iakttakelser (observations)

iFacturas has lots of reasons to be glad these days: the number of users is growing and growing and now we have been selected as Startup of the Day by the Microsoft BizSpark program. Here's just a portion of the original news: BizSpark Startup of the Day - iFacturas The BizSpark startup of the day is iFacturas, based in Norway and Spain. Below you will find an interview with Morten Jacobsen and Antonio Revaliente of iFacturas. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day! Website:  www.ifacturas.com Tell us who you are and your role in the company: I´m a «General Ledger Visionary» happened to be the in right place at the right time. I´m the CEO and founder of «iFacturas AS» in Norway and Spain. What did you do before creating your company? Creating other companies within the IT and accounting market. How do you feel being the most promising ‘Startup of the Day’ per Microsoft BizSpark? I feel excited about promoting our tools to the only comp...

We're is excited to tell everyone: partners, team members and most importantly customers, that the BizSpark company iFacturas (formerly No Excuse Accounting) have been selected as one of the world’s 25 top-ranked startups of the Innovate!2010 program, produced by Chris Shipley and Mike Sigal, founders of Guidewire Group in Silicon Valley. This is awesome news for us because: we are probably  doing things right with both our product and our business model we are  finalist to be the Innovate!2010 Startup of the Year we can pitch iFacturas to an audience of business leaders, investors, media, and partners For those of you willing to visit Spain and know a bit more about iFacturas, this is an amazing opportunity for you to come to the nice, historic Zaragoza , Spain on December 2nd. What we can proudly say out loud is that iFacturas is one of the 25 most promising startups around the world according to Guidewire Group. This deserves a good celebration! If any of you ...

Bego, Reva and Toni showing iFacturas to El Mundo We've got two pages in the second most important newspaper in Spain, in their startup section in the Valencia edition. Update:  Here you can see the article.

See all these cool templates! I'm really a Microsoft fanboy and owes a lot to BizSpark, although, if you read my blog, it will appear that I'm into Apple too. For me, this is two excellent sides of the same matter. And for me, the result is an iPhone invoicing App, iFacturas, that run on iOS and stores and acts on MS Azure. For me that's really cool!  MS is doing a lot just now, and a blog post from MakeUseOf.com by Mohan Ramkumar tells how you can use WebMatrix to build websites: Microsoft  has a history of releasing some  great free tools  for Windows users now and then. Recently they have unveiled WebMatrix, an all-in-one  web development suite to cater to the development community. WebMatrix is not just a typical IDE or development framework but has a bouquet of tools –  a web server, a SQL database, and a database-ready framework. WebMatrix  is free to download and is available for all Windows users. The new app is ideal for developers buil...

El Pais have been voted as the worlds best newspaper the recent years. Imagine my joy when they announced their arrival to our office in La Vila to take photos! And the chose to take a photo of Toni and Revaliente with me in Skype video between, a bit 'futurama'. In addition we was elected to present at the Vodaphone European contest. Finally, we got iFacturas posted to Apple App Store. I think this could be considered as a great day for us! See the picture here http://www.elpais.com/recorte/20100902elpcibpor_12/LCO340/Ies/Excuse_Accounting.jpg and the article here http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Facturacion/tiempo/real/traves/telefonos/moviles/elpepisupcib/20100902elpcibpor_20/Tes/ This post is written on iPad, and it doesn't have the advanced editing possibilities of Chrome and Internet Explorer. I'll fix that in the evening!

Faktura på 1 kilo kantareller We´re proud to announce that we managed to post iFacturas to app store in August. We´ve been desperately working to fix the lasts bugs before we thought it was good enough to post. Toni Climent has taken the major workload on the app, Bego Fontanet second and Anne Dahl third. They´ve been given some support by @Revaliente and myself. So this marks a huge shift in how we will face the market. We start today on planning our new social media campaign, while we will wait to see if Apple approves our lovely app. Since we´ve not done it before, we haven´t a clue. As you may know, we are a BizSpark company, and are using Azure.

Good news deserve a real flower, and here that means Calenula Officinalis Mark Chillingworth was at the BizSpark European Summit in Paris in May, and we discovered today that he had written about us  here . Amongst the applications on display were simple tools with business models that made you think, "I wish I'd thought of that". My favourite was Spain's No Excuse Accounting, a Smartphone application for invoicing. Pitched at tradesmen it allows them to keep on top of this vital business process from the one piece of IT you can't prize from a plumbers hand, the Smartphone. Coming from a family of tradesmen, I could see the business case for this instantly and it gets my backing, although not financially. Thanks!

Antonio Revaliente in Paris for BizSpark European Summit I have been working as an independent contractor (IC) for over ten years and let me tell you something: being involved in this project, creating iFacturas to allow other contractors feel the freedom of invoicing themselves in a fast and easy way, is just awesome. Time From now on, with iFacturas, any IC will be able to register all accurate billable work hours with the #iPhone and other smartphones. Also, he/she will be able to send the invoices from the point of service. No need to do it at the end of the day, week or month. No need to get all the invoicing paperwork ready for the in-house or outsourced accounting assistant. In less than a minute, the IC will be able to bill and get his/her accounting totally updated. Cost When we decided to develop iFacturas, our goal was to create a comfortable app for the #iPhone and other smartphones. We achieved our goal, and we went beyond. Today, iFacturas is not just a comfortabl...

Markedsansvarlig Antonio Revaliente på McDonalds i Paris. Norge er blandt nyskapnings-sinkene i Europa, skriver Aftenposten i dag. De sier at Norge er: ...som Bulgaria Inntrykket støttes av den siste utgaven av European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). Den viser at Norge ligger godt under innovasjonsgjennomsnittet i Europa.  Undersøkelsen, som er verdens mest omfattende innovasjonsmåling, rangerer 33 lands evne til nyskapning basert på en rekke indikatorer: Patenter, nye tjenester, deres lønnsomhet og innovative samarbeid mellom firmaer, er blant faktorene som plasserer landene i én av fire kategorier. Mens Sverige, Finland og Danmark alle er «innovasjonsledere», rangeres Norge som en «moderat innovatør» sammen med land som Malta, Bulgaria og Hellas. Mine erfaringer som seriegrunder stemmer helt overens med denne beskrivelsen., Firmaet jeg er ansatt i er "Startup of the Day" i Microsofts oppstarts-initiativ BizSpark som teller 35 000 firmaer globalt (3 500 i Europa). Vi ha...

Microsoft BizSpark honour us today. They write. "BizSpark Startup of the Day - No Excuse Accounting No Excuse Accounting, one of the Showcase Startups at the European BizSpark Summit, delivers an ERP solution to Norwegian and Spanish small and medium enterprises. The BizSpark startup of the day is No Excuse Accounting, based in Norway and Spain. Below you will find an interview with Morten Jacobsen, CEO and Antonio Revaliente MD. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!" Bootstrapping ie. blood, sweet and tears are not unknown to the team. Here is Anne (PM), Bego (UX) and Reva (MD) busy doing work in la Vila Joyosa, Spain. Thanks BizSpark! We will pay back with the nicest WP7 app you can imagine :)

Guy Kawasaki and Morten Jacobsen in Paris Tell us who you are and your role in the company: I ́m a «General Ledger Visionary» happened to be the in right place at the right time. I ́m the CEO and founder of «no excuse accounting» in Norway and Spain What did you do before creating your company? Creating other companies within the IT and accounting market. How do you feel being the most promising «Starup of the Day» per Microsoft BizSpark? I feel excited about promoting our tools to the only companies in the world which can really create new jobs - startups. What is your companies mission? Our mission is to help the Independent Contractor stop losing time and money, by providing his loved smart-phone with an compelling new invoicing, accounting and payment experience, as a service in the Cloud. Tell us what your company does in 140 char. 100 millions of independent contractors can use smart-phones as their primary computer, allowing them to invoice at the point of service. How d...

As 18 of MS BizSpark 3500 European partners we was invited to the Summit in Paris. Here is the interview with Morten Jacobsen about BizSpark and how it has helped us:

It was quite a hazzle to understand @ObjectiveMarketer concepts, and get the program running. I had to use a couple of weeks, and get some help to understand their landingpage concept. But overcoming this hinderance things went smoothly. Still I struggle with the analythic, polls, ques, and various lists, but these has to wait... I decided to to publish 3 messages, 4 times with 8 hours between. They have been published to mortjac and ringblomst twitter accounts, to NEA facebook page and my linkedIn page. I had to set some goals, and sat Total clicks to 200, Retweets to 20 and Average Clicks/post to 10. At #BizSpark EU Summit in Paris, @GuyKawasaki talked about his way to tweet. I´m now testing his advises. http://www.iakttakelser.com/2010/05/how-to-drive-traffic-with-repeat-tweets.html#links 15 things you didn´t know about your brain http://www.iakttakelser.com/2010/06/15-things-you-didnt-know-about-your.html#links 10 Ways To Be Your Own Boss: A VC: "The folks at Behance an...

The #BizSpark Eu Summit in Paris discussed entrepreneurship. And it seems the American is not confident that they are so much better... "The global economic downturn has lead to the perception that entrepreneurial opportunities in both the U.S. and Europe have declined. And with the ballooning debts in Europe, many have suggested that these opportunities in Europe are even more restricted. But is the U.S. really in better shape than Europe for entrepreneurship? According to an infographic created by Grasshopper , the differences between the regions aren't as great as one might imagine. The infographic compares what it takes to become an entrepreneur in several Western European nations with what it takes in the U.S. See the whole article here: Europe or the U.S.: Which is Best for Entrepreneurs?

After the excitement around our iFacturas.com  at the #BizSpark EU Summit in Paris, I have to write down some thoughts about immersive computing and invoicing. My main objectives were to represent a physical object and be faithful to the natural user interaction (NUI) metaphor. So we created an electronic representation of the paper invoice. We´ve done that by taking away whitespace and only showing a couple of lines. So in short; its an invoice image, and with this you can flip back and forth to earlier or later invoices. When you touch the invoice, magically appears some buttons, which let you filter between drafts, invoiced, sent and paid invoices. We are now striving to increase the smoothness of the flipping, it still a bit slow. To be true NUI however is pretty difficult. As you can see in our video , we are using some pop-up menu to do what we didn´t find enought space to represent. Now we´re trying to get rid of them, and doing that followi...

I had a great time watching @GuyKawasaki talking at #BizSpark EU Summit in Paris about startups. The following cite from him is something I need to meditate on, so then, right on to my blog. Based on these experiences, I encourage you to break all the “rules” that you’ve heard about social media and make your own. Like my friends from Alaska tell me, unless you’re the lead dogma, the view never changes. 



My thanks to the people at Objective Marketer (whom I advise) and Adjix who provided me with the tools to track clickthroughs for my tweets for this experiment as well as furthering my goal of WWDR (worldwide domination of RSS)." See the rest of Guy´s article

"With Azure and Silvelight Microsoft has finally got it right!" An interview with Morten Jacobsen and Antonio Revaliente by Larry Gregory, taken on the BizSpark Camp in New York City in late January. We try to explain our product and gives a pretty good pitch of the state of the art development made possible by Silvelight, WCF Ria Services and Azure.

GL21Azure , formerly GL21 , is my pet project. It really covers a lot of my 28 years experience with accounting, databases and IT. The cool thing is that the baby runs on SQL Azure, Microsoft virtual SQL servers on their monster container servers. Now and then, GL21Azure have to be updated. We are now in the last phase of finishing an iPhone client for the invoice part of GL21Azure. During the last half year, small changes did make the core proc, addAccountBook.sql, not so convenient as it should, and a bit dull. Well, the last week I updated it, cleaned it and added functionality, so it now can process both journals, accountbook entries and specfications, with versioning, and it evens updates the tagCloud directly. I order to prove this, I updated the testGL21NO.sql test with all these different way of handling accounting entries. I´m really happy with it, and I´m confident it will serve the BizSpark Startup " no excuse accounting as " new iPhone application as a champ, a...

no excuse accounting as was one of five startups selected to deliver a pitch to investors at the BizSpark camp at New York City this afternoon, actually at 19-21 local time at http://bit.ly/bizcamp So you have a lifetime opportunity to see Antonio Revaliente and Morten Jacobsen doing a 15 mins presentation and Q&A.

Camping on #BizCampNYC by Microsoft neat Time Square on Manhattan in NYC. A lot of great people are helping us startups to getting things straight from the start. And there’s a lot to straighten up. We’re trying to get iPhone working with Windows and SQL Azure, WCF Ria services and Silverlight, technology which is supposed to be incompatible. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, we have to do the pitching for investors more correct than ever. They are still investing, but the endless row of bad events are making them cautious. Here we can get help from Azure experts, authentication experts, Bing maps experts, from managers seasoned to deal with investors. All in the context of a marvelous building on Av. de las Americas, excellent food and positive atmosphere. I don’t think SW startups can get better help than here. And it doesn’t matter to lodge on the Time Square and be in the middle of “The Big Apple” – New York City!