I was in San Francisco two weeks ago for Office 2.0 conference. The effort was the third installment of Ismael Gahlimi’s pledge to bring together leading minds in the Web 2.0 space for a 3-day discussion about moving the duties associated with work off of the hard drive and onto the Internet — exclusively.

That means all of it, from data storage to accounting, and everything in between. It’s a radical shift in concept. Moving all of a business’ operations into “the clouds” gives pause to some (data security junkies) and brings smiles to others (whomever might be concerned about the bottom line).

Whatever your feeling about moving organizational functionality into a hosted state, the fact that it’s gaining momentum is impossible to deny.

Thankfully for those of you who need to use email (please don’t overlook the sarcasm there), Email Center Pro is a product with its eye on “the clouds”. And that’s probably one reason I felt so at ease while scrolling through the demo booths last week in San Francisco. Yes, there were plenty of cool applications on display. But were any of them attempting to do to email what we are? No, not that I could tell.

With a rich feature set that’s only sweetening as we approach the public release of version 2, it was nice to see that Email Center Pro might be standing in the gap between the obligation of email and the genuine usability of a collaborative tool.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Blogtrepreneur recently posted “101 Useful Resources” for internet entrepreneurs. I heard about it from Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, who summarizes very well in “The Online Entrepreneur.” She points out some important differences between online entrepreneurs and the world at large:

Such businesses have unique needs that are very different from their more traditional brick-and-mortar cousins. Online businesses tend to be heavy users of online software applications. They conduct a higher percentage of their business processes and transactions online—they may invoice online, buy products primarily online, pay bills and invoices online, and prefer to be paid online as well.

They are naturally more savvy when it comes to social networking because, after all, that’s where they get most of their business from. Many are freelancers and often hire other freelancers or small businesses, instead of hiring employees.

Campbell makes three additional points about the list of resources:

1. Obviously it is a helpful list of services for online entrepreneurs—you’re bound to find a few useful resources.

2. The list is revealing in how this segment of online entrepreneurs works and how they operate their businesses. It’s very telling in what’s important to them and what products they need. A list like this is a form of “word of mouth.”

3. The majority of the products and services on the list are by smaller companies (with obvious exceptions, such as Google and PayPal). Smaller entities have been fastest to catch on to what this market segment needs, often because it is what they needed, so they created a solution to meet their own needs.

So that’s a very good list. Here’s the URL again: “101 useful resources for online entrepreneurs.”