of your content. Or you can just go to your Google account in a normal web-browser and read it there.

So I now feel fully up to date on all the blogs I read. And I’m so glad I’ve done it because I’ve read some real gems that otherwise I would perhaps have missed.

A better app?

The app I’m using on my iPhone is called Feeddler. It’s OK and does the basics. But I’d be keen to hear of any better apps out there as Feeddler misses some pretty basic functionality such as adding feeds.