The Small Business Web

Convener, Notes-taker: Sunir Shah

Discussion notes:

I described The Small Business Web (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com), and our goals of increasing the overall market for SaaS amongst Small Businesses by building a "whole product solution" through integrations. FreshBooks is a founding and leading member of this group.

We then talked about how the current market for small business web apps is undergoing a major push by Very Big Companies to get aligned, all due to App Stores. We discussed how it's in all our best interest to push for Open Web standards as the basis of single sign on, account provisioning, embedded interfaces, licensing, billing, and reporting in order to build the largest economy. Failure to adopt Open Web standards will lead to the monopolization of identity by big vendors who will then take a huge cut of all revenue on the Internet. Put simply, whoever owns the business email address, owns the credit card, and can take a sizable toll unless there is open competition.

We discussed the ideal workflow of applications fitting the user's workflow (through embedding; e.g. OpenSocial, Disqus) rather than users being dragged towards applications (through log ins).

We then discussed the implications for Amazon in terms growing of its affiliate market by making Amazon an IDP through OpenID and extending OneClick (tm)'s reach onto its affiliates' websites.