CEO Unplugged

Take Charge of Mobile Commerce

Hello again! I just wrote another article for Entrepreneur magazine on growth strategies for small businesses, and this time I'm going mobile.

There's a very good reason for that: over 40 million Americans use cell phones and other mobile devices to access the Internet! Those mobile users represent a big opportunity you don't want to pass up. You can help your own business tap into that market by following some simple guidelines for attracting mobile business—check out Take Charge of Mobile Commerce for some ideas.

Enjoy!

Don't believe everything you read

I'm usually a huge fan of the journalistic quality of the Wall Street Journal.  So I was shocked to see on article on page B4 yesterday by Elizabeth Holmes entitled "Going Online Isn't a Must Move for All Entrepreneurs."  The article begins by quoting the 62-year-old owner of a fabric business in Florida who prefers to advertise in the senior section of the local paper and the vinyl cover of the phone book. 

Gregory Giesche, the owner of a shoe store in Geneva, Illinois that has been around since 1890 is quoted as saying he has no interest in being online.  "Everybody in my family is computer illiterate.  We have a difficult time understanding the Internet."  He notes that they keep their inventory using the same pencil-and-paper system that the family has used for over 100 years.

The article goes on to say that the rate of businesses opting to be online has slowed since 2000, citing a recent survey by the National Small Business Association.  Reading the WSJ article would make you think that this survey was entirely about the online behavior of small businesses, and drew damning conclusions.  In truth only 3 out of 48 pages of the study have anything to do with the internet.  The article also states that the NSBA survey concludes 2/3 of small businesses are rejecting e-commerce, when in fact the study states that 2/3 of businesses don't use ecommerce (this is because about 2/3 of businesses are service businesses and don't have any products to sell!!).  Ms. Holmes creative interpretation of the survey explains why a somewhat stunned representative of the NSBA is quoted in the article as saying "I would think in today's day and age you would have to have a web site." 

I would think so, too.

Homestead named "Best of Web" by Forbes

We were pleased to learn yesterday that Forbes.com named Homestead.com "Best of the Web" in the Entrepreneurs category.  Now, we've been fortunate enough to garner our share of these awards in the past, especially during the Internet bubble when everybody and their brother was giving out awards to websites.  However, a few magazines have Internet awards that still mean something, specifically PC Magazine Editor's Choice, and Forbes Best of the Web.  Their reporters actually research the sites in depth, follow the competitive trends, and use the products like real consumers.  So, we're flattered to have received Forbes' award again, and especially excited that they have created a new category that is a sweet spot our company and our customers: Entrepreneurs. 

Some of Forbes other "best of" sites in the Entrepreneur category: WebEx (online meetings), Staples.com, Simpata (HR), and Business.Gov (run by the SBA).

--jsk 

Google PageBuilder: unimpressive but scary

The other day, Google, in typical “we’re so cool we don’t even have to announce anything” fashion, made available an early beta version of a web-page-building service called Google Page Builder.  It’s an AJAX application (sidenote: for the 99% of you out there who aren’t following the over-hyped, so-called “Web 2.0” fad, AJAX stands for “Advanced Javascript and XML” and simply means that it uses the latest features of the popular web browsers to make web pages feel and behave more like applications) with some basic templates.

Based on the first look here inside Homestead, it’s a fairly basic attempt, and lacks most of the functionality of our simple AJAX editor, Site Builder Lite.  Of course, it will get better, but for now it doesn’t look like a serious tool for small businesses.  More like a 2006 version of GeoCities or Homestead circa 1998, with some Web 2.0 whistles (see my definition of Web 2.0 here).  However, Google entering this space is not insignificant.  Most importantly, they have already made their pages extremely friendly to the Google spiders (sidenote: “spiders” or “bots” are what search engine companies call their programs that are constantly scouring billions of web pages for their latest content.  If you want your page to be found by a search engine, it has to be visible to their spider.  Whenever you publish a page on Homestead, it gets spidered regularly by all of the popular search engines, but if you just stick a page up on the Internet by yourself, you have to spend time and energy making sure the search engines can find it, and notice your changes.)

Google Base, a service that they launched last year, is important for the same reasons.  Content that you enter into Google Base is immediately available to people searching the flagship Google destination.  This can take weeks or even months to accomplish without Google's assistance, so being able to do this in a few hours is no small benefit.  It remains to be seen how seriously Google will invest in these platforms, and whether they will continue to allow people to "main-line" data directly into their index without a fee, but there are a ton of possibilities here, some very scary for the rest of us out here on the Web.

Office Live is Live but not Office

Walt Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal, wrote unenthusiastically recently about the new Microsoft Office Live service, which is aimed at very entry level small businesses trying to create a basic web presence (full disclosure: he compared Homestead favorably to the new service, which is competitive to Homestead).  While their web site solution seems too rudimentary for even the most basic full time business, their integration of simple CRM solutions is really cool.  I’d be curious to hear from the Homestead customers (or potential customers) out there if you’d be interested in basic CRM and database functionality built into your Homestead service.

Unfortunately, the name Office Live leads one to believe that it includes web-based versions of Microsoft’s flagship Office Suite (i.e. Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), which it doesn’t.  At least not yet.  Now that would be a killer app for small businesses, and Homestead would become an ASP/reseller of that in an Internet minute if it every happened.  Of course, they would probably screw up the pricing somehow, and/or make the licensing agreement ridiculously draconian, or pull some other myopic Microsoft move.  But if you’re reading this Bill, take it from a former employee: I think there’s a really big opportunity here.