IndieGoGo, Rocket Hub, and KickStarter.com won’t be replacing the National Science Foundation anytime soon, but these websites may help scientists solicit the masses for small amounts of funding. Two biologists raised $4,873 to study Mexican quail, and an Italian scientist named Andrea Gaggioli started a site called the Open Genius Project that he hopes will help researchers bankroll projects by soliciting the crowds. READ MORE
To hear Xenios Thrasyvoulou tell it, all the world’s a marketplace, and all the men and women their own employers. Thrasyvoulou is founder and CEO of London-based PeoplePerHour (PPH), an online platform connecting small businesses with freelancers offering a range of services. He’s a champion for the growing economy of self-determined employment, and has the bona fides to back it up–he’s an entrepreneur, after all, having founded an early iteration of the company, called PAperHour, at just 22 years old. READ MORE
Following the success of Pandora’s IPO last week, London-based music streaming service Spotify hopes to achieve similar success when it debuts in the U.S. later this summer. Spotify, which allows users to listen to any artist, album, or genre on-demand, has just closed its latest funding round with $100 million and working on deals with the four major U.S. record labels and Facebook. READ MORE
Despite growing a back-room start-up into a billion-dollar software giant, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is still the socially awkward and publicity-shy man he’s always been. In a rare move, Gates granted an exclusive one-on-one interview with The Daily Mail, revealing secrets and details about his enigmatic personal life to promote the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, an organization co-founded by Gates in 2000, which kicks off a “pledging conference” in London to raise money for vaccinating children in the world’s poorest countries. READ MORE
At RiskMetrics Group, two full-time employees were spending each day processing the company’s many travel expense reports. All day, every day. That is, until the New York-based risk management firm started using Concur Expense, a Web-based travel expense solution. Using Concur, those two RiskMetrics employees — one in London and one in the U.S. — spend perhaps one hour a day on expense reports, notes Michael Ciaccio, travel and expense manager for the 300-employee firm. That’s important because the company is in the process of tripling in size due to acquisitions. “This has really opened up their time so they can work on other projects,” he says. The Concur Expense product, an on-demand Web solution, can start gathering travel expense information from the moment an employee books their travel, explains Chris Juneau, vice president of product marketing for Redmond, Wash.-based firm. Concur Expense includes a travel booking tool and a direct link to the company’s corporate bank card. The more employees use their corporate card to pay for their expenses, the less they need to keep track of receipts, dates and locations later. Employees just add in their cash expenditures, and print off or email their report. “Our product eliminates receipts, eliminates keystrokes, and can eliminate paper expense reports,” Juneau says. ROI in “soft dollars” While the return-on-investment attributable to these solutions are in “soft dollars” — not hard cash — admits Tim Dougherty, sales director of Irvine, Calif-based ExpensAble, they can be significant. “You have employees doing something other than spending their Friday afternoon doing an expense report,” he notes. “And you have the accounting staff able to do something else, too.” For small businesses especially, where many employees wear several hats, finding ways to save the time associated with developing expense reports can be a godsend. Many smaller companies suffer through the travel expense process, perhaps using Intuit’s QuickBooks or free services offered by their bank card. Often, those services don’t go far enough. Dedicated on-demand travel expense services or software can help a small company do a better job. And on-demand services can even help companies that lack an IT staff. Products such as Concur’s Expense can run from $1,000-$5,000 in set-up fees, and from between $250/month to $5,000/month in service fees, depending on the size of the business and the number of users. ExpensAble offers several small-business options: its Enterprise on-demand product for 20 users or less for a $1,200-$3,000 one-time fee, or its Desktop software option at $700 per 10 licenses, and has off-line options as well, according to Dougherty. A third provider, CyberShift, also offers on-demand and licensed products, but does not make its pricing models public, according to spokeswoman Pamela Marshall. The sales force may grumble, but… For companies accustomed to having the accounting office manage their expense reports from start to finish, however, asking employees to shift over to a do-it-yourself model can be met with resistance. “At first, our sales team grumbled … they thought it would take away from time doing sales,” admits Ciaccio. “But right now, everyone’s pretty receptive,” he added, noting that RiskMetrics has put tutorial information about Concur on its website to help employees work through it more quickly. In addition to saving RiskMetrics time, Concur also helps keep managers in the know about their departments’ travel costs. “We can provide detailed reports to the managers, so they know just what they’re spending on travel.” Concur’s Juneau adds that many of his clients find that their employees’ travel expenses drop significantly after the Concur system is in use. With increased use of the corporate card, it becomes harder for employees to “pad” their expenses, he notes. In sum, dedicated travel-expense solutions could drive savings to your business in terms of time, money, and hassle.
CEO of AppRiver In the murky world of Internet security, Michael Murdoch’s company thwarts the spammers, phishers, and hackers. After working in the IT industry for 20 years, Murdoch co-founded AppRiver in 2002. These days, the $5 million company blocks spam and viruses for roughly 6,500 organizations. Murdoch has 42 employees in Gulf Breeze, Florida, and will hire more when he opens a London office next month. In 2004, AppRiver’s location made it vulnerable to a different threat. “Hurricane Ivan pounded us,” says Murdoch of the storm that ripped the roof off the company’s headquarters. Fortunately, Murdoch’s customers weren’t inundated with offers for Viagra and cheap mortgages because AppRiver’s servers are in other states. This hurricane season Murdoch is spreading goodwill by offering free services to Florida companies. If a hurricane knocks out a business’s servers, AppRiver will safeguard incoming e-mails until the systems are restored. “Sure, it’s philanthropic,” Murdoch says. “It’s also good business.” Attack monkey, $31 “The attack monkey is our company mascot. Every new employee gets filmed being killed by the attack monkey on his first day of work.” Reef flip-flops, $50 “Florida is casual, and you have to have a good pair of flip-flops. I’ve yet to find a more comfortable brand than Reef.” Collection of history books, $2,400 “I studied business in college, but history is my true passion. I like American history, particularly the Civil War and President Lincoln.” Sprint PPC-6700, $400 “This can do anything my desktop can do, anywhere–even on vacation in Costa Rica (when my wife’s not looking).” …and What I Covet A700 AdamJet, $2.3 million “I don’t fly, but I’d like to learn. I travel a lot for work, and the airports around here are so difficult these days. It would be nice if I could travel in my own plane.”
The camera has gone through quite an evolution over the past generation. Twenty years ago, Polaroids were still state-of-the-art. That evolved to the 35mm standard, throwaway cameras and digital pictures. The next level is cameras that can talk to your company’s computer without being physically connected. These new wireless digital cameras have a number of business applications in the fast-paced world of entrepreneurs. Send photos from a product demonstration on the road so that your Web page can be updated in near real-time. E-mail pictures from a company award ceremony in London to rally the troops in Mountain View, Ca. Shoot and print out photos for a presentation and have them ready in the time it used to take to import digital photos over a cable to a PC. How does this work? In the same way your laptop is able to wirelessly connect to the Internet, camera designers are incorporating Wi-Fi wireless modems right into their latest digital photographic devices. This technology enables them to seamlessly communicate with other devices, such as computers and printers. For example, the Kodak EasyShare-One (4 GB for $199.95, 6 GB for $299.95 at www.kodak.com) uses its Wi-Fi to transfer pictures and video to your computer. Using the extensive interactive display, you can also e-mail pictures directly from the camera while you’re still on the road without having to find a local computer. It is also compatible with Kodak printers for easy prints. Similarly, the Nikon Coolpix P1 and lower-end P2 ($549.95 and $399.95 at www.nikonusa.com) will talk with your computer and printer. The Coolpix models also have a Wireless Live Transfer, which will move pictures instantly to the computer as they are captured. The Kodak and the Coolpix cameras use IEEE 802.11b and 802.11g, the standard Wi-Fi technologies. Nearly any computer with a wireless modem should work fine with these devices. Will they get cheaper? Prices may drop but probably not by much. The Kodak EasyShare-One seems to already target the low-end camera market, and getting a nice standard digital camera will run more than the cheapest EasyShare-One. Nikon’s prime market is professional photographers — the $399.95 Coolpix P2 is low by their standards. More important, there aren’t any other notable companies making Wi-Fi cameras. No competition means that they can set the price as they see fit. Any complications? There are not as many downsides to upgrading to this new technology. To ensure compatibility, buy the same brand throughout. The Kodak camera may not want to talk to the Canon printer, for example. Getting new equipment could get expensive. Second, every company has its own way of doing things. When you send a photo to a friend, the e-mail he or she gets is actually a link to the respective manufacturers’ online photo gallery. Most companies, including non-camera maker AOL, have their own online setup that must be used. The camera’s open interface also can leave your computer more vulnerable to attacks. A recent report found that the Nikon Coolpix P1 Wi-Fi opened up a pathway wide enough for hackers to breach the corresponding computer. That may be reason enough to wait on getting one until the next camera upgrade solves that problem, although the technology is exciting enough that security features will likely soon be addressed by manufacturers.
Oct. 11, 2005–Internet phone service provider Skype announced Thursday it had joined forces with a U.S.-based company to package its consumer-oriented calling product with a data service that would make it a viable player in the business-to-business market for voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services. London-based Skype provides widely popular software for making free telephone calls from one computer linked to another by a high-speed Internet connection. The company has almost 4 million U.S. users, according to the Yankee Group. Skype was recently purchased by eBay for $2.6 billion. Skype’s partner, GoRemote of California, operates a network that connects mobile workers to corporate networks over a secure, high-speed connection while they are working offsite. The alliance will bundle Skype’s consumer communications tool with GoRemote’s Mobile Office Solution so users will have the option to make phone calls over the same connection they use to access corporate networks. GoRemote’s chief executive, Tom Thimot, said the new service allows mobile workers to exchange data and communicate with their corporate office through a single laptop. Thimot also said GoRemote’s network connects to 31,700 corporate offices and home offices worldwide. The company has also set up 30,000 “hotspots at coffee shops, hotels and airports where traveling workers can connect to the GoRemote network and tap into their company’s computer system. VoIP, already popular among consumers, is drawing attention from small and medium sized businesses. A recent survey from Harris Interactive and Hewlett Packard found that most small and medium sized business managers are interested in using VoIP to reduce costs and add new features like e-mail with voice message attachments.
A growing number of Internet service providers (ISPs) are offering so-called “roaming access” to the Internet. Once you establish an account with an ISP that offers roaming access, you can dial in using any of more than a thousand local telephone numbers around the world. How can a single ISP offer dial-up service from 150 countries around the world? The answer is a Mountain View, Calif., company called iPass Inc., which has pieced to together a network composed of ISPs around the U.S. and around the world. By understanding how iPass works, you’ll be better able to find an inexpensive way to access the Internet while on the road. iPass doesn’t sell Internet services directly to the public. It relies on its network of ISPs, companies that sell Internet access directly to the public, to handle direct contact with customers. What iPass does is act as the intermediary between ISPs in two key ways. First, iPass provides the technical solutions that allow you to have an account with an ISP in, say, London, but connect to the Internet in Singapore using another ISP’s local phone number. Someone, after all, has to monitor access, verify passwords, and the like. Second, iPass handles the money. Since, in our example, your account is with an ISP in London, only London is in a position to bill you for the time you spend online in Singapore. So for the network to function, someone has to track where you have logged in from and for how long, and then transfer money from London – from the ISP that bills you for the service – to Singapore, where an ISP let you use its local access number. At present, the iPass network contains more than 1,100 points of presence (POPs). Each POP consists of a local phone number that can be used for Internet access. Larger cities may be represented by multiple POPs. A list of locations serviced by local phone numbers can be found on the iPass Web site at http://www.ipass.com. How It Works To use the iPass network, you need to have an account with an ISP that is a member of the network. Then each month in which you’ve used the roaming Internet access service, you will be billed for roaming access by your ISP together with the amount you normally pay for regular usage. There will be a flat monthly fee for use of the service (normally only charged for months when you’ve used the service) and a per-minute charge. The monthly and per-minute charges are determined by your ISP, not iPass, so charges can vary considerably. An iPass spokesperson says charges are mostly between $.05 and $.20 a minute. The monthly charge is normally a few dollars, sometimes more. How to Sign Up to Use iPass To find out if your ISP belongs to the iPass network, you can simply ask your ISP. Or you can check iPass’s Web site for a current list of participating ISPs. If your current ISP does not participate, you have several options. You can first try to talk your ISP into offering the service. In theory, this shouldn’t be too hard, since your ISP can conceivably make some money from participating. If that doesn’t work, you can shop around for another ISP. Look first, obviously, for an ISP that offers a local or toll-free number for normal use when you’re not traveling. iPass may give you Internet access from any of 150 countries, but your cheapest option is always going to be using your regular ISP’s phone numbers. Next, ask each of the ISPs you’ve identified that offer the iPass roaming service about their rates. You may find they vary widely. Ask both about fixed monthly rates and per-minute charges. Using the Service When you’ve established a roaming account with your ISP, it will provide you with a simple software utility to load onto your computer. Roadnews.com tested the Windows 95 version. The Windows 95 utility consists of a database of all the local numbers around the world and a wizard that sets up a Dial-up Networking connection script. When you run the wizard, you are prompted for such information as the city and country from where you are going to connect, your user name and password, and so forth. It then creates a connection script that is assigned an icon that resides in Windows 95 together with other such scripts. You can create, store, and edit as many of these separate dial-up scripts as you need. When you wish to connect, you double-click on the icon appropriate to your location, and your computer will dial the number for the location designated. Once connected, you can surf the Web, ftp, or use e-mail software such as Eudora to send and receive messages. As with EUnetTraveller, you do not change your normal software configuration when sending e-mail. Your connection to the Internet may be from some far-flung corner of the world, but your e-mail is checked using your regular e-mail address, user name, and password. Corporate Users The iPass network works for people who normally use dial-up accounts. It can also be set up for corporate users who wish to give individual employees use of the service whenever they are on the road. More sophisticated systems can be established for companies with extensive or specific needs, says iPass. Contact: The first place to contact is your regular Internet access provider. You can locate providers that are part of the iPass network, and see a list of the places where local phone numbers are available, by going to iPass’s Web site at http://www.ipass.com. Information about EUnetTraveller can be found at http://traveller.eu.net. Copyright © 2000 Roadnews.com
