Accountancy, Balance Sheet, Business Processes, FreshBook, Intuit, Invoice, QuickBooks, Small business

FreshBooks Adds Balance Sheet Tool for Small Business Accounting

Image representing FreshBooks as depicted in C...

As part of FreshBooks  shift from online invoicing only to cloud accounting for small businesses,  they’ve expanding on their accounting offering with the release of Balance Sheets, a tool at helping businesses prepare to apply for loans, grants, submitting taxes, or seeking investors.

The new Balance Sheet tool allows users to see a summary of assets, liabilities, and equity and easily determine the health of their business.

FreshBooks claims more than 5 million users in 120 countries, and says “No one in North America has more paying users online other than Intuit’s QuickBooks Online. ”

More info on Balance Sheets is available at the FreshBooks Blog.


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Symform to Exhibit and Speak at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that Symform, a revolutionary, distributed cloud backup service, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Symform is a revolutionary and secure cloud backup service. The Symform Cloud Storage Network protects your files, your business, and your bottom line: when you contribute to our network, we provide you unlimited cloud storage and backup for free. Unlike traditional data center storage, Symform’s network encrypts, shreds, and globally distributes data. This disruptive technology provides more secure, more cost-effective, and higher-performing cloud backup than any alternative today. Customers join the Symform network by contributing excess local drive space and, in exchange, receive free cloud backup.

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Virtualization Takes Cloud to the Next Level

BancVue creates the services that empower its customers to beat the giants in their field by better leveraging agile IT.
The first thing we wanted to do was to abstract the applications and the operating system from the hardware so that a hardware failure wouldn’t bring down our systems. For that, of course, we went to virtualization. We experimented with various virtualization products. Out of those trials, vSphere was the best software for a heterogeneous environment like ours, where we had Windows and different flavors of Linux.

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Canonical, Cinder, nova, Open Source, OpenStack, Partnerships, SolidFire, Storage

SolidFire, Canonical Deliver Deployable OpenStack Nova, Cinder

SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems for cloud service providers, announced today, in conjunction with Canonical, a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production- ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the OpenStack Summit, taking place October 15 through October 18 in San Diego.

John Griffith from SolidFire and David Medberry from Canonical will co-present the summit’s first workshop: “How to Deploy a Best-of-Breed OpenStack Compute and Block Storage Cloud” on Monday, October 15, at 9:50 a.m. local time. The session will include information on deployment tools, tips and tricks, targeted use cases, benchmark results and key enabling technologies.

“SolidFire has done a great job leading the Block Storage project in line with the OpenStack philosophy of delivering a pluggable architecture with integration points for multiple vendors and technologies,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s exciting to see more production implementations and configuration options available to OpenStack users.”

“Canonical has worked with SolidFire to ensure tight integration of Cinder into Ubuntu OpenStack packages to deliver a production-ready cloud infrastructure. As the reference operating system for OpenStack, Ubuntu was the natural choice to integrate with SolidFire’s solution,” commented Nick Barcet, Ubuntu cloud product manager at Canonical. “We believe SolidFire’s work in OpenStack is extremely important to the ecosystem, because it allows cloud providers to enhance their offering with high IOPS storage and unprecedented quality-of-service. They have also been leading the Cinder project in OpenStack to deliver a great abstraction layer that can be reused by other vendors to integrate their own solution.”

“Cinder has gotten off to a very successful start thanks to the hard work of more than 50 individual contributors,” said John Griffith, senior software engineer at SolidFire. “We delivered a deep feature set in our first release of Cinder, which allowed us to move quickly with Canonical in executing this powerful production-ready reference architecture for large-scale multi-tenant clouds.”

Key SolidFire-related features in the first OpenStack Cinder release include:

  • Full SolidFire driver integration
  • Ability to create, snapshot and manage SolidFire volumes using
    OpenStack clients and APIs
  • Ability to set and maintain true QoS levels on a per-volume basis
  • Ability to store instances on SolidFire volumes
  • Enhanced boot from volume options, including support for SolidFire
    volumes

SolidFire’s efforts around OpenStack are further evidence of its commitment to delivering proven, integrated storage solutions for its customers’ cloud infrastructures. This Cinder integration milestone follows SolidFire’s recently announced integration with major technology vendors across the cloud ecosystem.

Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfireinc | www.facebook.com/solidfire.


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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Leverage Connectivity to Speed Up Data Access

Fast and easy remote data access is essential for SaaS-based ERP systems today.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, David Shugars, Sr. Software Engineer, Research & Development at Plex Systems, Inc., will describe how Plex Online uses superior connectivity to provide simplified data access for compatibility with a broad range of standard reporting tools. With this powerful data integration, Plex users simply access business, production, financial, and other data from their manufacturing operations through queries, and combine the information with data from other sources as required to generate custom reports.

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Asure, FotoPunch, Human Resources, Partnerships, Time Tracking

Asure Software Partners with FotoPunch for Mobile Employee Time Tracking

Asure Software announced that it has entered into a private label licensing agreement with FotoPunch, Inc. FotoPunch is a SaaS-based technology company that offers biometric and geospatial technology solutions to track employee time from virtually anywhere at anytime.

“We are very excited to be partnering with FotoPunch to offer mobile time and data collection solutions to our AsureForce™ Time & Labor Management (TLM) clients,” commented Pat Goepel, Asure’s Chief Executive Officer. “This partnership is in complete alignment with our strategy to quickly bring to market innovative, cloud-based solutions that work when, where and how workforces are operating today. FotoPunch technology is the first of its kind in the time and labor management industry.”

FotoPunch uses facial recognition and GPS software to allow employees to punch in and out using any mobile device, including smartphones, feature phones and dumbphones with a camera and SMS capabilities. When clients deploy this capability, they increase manager and employee productivity, reduce payroll costs, and avoid hardware costs. And users can access data without requiring Internet access, which is significant for highly mobile employees. The solution can also run through wall-mounted tablets in busy work areas.

From a workplace productivity perspective, managers have instant access to information via a web-based dashboard to track when and where employees are working, eliminate time fraud and stop buddy punching. FotoPunch also integrates with AsureForce TLM solutions and virtually any payroll solution.

“Our patent-pending technology will help expand Asure’s solution portfolio, but more importantly, this one-of-a-kind mobile technology provides truly measureable benefits to clients,” said Lance Ellsworth, Vice President of Business Development for FotoPunch.


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The Power of Opacity in REST

Fundamentally, the client has no way of knowing anything at all about what’s really going on behind the scenes. The resource might be a file, a script, a container, an object, or some complicated combination of these and other kinds of things. There are two important lessons for the techies behind the curtain: first, don’t assume resources come in one flavor, and second, it’s important to understand the full breadth of capabilities and patterns that you can leverage when architecting or building resources. After all, anything you can give a URI to can be a resource.

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Rock – till You Drop – to The Temptations at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley!

SYS-CON Events announced today that the legendary group The Temptations will perform at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, upcoming at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the first week of November (Nov 5-8).
While the Cloud has been doing well for just six or seven years, The Temptations have been prospering for forty, propelling popular music with a series of smash hits, and sold-out performances throughout the world.
On November 6, 2012, at 8 p.m., The Temptations will wow Cloud Expo attendees with music that spans R&B, doo-wop, funk, disco, soul, and adult contemporary music.
All Cloud Expo delegates, sponsors and exhibitors are invited to attend the Temptations concert on the Expo Floor, November 6 at 8 p.m. Enjoy such hits as «My Girl,» «Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me),» and «Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone» performed by one of the most successful groups in music history.

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Complex Problems Need New Approaches

A one-size-fits-all approach to network optimization and applications performance is no longer adequate.
New realities of delivering applications and content in the cloud and mobile era demand a more situational capability among and between enterprises, clouds, and the many popular end devices.
That is, major trends have conspired to make inadequate a one-size-fits-all approach to today’s complex network optimization and applications performance demands, says an executive from Akamai Technologies. Rather, more web experiences now need a real-time and dynamic response tailored and refined to the actual use and specifics of that user’s task.

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Of Escalators and Network Traffic

Escalators are an interesting first world phenomenon. While not strictly necessary anywhere, and taking more horizontal space than an elevator, they still turn up all over in most first-world countries. The key to their popularity is, no doubt, the fact that they move traffic much more quickly than an elevator that has to stop and go, and offer the option of walking while on them to increase speed to destination even more.
One thing about escalators is, they’re always either going up, or down. Not something you see in an elevator that changes direction with each trip.

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