September 2nd, 2010 by Duane Jackson
I thought now might be a good time for us to publish what we do in terms of backing up your data and recovering from hardware failures.
This stuff long ago got more technical than I have the patience (read:competence) for, so I’ll hand you over to Tim McOwan, our CTO.
One of the key benefits of using KashFlow is that we take care of things for you, so that you don’t have to lose sleep worrying about things like “How secure is my data?” and “What happens if disaster strikes and one of the servers fails?”
We’re proud to say we’re hosted with Rackspace, the leading provider of manged hosting solutions. Yes, they’re expensive – but we think they’re worth every penny. They guarantee 100% network uptime and can replace any faulty component in our servers within an hour. We’ve been with them for two years now and have just signed up for another two.
Hardware Failure
Let’s say a component on one of our servers goes bang. Under our contract with Rackspace, and because they’re very good at this kind of thing, they’ll have it replaced, whatever it is, in less than 1 hour.
What if it’s a hard disk that goes bang, where is the valuable data kept and how up-to-date is that data? All of our servers use what is called “RAID“. So if one hard disk goes pop, you wouldn’t even notice. Rackspace would put in a new disk within the hour and KashFlow wouldn’t even sneeze.
Back Ups
What if a Bad Thing happens? Perhaps all the disks fail at once or the datacenter explodes? There’s only one thing more agonising than doing your books, and that’s having to do them twice. So we have lots of backups of your data:
- We take (and verify) an offsite backup of the database every night as a matter of routine.
- We also take a backup of the database every 15 minutes and immediately send that data off-site to a separate datacentre at the other end of the country for secure storage.
- Additionally, we have an expensive bit of software called DoubleTake. This software replicates in real-time all of the data on our live servers to another server on the other side of the country. So if the worst ever happens there would be absolutely zero data lost
Getting back up and running
If the server or data centre has exploded – it’s great to know your data is safe. But what about accessing it and carrying on working as normal?
We have additional hardware on stand-by with our software installed on it. This can be brought online very quickly and use the data copied to it by DoubleTake.
The only problem is with DNS; it can take up to 24 hours for your ISP to redirect your request for our site to the new server.
As a work around, if we ever had to switch over to our back up servers then we would publish a new address so you can quickly access it. This address will be published on our Twitter feed and on this blog. We’d also send an email to all of our users just to be sure.
Testing
The best plans in the world can look great on paper bur fail miserably when they’re implemented. So as you would expect we regularly test our recovery procedures to make sure they actually work and do what we expect them to.
Hopefully this demonstrates to you how seriously we take this stuff, but if you have any questions at all then please email support@kashflow.com and we’ll do our best to answer.
For more of Tim’s techie stuff, see his personal blog at devballs.com
![[Post to Twitter]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-micro3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://blog.kashflow.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-micro3.png){kind=icon}
Tags: backups, devballs, recovery
Posted in Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology | 1 Comment »
August 31st, 2010 by Duane Jackson
There’s been much talk about the impact of your social media presence on your job prospects. The thinking seems to be that a prospective employer searches your name on Google and discovers your Twitter feed or Facebook profile and is alarmed and disgusted by what you get up to at the weekends, your political views or your drunken photos.
Sure, if you’re posting about how great that skunk was that you smoked on Friday night or you’re tweeting homophobic or racist views then it’s going to get you into bother in all sorts of ways as well as ensuring you don’t get that job interview.
But the alternative of total radio silence or private profiles can also be damaging.
We’re currently recruiting for a Digital Marketing Manager (yes, it’s an old post – we’ve had some delays). Imagine I’m looking at two CVs of two individuls that are equally qualified for the role.
One name returns no hits on Google. But the other reveals a Twitter feed. Firstly, just the fact that you’re on Twitter shows you have a real interest in the internet and being involved with technology in your personal life as well as your professional life. Your tweets give me an insight into your interests and your personality. You’re now a real person as opposed to two sheets of paper and the prolific phrase “I work equally well unsupervised or as a part of a team”.
If I have only one interview slot left, guess who’s getting it?
So please, don’t be afraid to tweet/poke/post!
Tags: employment, facebook, social media, Twitter
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 3 Comments »
August 19th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
It amazes me how often I see websites with appallingly bad copy.
If you’re selling to a non-technical audience then pricing your product on gigabytes of data storage is a really bad idea. They don’t know or care how many documents they can store before they hit your 1GB freemium limit and then have to start paying.
The same applies to competitors selling online accounting software like ours. I see so many people saying in big text on their home page that they’re a “SaaS solution” – what does that actually mean to Steve the sparky or Sarah the pie maker?
I spotted a blog post at OpenView recently that linked to this readability calculator.
Essentially you give it a block of text and gives you an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading.
Useful for sanity checking your gobble-de-gook.
Tags: Marketing, openview, pricing, SaaS, twaddle
Posted in Marketing, Technology | 3 Comments »
August 3rd, 2010 by Duane Jackson
There’s no shortage of technological innovations that existed in the pages of a Science Fiction novel long before they existed in real life.
Augmented reality is straight from the books of William Gibson
Submarines from Jules Verne
Satellites from Arthur C. Clarke
- the list could go on and on.
Anyone that’s read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would expect their iPhone/iPad to have the words “Don’t Panic” stamped on them.
I’ve just started reading Containment by Christian Cantrell (eBook for $1.16 here, or free here) and came across the concept of ELP’s or End of Life Plans:
[the] concept of “End of Life Plans,” or ELPs, was adopted by most of the industrialized world. ELPs were simply instructions included with absolutely everything bought or sold that explained what should be done with the item and its packaging in order to discard it. There were, of course, strict guidelines as to what constituted a valid ELP, and strict oversight of those guidelines. Legitimate ELPs included things like returning the item to the manufacturer where it could be refurbished, dropping the item off at a local ELP station which specialized in recycling its components, or, if the material were benign enough, the right colored bin to toss it into.
Consumer adherence to ELPs was also strictly enforced. Anyone caught violating an item’s ELP faced fines or community service, and sometimes even very imaginative forms of public punishment involving bright green jumpsuits or yard signs with short shameful slogans. No item could be bought, sold, or imported without a valid and approved ELP which meant that even countries that weren’t particularly interested in saving the world needed to comply in order to have access to markets that did. Consumers started selecting products based on the attractiveness of their ELPs which meant that as much thought and engineering had to go into the disposing of a product as producing it. Products that weren’t easily recyclable, reusable, returnable, renewable, compostable, convertible, or biodegradable languished on shelves beside their more eco-friendly counterparts. People wanted to feel as good about getting rid of something as they did about acquiring it.
It goes on
It was initially feared that ELPs would ruin the already-fragile world economy. The theory was that raising costs associated with research and development would cause the prices of goods to increase beyond what the market could bear. In reality, however, ELPs ushered in an entirely new era of sustainable economic growth and prosperity.
Even the sharpest and best paid economists underestimated the guilt that the media had gradually installed in consumers for buying goods that were designed to exist in landfills for centuries, but only function for anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe a year. It was true that prices rose, but temporarily; costs were more than offset by the dynamics of guilt-free consumption, and by manufacturers’ ability to refurbish and resell end-of-lifed goods. Entirely new industries sprang up around ELP stations.
Manufacturing costs gradually decreased as more recycled components were used and fewer raw materials had to be purchased and converted. Many manufacturers transitioned into what became known as re-manufacturers. The quality of products even increased so that their components could be reused in future versions. It was common for electronics manufacturers to build very fast processors for their devices, but underclock them so that when they found their way back into their factories through their ELPs, the chips’ constraints could simply be removed, and the entire device resold as the next generation, new and improved. ELPs allowed even the biggest and most powerful of multinational corporations to participate in sustainable and responsible manufacturing practices while still feeling like they were being suitably devious.
To me this seems a great idea to help combat global warming. It doesn’t even require any new technology, just political will.
You thoughts?
Tags: Christian Cantrell, ELPs, ipad, iphone, SciFi, William Gibson
Posted in Ramblings, Technology | 2 Comments »
July 30th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
I read recently that Amazon currently sell something like 180 e-books for every 100 dead-tree books.
I just finished reading Grumby as an e-book on my iPad via the Amazon Kindle software.
The book was a good read and it was a pleasure reading it on the iPad screen. Perhaps the best thing was that I could start reading it mere seconds after deciding to buy it. Instant gratification!
But here’s the problem. As soon as i finished it i thought, “Tim would perhaps like this, I’ll give it to him to read”. And there’s the “gotcha”. With a traditional book you can pass it on to whoever you like and they in turn can pass it on. So that over it’s lifetime a book is probably read by dozens of people.
With the e-book, I can’t do that. Once I’ve finished it it just sits there in my device doing nothing. It’s dead money.
There’s no incentive at all for Amazon and the like to make it possible to pass on an e-book once you’ve read it. They’d obviously prefer Tim went and bought it himself.
Given that most books are the same price or more expensive in the e-book format than they are in paperback, I think for now I’ll stick with dead trees over dead money on my next purchase.
Tags: amazon, ebook, grumby, ipad, kindle
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
July 13th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
Ben Weeks, a KashFlow customer, made a blog post recently about his move to the cloud for all of his business software needs.
He included this great diagram showing all the different products he uses, with arrows showing the integrations/data flow between the apps.
For the full post from Ben, click here.
Tags: carry the one, cloud, SaaS
Posted in Cloud Computing / SaaS, Small Business, Technology | 3 Comments »
June 18th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
Now we have proper programmers focusing on building, improving and maintaining our accounting application, I’m meant to be focusing on marketing whilst we are waiting to fill a marketing manager vacancy we have.
I’m finding that a little bit of programming skill goes a long way with digital marketing.
I have my personal twitter account that I tweet from and we also have @kashflow, the company twitter account. @kashflow uses Google to automatcally parse and tweet RSS feeds of this blog, our changelog and press releases.
But I wanted to also have it send a couple of tweets a day from a pool of a hundred or so pre-written tweets promoting aspects of the software followers may not be aware of.
Building a table of tweets and a stored procedure to select one at random was the easy bit. The tricky bit was getting a stored procedure to actually talk to twitter and send the message. But I managed it. To save anyone else having to write ths from scratch I’m sharing my code here.
SET ANSI_NULLS ON GO SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE PROCEDURE p_SendTweet @username nvarchar(100), @password nvarchar(200), @msg nvarchar(140), @STATUS int output AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON; --create the XMLHTTP object declare @RETURN int declare @object int exec @RETURN = sp_oacreate 'Microsoft.XMLHTTP', @object output --SELECT @return --Open the connection DECLARE @param nvarchar(500) SET @param = 'open("POST", "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml", false, "' + @username + '", "' + @password + '")' exec @RETURN = sp_oamethod @object, @param SET @param = 'send("status=' + @msg + '")' exec @RETURN = sp_oamethod @object, @param declare @output int exec @RETURN = sp_oamethod @object, 'status', @output output exec sp_oadestroy @object SET @STATUS = @output END GO
There you have it. Now to send a tweet from any other stored procedure all you have to do is
EXEC p_SendTweet 'your_screenname','your_password','the message',@output output
If all went well then @output will contain “200″
As a side note, I’ve only written one really techie post before on this blog. I’ve deliberately refrained from doing too many as I’m assuming the majority of readers aren’t too interested in this stuff. If I’m wrong and you’d like more like this then let me know using the comments box below.
Posted in Programming, Technology | 1 Comment »
May 25th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
Last night our KashFlow iPhone App became available in Apples App Store. so if you have a KashFlow account and an iPhone, go get it now. It wont cost you a penny.
Once you’ve downloaded the app you’ll need to enable the API in your account. This is done in Settings -> API Settings.
Using the app you can do everything you’d expect from checking your bank balances, overdue invoices and purchases, adding/emailing new purchases and sales, etc
My favourite feature is the ability to take a photo of a paper receipt and attach it to receipt (”purchase invoice” in accountants lingo) directly from your iPhone. No more lost receipts!
Next version planned already
I expect that over the coming few days we’ll have a whole load of feedback and possibly even some bugs found (the misspelling on the first screen was a deliberate mistake to ensure you were paying attention). So we’re planning to do an update to the App within a week or two once we’ve tweaked it based on the initial feedback.
We don’t have t he skills in house to develop iPhone applications. So we looked for a company we could work with. We selected Pear Computer and we were pleased we did. Ben and Mattias have been brilliant at getting our ideas in to the application and have been very professional throughout the whole process. If you’re looking for someone to develop an app from you then these guys come with a personal recommendation from me.
Download the App – from the App Store
Pear Computers, the developers – website / twitter.
Tags: app, iphone, pearcomp
Posted in Accounting, Technology | 6 Comments »
May 11th, 2010 by Duane Jackson
Recently I’ve had a fair number of people get in touch saying they’re starting SaaS businesses and wanting to pick my brains.
It makes me feel like a bit of a fraud if I’m honest.
The modest success of KashFlow, my SaaS accounting software company, has been mainly down to hard work by other people and some very lucky timing as opposed to any great planning, foresight or execution on my part.
However, a recent conversation threw up an interesting question: what are the essential elements of any SaaS application?
Here’s my stab at an answer
In todays world of interconnected applications, an API isn’t optional. It’s right at the top of my list of must-haves for a number of reasons.
Having an API means lots of other applications can integrate with yours (see our Add Ons page) , making your product a more compelling offering as well as potentially giving you access to other companies customer bases.
The more applications in your ecosystem that a customer uses, the less likely they are to jump ship.
And your API has to be free (some silly sausage here tried to charge users £99/year for it and it set us back quite a bit) and fully functional (I know a number of our integrated apps have been approached by a competitor and they’ve not been able to integrate because they have a less than comprehensive API)
You must provide a free, fully functioning trial of your software. And it must be available instantly.
Some sites make you fill in a form and they then get back to you when the trial is ready for you. That’s just plain silly. Either they’re wasting time trying to filter out competitors (if they want to see it, they’ll see it) or they need some manual intervention to get you up and running (not scalable and probably not real SaaS)
This is something we didn’t factor in at the very beginning and had to retrofit (not fun). If you can provide your software on a white label basis (some times called ‘private label’) you’ll find a whole raft of opportunities to sell your product via different channels.
To make your application available on a white label basis you’ll need to be able to totally eliminate your company/product name from the application, including in address bars. Don’t get precious about your brand, get precious about license fees!
This one will raise some eyebrows with anyone familiar with KashFlow. We’re not the best looking application on the web by any means. This is because I’m a techie and designed the initial interface. Techies don’t do beautiful design. At best we do functional design.
It’s an area of our product we’re working on improving. But changing the UI when you have an established customer base of thousands of users is a delicate thing. Get it right at the outset. It really matters
Would you agree those 4 are essentials? Have I missed anything? Feel free to add your thoughts using the comment box below.
Tags: api, design, SaaS
Posted in Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology | 6 Comments »
April 22nd, 2010 by Duane Jackson
I got lucky at the end of 2008 and got the chance to announce Sages entry to the UK SaaS accounting software market before they did. the luck continued with finding some serious security flaws that forced them to withdraw the product a month after launch.
Their new SaaS product which I’m dubbing “Son of SageLive” is due to be released in a matter of weeks. As I predicted, it’s a “back to the drawing board” jobbie, the problems with SageLive were too fundamental to be fixed.
So with one industry heavy weight about to enter the market, it seems another is close on their heels. Intuit have had an online version of QuickBooks available in the US for sometime, but it looks like they’re now about to launch in the UK.
Witness the following Tweets:
MadelineMcQueen - Found a great business online accounting tool http://www.kashflow.co.uk
(9:13 PM Apr 19th)shaawasmund - @MadelineMcQueen you want to check out Quickbooks – by far the best. We tested everything.
(9:26 AM Apr 20th)MadelineMcQueen - @shaawasmund Quickbooks on-line is not available in the UK, which is what we really need, it is in the US but no plans for release here.
(10:44 AM Apr 20th)shaawasmund – @MadelineMcQueen watch this space … honestly I know far more than what you read!
(11:14 AM Apr 20th)
Shaa Wasmund is a very well respected entrepreneur and founder of Smarta. If she says she knows something, she knows something.
But just to be certain that she is privvy to inside information:
DuaneJackson @shaawasmund KashFlow and Smarta should be working together
(13:00 PM Apr 22nd)shaawasmund @DuaneJackson hear good things about you … However we’re already hooked up with Intuit who are an awesome partner too.
(13:09 PM Apr 22nd)
So there you have it. Not quite as conclusive as seeing the actual product, but I’ll buy a hat and eat it if we don’t see a UK launch of QuickBooks online this year.
Tags: intuit, Quickbooks, SaaS, Sage, SageLive
Posted in Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology | 6 Comments »
