With all the traveling I do, it would be difficult to get much work done if I had to wait until I got back to my home office in New York City–which is why I’m writing this week’s edition of The Friends of Axxess Newsletter on my daughter’s MacBook 35,000 feet in the air.
It’s also why I pay my bills online, get my news online and do my bookkeeping online. Because I store just about all of my data on the internet (thank you, Google Docs and Microsoft Exchange), I can do my work anywhere there’s a computer and an internet connection. (Few airlines offer internet access yet, but that’s another story.)
And that’s fine as long as I’m in a hotel room, a client’s office or my house in Long Island. But, more and more, I find myself in transit–on a train, in a cab or at an airport–without access to a laptop or an Ethernet cable. That’s why I’ve started relying on my BlackBerry not just for checking my e-mail (I’ve been doing that since February 2000) but for accessing data from web applications as well.
Now I’d be the first to admit that the BlackBerry browser isn’t perfect. It’s slow loading pages, can’t display frames very well and, on certain sites that require Microsoft’s ActiveX controls that let you run scripts on a web page, not much use at all. That’s why, even though I switched to the online version of QuickBooks almost two years ago so I wouldn’t have to come back from a trip and dig out from under a big stack of bills, it annoyed me that I couldn’t access my financial data on the go.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one. Last week, while on vacation in Vienna with my daughter, Caroline, I picked up an e-mail on my BlackBerry from Intuit that a QuickBooks mobile app was now available in beta. (Intuit has also released a version for the iPhone.) I immediately typed the URL–https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m–into my BlackBerry browser to check it out. I was impressed.
After I entered my user ID and password, a screen popped up with links to the three companies (and my personal checking account) whose financials I track with QuickBooks. While the beta version does not yet allow users to pay bills, send invoices, reconcile bank statements or create journal entries (though Intuit spokesperson Anna Bueker assured me that the company’s developers are hard at work on these features), it does give you access to all your company’s vital stats. For starters, you can immediately see who owes you money and how much in the way of payables you have outstanding. It also displays a list of clients and vendors (with full contact info) plus a P&L, a balance sheet and the total amount of cash you have in the bank.
All this is a good first step toward creating a world where we can finally unplug from our desks and detach ourselves from cables and cords. Though wireless devices are everywhere now (except on certain parts of the Long Island Railroad where my fellow New Yorkers have told me in no uncertain terms to get off my cell phone or move to another car), they still need to be charged by AC adapters in outlets that don’t always run the same current (if you’re an American traveling in Europe or vice versa) or use the same kind of plug (flat prongs in the U.S., round prongs in Europe and completely different plug configurations in the Middle East and Africa). There’s also the high cost of international voice and data transmission that, even by adding discounted packages to your existing wireless plan before you leave home, can still end up costing a small fortune.
That said, I’m optimistic that a wireless web is not too far away. When I think back on the dark ages of online computing in the early 1990s–when I struggled to hook up my U.S. modem to European phone jacks with alligator clips–it’s clear that we’ve come a long way. Still, I pray that one day the gods of technology will knock down the Tower of Babel that prevents us from sharing voice and data seamlessly around the world and bless each of us with a convenient, handheld device that will give us instant access to everything we want to do, buy, sell and know. (Memo to Google: This device will be free and ad-supported.)
Now if only they could do something about those nine-hour flights back to the States!
This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
