Small Business Software on the Open Web

From IIW

Issue/Topic: Small Business Software on the Open Web

Monday – Session 1 - H

Conference: IIW10 May 17-19, 2009 this is the complete Complete Set of Notes

Convener: Sunir Shah

Notes-taker(s): Sunir Shah

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Sunir from FreshBooks (sunir splat freshbooks dot com) reintroduced the Small Business Web, an organization of over 100 companies looking to build the market for small business software over the Open Web.

We talked specifically about use cases about how to use the Open Web stack in order to engineer a bigger market for small business software.

Use Case 1. Seamless integrations

Cross-sell related services from one app to the other. e.g. FreshBooks recommends Tick for time tracking.

  1. FreshBooks creates a Tick account for the user (OpenID+OAuth)
  2. Tick accepts log-in info from FreshBooks (OpenID)
  3. FreshBooks grants API access to Tick (OAuth)
  4. Tick discovers data! (Contact info, clients, projects) (Portable Contacts, ???)
  5. Maybe Tick charges FreshBooks for the account (???)

Use Case 2. Marketplaces for SaaS apps e.g. Google Apps Marketplace

  • Present
  1. Google creates a FreshBooks account (OpenID+OAuth)
  2. Google provides single sign-on to FreshBooks (OpenID)
  3. Google grants FreshBooks access to data (Contacts) (OAuth, Portable Contacts)
  • Future
  1. FreshBooks charges Google for account (???)
  2. FreshBooks registers Invoice service w/ Google (XRD + registration protocol)
  3. BatchBlue discovers FreshBooks from Google for Invoices (XRD, Webfinger)

We discussed aggregating identity

  • email provider and equipment OEMs are natural sources
  • single sign-on
  • single payment source
  • when you hire Sally and fire Joe and promote Sue, it's easier to add/remove software if identity is managed centrally

We then talked about the issues:

  • negotiating contracts with each ISV partner. Can we automate this?
  • do we need to audit companies with a better business bureau?
  • We need a protocol to register services with the XRD profile
  • Business identities are owned by the business, not the human
  • Password recovery is hard when there are catastrophic staff losses
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