As SaaS companies start to mature and go public (there were several in 2007 and a flood expected in 2008 and 2009) there is starting to be some interesting discussion about the real economics of a SaaS business. A new debt financing firm named SaaS Capital recently released a white paper titled Understanding the Financial Implications of the Software-as-a-Service Business Model. My experiences don’t agree with everything they say, but I find it fascinating that there is now a dedicated SaaS debt financing company.

Following on the “sales” theme I received the following question yesterday from a regular reader. Are you aware of any blogs that regularly deal with issues that arise when startups sell technology to customers? I am thinking of issues like: choosing strategic partners/ resellers/integrators/selling directly how to get to customers using a PR firm; spending on a website what a presentation should look like the sales cycle process deal structures key provisions – exclusivity, pricing, ownership of IP, liability If you are a VP Sales blogger (or sales guy (or gal – Amy made me say that) blogger) that is writing about this stuff, please leave a comment with your link. Wendy Lea – time to start blogging!

You are an experienced software sales person. You just drained your 2007 sales pipeline and are frustrated with the lack of growth of your existing company. You want to join a well funded company with great products, loads of referenceable customers, in a market that is exploding. Plus – you want to hang with people that know how to have fun. If you fit any of the following parameters, NewsGator is looking for you.

I heard a great line recently. Michael Price – one of the senior guys at Evercore and a long time friend (we were on the PeoplePC board together) was interviewed. Buried in the middle of a bunch of questions was a gem when the interviewer asked Michael about trust. The following popped out: “Trust is the business word for love.” Perfect.

My last book of 2007 was Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, one of the CIA books recommended in the comments of my post History of the CIA. I read it on my Kindle, which I love. I’ve read a lot of books in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that was as profoundly negative and damning on any organization. The author – Tim Weiner – is a well regarded Pulitzer Prize-winner New York Times correspondent so this book is the real deal.

Tom Evslin picked up my challenge to help invalidate the proposed patent in my post Have You Ever Coded a Progress Bar? Tom has prior art going back to 1987 from a program he wrote called Desktop Express (Dow Jones Software). He writes his thoughts and how he’s nailed 5 of the 20 claims in his post Patent Absurdity – A Possible Cure. Tom got on the Peer-to-Patent site and entered a detailed challenge to five of the claims. 

I didn’t listen to any voicemail in 2007. I got plenty of them – but I didn’t listen to any of them. Yet I got 100% of the information that people left to me. I discovered a magical system that transcribes voicemails to emails. And it doesn’t involve anyone that works for me. I’ve been searching for a speech-to-text voicemail conversion system for a while. I approached the problem incorrectly – I assumed that it was a technology issue. I’d periodically come across something that tried to do what I wanted but truly sucked. For a while I had my assistant transcribe my voicemails, but that was tedious, a poor use of her time, and often had a lag if the call was after hours or when she was in the middle of other stuff. Plus, she hated doing it (think “extremely tedious part of the job – yuck.”)

It appears that Vonage had something in its patent portfolio that Nortel didn’t like. Several weeks ago Nortel sued Vonage for patent infringement. They just settled for a limited cross license to three patents. Good for Vonage for standing up to Nortel.

Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. Plaxo. Gmail. Email Contacts. Bebo. Every individual social networking software product that I use (Dogster, Shelfari, …) Oh how I friend thee. Let me count the ways. I’m already seeing “predictions for 2008” that it will be the year of “friend consolidation.” How exciting. Phase 1 (of at least 10) is starting to appear. You can now see your LinkedIn data inside of Facebook (but you can’t really do much with it – yet.) And of course this isn’t an “official LinkedIn app – just something someone else put together.) Or – using Fuser – you can now see your MySpace data inside of Facebook. Again – you can’t do much with it.