Rich Buggy

Lately I’ve been looking at a number of SaaS providers covering a range of areas. It amazes me how many of them have no API or only a reporting API. If you’re thinking of building a SaaS start-up then you should be thinking about creating an API that allows your customers to do everything they can with your user interface.

Service providers with this API have an obvious advantage when it comes to migration and integration but they also have a more subtle and more important advantage. When reviewing potential providers I looked at those with an API before those without. Your SaaS may be the best but without this API are potential customers even considering you?

Normally I’m highly critical of the NSW Government but they seem to finally be doing something right. According to Builder AU the NSW Government is now starting to open data to developers. They’re even running a competition for developers and have an entire website dedicate to providing public sector information. Sadly the site doesn’t contain anything yet but at least they seem to heading in the right direction.

I was a big fan of Planet MicroISV. The site aggregated blogs from a number of MicroISV’s around the world. Unforunately it seemed to disappear in late April this year. Today I found the time to launch a new Planet MicroISV with a new URL (http://planet-microisv.com/). Luckily Google Reader allowed me to recover a number of feeds the old site aggregated.

If you want your blog added (or removed) then send me an email rich@buggy.id.au

I was reading a post on TechNation Australia which contains a quote from the co-founder of a new services market place who describes their point of difference as “not charging”. Free is a great way to get people to try your service but price is never a point of difference. You will always find someone willing to sell a similar product for less. In the end you’ll either lose your point of difference or end up reducing your price until it finally costs you money to make a sale.

Yesterday a new search engine, Cuil, was launched with much fanfare. It was promoted as a “Google killer” created by founders who’s previous company was sold to Google for its search technology. The site had huge problems with the load created by the launch hype and the search results are nothing short of craptacular. I thought I’d give it a go by searching for myself. On the other major search engines this returns a link to my blog while on Cruil it links to LinkedIn, a previous employer and random posts I’ve made around the web but not to my blog.

Today I heard that if you search for “cuil” you don’t even get a link for the search engine itself. I guess next time they’ll try opening it up for beta testing first…