The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

My good friend and Zillion business partner Simon Barton finally took the covers off his new shopping site today with the launch of Mighty Ape.

Simon, Matt and the rest of the team at GP Store have been working hard on Mighty Ape for a very long time and I really rate them to go all the way and deliver New Zealand a truly world class shopping web site. The site’s great, they have a warehouse packed full (really full) of stock and a solid team of guys and girls packing and shipping orders quickly (like GP Store, Mighty Ape offers same day shipping of in stock items).

Well done guys. Seriously well done.

Check out Mighty Ape

I love web apps. I love having access to the same data at home and at the office. I love being able to collaborate with members of the team who work remotely.

At Zillion we already use Google Docs and Basecamp and last month to prove I’m not a total hater we added Xero to the mix.

Xero doesn’t disappoint. It works as well as it looks. I’m yet to be convinced the numbers stack up on the business side but they’ve built a truly world-class product that should benefit hugely from word-of-mouth. My new accountant works for a firm and while she’d heard of Xero she’d never used it. Thanks to the intuitive interface (that recently picked up an award from one of my usability hero’s Jakob Nielsen) she was up and running in no time and has already signed up to one of their Auckland-based advanced training sessions. Another convert that will no doubt tell her friends.

So thanks to Xero when my accountant enters and reconciles transactions I can see the results in real time. It’s a great feeling and I recommend Xero to any web savvy business owner. Aside from the price and the possiblity of it being increased once you’re “locked in” I don’t see any reason for small business owners to stick to MYOB.

Good work Xero and best of luck getting those subscription numbers up.

PS: if anyone from Xero is reading this. We loved Xero so much we did the unthinkable and re entered three years of historical data into Xero. Because BNZ Internet banking doesn’t let you export data further back than 6 months we did a lot of manual entering. While I appreciate entering transactions manually one at a time isn’t your core business the interface for this could be improved hugely if you let people enter more than one transaction per page. Web apps will never be as fast as local apps and waiting for pages to load is a pain, especially if you’re reloading once every 20 seconds or so.