Google Search Changes to Affect CPA Firms

Tax season is finally over. For many, now is a time for some relaxation before ramping back up for summer work.

For those that just don’t feel comfortable relaxing and are looking for something new to worry about now, you can start worrying about your website now. According to Google, on April 21, their mobile search platform will start favoring mobile-friendly websites.

What does this mean exactly? It means that websites that are not optimized for mobile and tablet devices will move down in the Google rankings and, by extension, those sites that are mobile optimized will move up...

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Source: Melissa Hennig (www.accountingtoday.com)

How firms can use social media more effectively

CPA firms have a long way to go before they are making effective use of social media, according to a new survey report.

Firms can improve their effectiveness on social media with better training and tools, and by adopting written social media policies and monitoring metrics, says the 2014 Social CPAs Survey, How Accounting Firms Use Social Media Today.

The report, produced by consultancy SocialCPAs, Inovautus Consulting, and the Association for Accounting Marketing, can be downloaded for free...

...Firms seeking to improve their social media effectiveness, according to MacQuarrie and Dobek, can do so by:

Training . Half of the survey respondents said they provide their employees no training in use of social media. “I talked with some CPAs about LinkedIn, and they were asking, ‘Why would you need training on LinkedIn? Everybody knows how to use it,’ ” MacQuarrie said. “And I think the perception is, much like Excel, if I know 10% or 20% of Excel, I feel like a power user. And I have no idea what I don’t know"...

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Source: Ken Tysiac (www.journalofaccountancy.com)

Tomorrow, Apple Will Officially Kill The Credit Card

Someday, your teenage child (or grandchild) will stumble across a credit card in an old desk drawer and ask you: “what was this for?” That day is imminent. The extinction of the credit card will officially begin tomorrow, September 9th. Is your business ready?

As you’re probably aware, tomorrow is when Apple will announce a bunch of new products, updates and services. The company, according to leaked reports, intends to intoduce a new “iWatch”, a bigger, more durable iPhone and further details on its OS operating system and Mac hardware.

But the biggest news that will affect us, as retailers, business owners and consumers, will be the company’s support of NFC (Near Field Communications) for mobile payments. NFC, which has been around for years, allows two devices to transfer encrypted data at short range using radio waves. Up until now the major backer of the technology has been Google. But as popular as Android devices are around the world, it’s the iPhone that rules in the economies (i.e. the U.S.) that pay the bills. And Apple for years has instead resisted jumping on the NFC bus. That will change this week, according to all accounts. And the impact will be fast and enormous.


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Source: Gene Marks (www.forbes.com)

10 Best Practices for Accounting Firm Online Content

BKR International hosted a panel of some of the best accounting marketers in the country in conjunction with the Association for Accounting Marketing Annual Summit in Austin, Texas. Putting their smart brains together, they agreed on 10 best practices for building the reputation and visibility of accounting firms in a high technology, but still high touch industry.

1. Responsive Design
Responsive design is an approach that crafts websites and other content for an optimal viewing experience on any device. It provides easy reading and navigation with minimal resizing, panning or scrolling. “Any new content should be oriented toward responsive design, not just accessibility on a mobile device,” noted Wendy Nemitz, BKR panelist and principal of Ingenuity Marketing Group, St. Paul.

To read full article and view the slideshow, click here.

Source: Accounting Today (www.accountingtoday.com)

Tech - Transforming the Way We Work

10 years ago I started Hamilton Bradshaw and our success to date is something I'm very proud of. One of the things I enjoy most about the world of business is the way in which practices, approaches and technology are constantly changing and developing.

If you carried on doing the same things over and over again you would get bored very quickly and run the risk of losing out to rivals who embrace change and are prepared to evolve.

Of course the fundamental principles of business remain the same – understanding your customers, getting your margins right and providing a great product or service. But the way we all do business has changed dramatically over the last 10 years and there is every reason to believe that even more changes are just around the corner.

Attitudes in the workplace have become more relaxed in recent years, particularly in the creative sector and in the communications business. But that does not mean that they are less focused or professional. The changes in atmosphere and attitudes are simply a reflection on the way society has changed and evolved.

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Source: James Caan (www.linkedin.com)

Google Bought a Satellite Startup to Make Maps, Not Internet Connections

The battle for the sky continues. Google (GOOG) has spent $500 million to buy Skybox Imaging, a company that uses small satellites to transmit high-resolution images from space. Tuesday’s announcement comes only two months after Google acquired Titan Aerospace, which beams Internet signals from high-altitude drones. In March, meanwhile, Facebook (FB)spent $20 million on Ascenta, another drone maker.

Google plans to use Skybox’s satellites to make better maps with “up-to-date imagery,” the company said in a statement. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief—areas Google has long been interested in.”

Skybox has only a single satellite in orbit right now but plans to fly a fleet of them to cover the entire globe at all times. Constantly updated satellite images would be of interest to everyone from agricultural companies and hedge funds to hardware stores. A demonstration earlier this year showed how Skybox satellites could be used to monitor oil reserves from space.


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Source: Joshua Brustein (www.bloomberg.com)

Cloud from "An Accountants Perspective"

All of us have received the email from an IT company or read an article on Cloud Technology. Having also undergone recently a major upgrade on our servers this was at the top of our agenda as to which way we went, Internal or Cloud. There was so much debate about the pros and cons of the Cloud. And yes being accountants cost did come into it and it was surprising to see what this Cloud would cost us extra over an internally server based system.

And this is where i get to from "An Accountants Perspective", the industry in promoting the Cloud is getting it all wrong. Basically the Cloud is just off premises storage of data that allows the collaboration of data. The first part of this sentence is already happening with so many apps and tools we use on a daily basis, be it Apple products or Google apps. The latter part is the key.

This is why I feel the sell of this Cloud is a bit of a have. Everyone's focus is wrong. To date we have been primarily focused too much on our own internal processes. Generally most businesses are fairly efficient and there is only so much more that one could "beat" out of our staff more. Most technologies to date have allowed us to automate our processes including the internal management systems that we use to run our businesses.

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Source: Paul Yovich (www.linkedin.com) 

And The Best Small Business Cloud Accounting Software Is...

The very fact that you’re reading this marks a milestone. Would you have been interested in a “cloud based” accounting application only a few years ago? Probably not. You were probably, like myself and most small business owners, still trying to get your arms around the cloud and doubting that you would ever entrust your most critical financial data to some outside company. But things have changed. Online, or cloud financial applications, are slowly but surely becoming the norm. Many small business owners are taking notice, particularly because of their benefits.

And the benefits are many: access from anywhere, integration with other popular third party cloud applications and banking software, better backup, quicker bug fixes, immediate access to upgrades. And, let’s face it: better security. No cloud provider, not even the Department of Defense, can provide 100% security against hackers. But with so many threats today many business owners are reluctantly agreeing that their financial data is probably better secured by a cloud provider whose business model is reliant on security than on their own server that’s looked after maybe once a month by their local IT guy.


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Source: Gene Marks (www.forbes.com)

To Manage IT, Speak Their Language

I’ve heard it said more than once that “accounting is the language of business,” but as some of my colleagues who work in technology departments for their firms know, accounting and tax services can, at times, seem worlds apart from software and systems.

After all these years of firms building out advanced, integrated technologies to help them deliver services to clients, the relationship between a firm’s IT department and the rest of the firm, including practice and other non-practice departments, still, at times, seems divided.  Like referees in a football game, the IT department in many firms is only noticed when something goes wrong. This reality leads to the perception that IT is not much more than a necessary cost of doing business.

Changing this perception boils down to one word: management.

Managing a firm’s IT is just like anything else in the firm: you have to lead people and manage everything they produce, including creating and designing processes, and implementing and evaluating systems. You also have to create value and communicate that value to the rest of the firm in business terms everyone can understand.


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Source: Chad Poplawski (www.accountingtoday.com)

Why Cloud Browsers Are The Wave Of The Future

A tiring bit of Internet security advice one often hears suggests using a separate and dedicated browser for sensitive transactions such as online banking or checking your medical data. In the past this meant sorting out which was the secure browser and then avoiding it for other purposes or even using a different computer altogether.

“Set up a separate, Java-free browser dedicated just to shopping and banking,” security software company F-Secure suggested in December ahead of the holidays. “Busy, distracted people doing their holiday shopping online may be more susceptible to falling into malware traps that attempt to steal credit card info or banking passwords.”

“Java-free what?” would be most people’s response. Now several companies are making this process easier and ever safer through cloud-based browsers that store no data from each session and prevent any malware from interacting with your computer.

To read full article, click here.

Source: Adam Tanner (www.forbes.com)

Technology Has Redefined the Accounting Firm

Technology has led to the evolution of many industries. However, the accounting industry has always been slow to adopt change.

I’m sure when most think of an accountant, there is still a stereotypical image of an elderly individual with a calculator on their desk and papers shuffled up in piles throughout the office.

This stereotype is probably derived from the fact that accounting practices have been run in a similar fashion for the last twenty years with only minor innovations in the operations of the day to day practice.

There is now a new breed of accounting firms that leverage technology to make the lives of their clients simpler. I believe that the evolution of the modern day firm extends beyond the improvements in technology. There has been a dramatic shift in the relationships between clients and business owners.

In the past, accountants served merely as compliance officers to ensure tax filings were processed in a timely manner, however the new breed of accountant offers value added services to simplify the lives of business owners. As technology has been at the forefront of this evolution, here are some of the major changes that have taken place. 

To read the full article, click here.

Source: Mike Pinkus (www.techvibes.com)

Handset Makers Go Big on Smartphones

BARCELONA, Spain — Smartphones are going against one of the long-held rules in portable electronics, that smaller is better.

Year by year, computers, storage devices and music players have shed size and weight. And for decades, it has been happening with cellphones, too.

But now cellphones, and smartphones in particular, are going the way of the television: They just keep getting bigger and bigger. And people keep buying them.

The trend became even more apparent this week, as handset makers introduced a number of big-screen smartphones — from five diagonal inches to more than seven inches — at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.


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Source: Brian X. Chen (www.nytimes.com)

Top Technology Trends Shaping Accounting and Finance in 2014

As we kick off 2014, our thoughts inevitably turn to what will happen in the New Year. Here is my personal take on trends, change agents and motivators for accounting and finance in 2014.

Cloud to leap forward. According to Gartner, cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016. IDC predicts that from 2013–2017, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, five times that of the IT industry as a whole. Although cloud adoption in the finance function initially lagged behind other functions including HR, sales and marketing, it is now catching up.

As the cloud market starts to mature, two important themes will become more evident in 2014. Firstly, larger organizations will continue to transition to the cloud, often as part of a two tier strategy as they seek to wind down legacy systems and simultaneously leverage new applications available in the cloud. Secondly, cost reduction will no longer be seen as the main driver behind a move to the cloud. CFOs will see that the cloud can serve more broadly as a springboard for process transformation, innovation and increased business agility.

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Source: Jeremy Roche (www.insights.wired.com)

A Different Gates Is Returning to Microsoft

SEATTLE — The last time Bill Gates played an active role at Microsoft, as chief software architect, he witnessed the company muffing its earliest efforts to become a major player in search, smartphones and tablet computers.

In the six years since then, he has watched as the technology industry changed without him. The personal computer era that Microsoft so ably dominated during and after Mr. Gates’s heyday as Microsoft’s chief executive has started to fade away. Now, the focus is on social media and mobile devices that run in large part on cloud computing.

And what technologies has Mr. Gates, who turned to philanthropy, been most vocal about during all that change? Things like self-contained toilets and vaccines.

To read full article, click here.

Source: Nick Wingfield (www.nytimes.com)

The Top 7 Technology Trends That Will Dominate 2014

Strap yourself in, it’s going to be a wild ride. In considering the changes we’ve seen in technology over the past year, I’m bracing myself for unprecedented growth when it comes to anytime, anywhere, on-demand information and entertainment.

Based on the trends we’ve seen so far in 2013, I predict 2014 will see many fledgling technologies mature and grow beyond what we could have imagined just a few years ago.

So without further ado, here are my top 7 predictions for technology trends that will dominate 2014.

1. Consumers will come to expect Smart TV capabilities

With Smart TV shipments expected to reach 123 million in 2014 – up from about 84 million in 2012 – we are poised to see explosive growth in this industry.

In the midst of this growth, we will continue to see fierce competition between major players like Samsung, Panasonic, and LG. Prices will need to continue to drop, as more consumers crave, and even expect, the ability to use Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video and their web browser via their TV.

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Source: Jayson DeMers (www.forbes.com)

Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2014

Gartner just concluded its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013 in Orlando, gathering tens of thousands of IT executives. Among the most anticipated aspects of the gathering are the ruminations from the Gartner pontificators regarding IT trends.  Among several trends shared were the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014. Here is a summary of those trends:

Mobile Device Diversity and Management 

Gartner suggests that now through 2018, a variety of devices, user contexts, and interaction paradigms will make “everything everywhere” strategies unachievable. The unintended consequence of bring your own device (BYOD) programs has been to render much more complex (by two or three times, Gartner estimates) the size of the mobile workforce, straining both the information technology and the finance organizations. It is recommended that companies better define expectations for employee-owned hardware to balance flexibility with confidentiality and privacy requirements.

To read full article, click here.

Source: Peter High (www.forbes.com)