December 2005

I have been looking with argus eyes to Numsum. Why bringing a desktop application to the web without considering even one minute alternative ways to solve a problem.
It just reminds me how the car was invented. You just replace the horse by an engine and there you go. One of the biggest mistakes and opportunities mankind missed.

Let’ say you want to make your financial plan for your 10 men company, household budget or you just got appointed as the treasurer of your local tennis club. What do you do?
You go to the local store and buy Excel.

You come home and then the challenge starts. How do you begin? How do you organise it? How does it work? What do you put where? Read the manual? Basically you just bought your self a pain in the neck.

Imagine now a different kind of solution.

You go to a website called tennisclubfinance.com. You sign up for free and the site takes you step by step organising your bookkeeping for tennis clubs. You have organised ticking boxes for categories such as: Maintenance, Equipment, Clubresto, Printing, etc... All of these categories have sub categories such as: Cleaning the court, purchase of balls, buying drinks or stationary.

That is just for the expenses. For the income you can have membership fees, parties, or a raffle.
When you have all nicely done this, you start giving in data.

You also have a section for cash management.
Basically it is a small bookkeeping online application.

Ok, You can do this in Quickbooks, but you have to do the category thinking yourself.
But I am not finished yet.
Now you go to the other section of the website to keep track of all the scores.
Your tennis friend used to do that also in a spreadsheet. Now you just can nicely fill in the result of every match. Check performance of every individual.
Now we go to the other section where the data of every member is. Before the members data was also managed in an Excel sheet.
We select every body who played that weekend and they get a mail with their performance and overall results.

From the same application you can maybe manage your clubs website by posting news or sending out mails to visitors with a map how to get there. A small section for selling online second hand gear.

Same you could do for a financial plan or your household plan if you are creative.
Or think about an online asset management for your private belongings. You do need that for insurance purposes.

My point is that a spreadsheet need never stands alone. It is part of a bigger project or need. This is where online applications will wipe out the need for a web based spreadsheet. As Google co-founder Sergey Brin says in The Register it will be in an other form. And as Jason Fried says in Bussinessweek: carpenters or metalworkers, have very specific tools for each job.
For every need their could be an online application. Just look at Basecamp, it is more then a to-do list, it is answering the main needs of every website building company and others.

If you doubt there is no market for this? Just imagine that you charge 5 $/€ a month and you have only 0.001% of all the tennis clubs worldwide as a customer?

Spreadsheets on the web will be of marginal use ! 

What strikes me is that many reviews and forum discussions ask what kind of programs run on it. I believe this is the wrong question.

My Powerbook 12" broke over a month ago and since then I live without a PERSONAL computer. I decided to see if I can live without my OWN computer. Since then, I access the computers of my kids, the computers in the office or my tablet.
I moved all my desktop applications to the internet.

 

• For my mail I use Gmail, my office mail gets forwarded to Gmail automatically and now I don’t have 300 spams anymore daily, since Google filters it. Thanks Google!
  

• I moved over 5000 pictures to Flickr. Next month I move another 5000 since they have an uploading limit per month. When I go to my mothers place I have them all with me.
  

• My Calendar is now Trumba.com online that communicates with Ical caplacelendars that people use in the office.
  

• For working with Collegues and clients in the office we moved already since months all our projects to Basecamphq.
  

• My recipes, To-Do lists and other stuff I manage on Backpackit. This gave me even the possibility to access my recipes at my sister place last week.
  

• Our bookkeeping will run on the internet starting from the 1st of January on Winbooks.
  

• My bookmarks are on delicious
  

• The timesheets of the company will be moved in a week to MyHours.com
  

• All the info of the company we moved to a Knowledgebase same way that Wikipedia works.
  

• I also moved our Family Tree to the internet.
  

• If somebody sends me a word or excel file I can create for free a pdf file , so I can read it.
  

Oh, there is ONE application I installed, GAIM since Meebo does not work yet for chatting on the Nokia 770.
There is also one problem I had today since somebody in the office asked me to send him my vcf card. Can’t do that yet from my tablet, but I used my phone and send it by sms....

 The connectivity issue?

I have a Nokia 320 with GPRS. GPRS has full coverage in Belgium and also on my last holidays in Egypt and Turkey GPRS was available. (Egypt was really expensive; don’t do that ).
Wifi I use at home.

I live in Brussels and you would be surprised how many Wifi ports are open.
Yesterday I was at my doctor place and could choose between 3 different non password protected Wifi’s.
When I showed my doctor what a good reception I had; he said: "Oh, that is my network!" .....................

Brainstorming and programming for months finally ThingsBreakDown is launched. A new on line application. Most on line applications try to do something that you already do on your desktop. This one solves a problem that is a combination of internet access and on line application. Reporting broken things. Maybe a simple thing, but a huge problem - read challenge- for retailers, schools, campus, real-estate people. Before you can fix something, you need to know what is broke and WHERE. ThingsBreakdown is an answer to that. You could call it an Web2.0 app but I prefere to call it just a on line application, a simple one.