| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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The Ultimate Business Machine - ArchivesList of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel * Thu 05 Jan 2006 Another year over, a new one's just begunCategory : Commentary/YearOver.txt So this is Christmas Together with Hai Hwee, we've managed to get five pieces of software done last year - Postfix Enabler for Tiger, DNS Enabler, WebMon, MailServe and Luca Accounting. I'm trying to create a set of tools that will allow people to run a business on top of the Mac platform - tools that will allow the business to communicate with a potential customer base (through email and a web site), build a community around the use of its products, transact business on-line and in real-time, as well as account for the money flows. And I'm using this Mac@Work site to demonstrate what I mean. So what I hope to do in the coming year is to deepen the value of each of the products, cover the gaps between the products (if that is something we can do), and make the pieces easy to snap together and set up quickly - always with the objective of helping people get going using the tools to serve their businesses better. There are obvious things that can be done - if you're a user of WebMon or MailServe, you probably have a very good idea of what I should be working on to help you manage or exploit the web and mail server better. But there are other things that can be done - e.g., Luca. I believe that the most important thing about managing one's life is to get a firm grip on where all the money has gone - whether you're an individual managing your personal finance, or a small business owner, or a large corporation. I think we've got a very good double-entry engine built into Luca. And it's got a nice interface for traversing through all the figures, drilling down into the details and making cross-references, so that you'll get a good picture of where all the money has gone. But it needs a little more work to make it suitable as a personal finance tool for individuals, especially when it comes to data-entry. Do we need another accounting application for the Mac when there is Quicken and MYOB? I don't know. What I know is that they're not Mac-centric and I'd rather do my own since we can do it, and having control over it, I can tie it in with all the other stuff we're doing, building tools for Mac business users. And managing the business means managing the business's finances. There is one more thing I'd like to do. Bundle all of Hai Hwee's work interfacing with PayPal into a package people can download and set up so that they can also do business on the web the way we've done. There is quite a bit of negativity surrounding PayPal, about its susceptability to fraud and all that, and that's probably deserved. But in the realm of powerful ideas, I can put forward a case that PayPal is probably the most important test-bed we have right now for deriving A New World Currency. I think, in the scheme of things, PayPal is more important entity than eBay, its parent, and may end up being a whole lot more valuable (if eBay doesn't kill it first through mis-management). So, I'd like to do a PayPal-based, PHP-based, eCommerce solution. But PayPal has a more interesting web-services-based solution that we haven't been able to access yet because we're outside the US. I think that would make for a neater solution and so we'll wait until there's a better time to work on that. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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