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Intuit shared details of bookkeeping app QuickBooks 2009 on Monday. With this release, the company aims to broaden the focus beyond the ledger book, providing a management center for small businesses that includes expanded online banking, support for transactions in more than 100 currencies, and 12 months of free Web hosting.

The applications are set to arrive in stores October 8.

(Credit: Intuit)

The 2009 release targets businesses that do work globally, whether that means say, shipping vintage Disney toys to eBay buyers in Japan or employing basket weavers in Uganda. At least 30 percent of QuickBooks users handle international transactions, according to Intuit.

Multi-currency support enables invoices, bill payments, and wire transfers in most of the world’s currencies, with online updates and historical tracking of exchange rates. Users can add custom currencies, such as Ithaca Hours in upstate New York or Linden dollars for Second Life.

Intuit is also offering users a free Web site for 12 months at an Intuit domain name. Drag-and-drop page designs come from Homestead, a 2007 acquisition. Once the free period expires, monthly hosting costs are $4.99.

QuickBooks offers banking center capabilities, so users won’t need to hop to banks’ separate Web sites to check on the status of accounts.

Intuit says its Live Community peer-to-peer tech support, with 2.6 million users since its introduction in 2007, increasingly is being used for general business advice. The context-sensitive question-and-answer interface is docked along the right edge of the QuickBooks interface.

The built-in QuickBooks Messenger enables users of multi-user editions of the applications to chat with each other while logged in.

A new Company Insights view provides quick access to balances, money owed, reminders, and reports.

Expanded tools for accountants include Client Data Review to scan for client errors.

For $99, QuickBooks Simple Start Edition targets users with the most basic bookkeeping needs. The full-featured Pro Edition costs $100 more for one user, or a total of $379 for three people and $549 for five people. QuickBooks Premier, which offers industry-specific flavors, costs $399, or $749 for a pair of users and $1,099 for three-person access.

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QuickBooks 2009 to handle 100 currencies

It’s the weekend, so time to review the Web tech news, reviews and analysis we brought you this week on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Facebook hitting 100 million users, checked out 10 great web apps for school, looked at the state of online accounting, and reviewed the latest in lifestreaming. On the trends side we did a special podcast on online music trends, investigated RSS news from Google and Friendfeed, reported on Facebook being used in the US elections, and analyzed YouTube’s business.

Web Products

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement this week by Dave Morin, the company’s Senior Platform Manager.

How does that compare to MySpace’s ascent? A guy named Rick appears to have become MySpace’s 100 millionth registered user in 2006. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.

Back to School: 10 Great Web Apps for College Students

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

Online Accounting: State of the Market

Accounting software for small business and personal use is increasingly moving from the desktop to online. However, compared to other office software, this transition to online has been relatively slow. Partly that’s due to user reticence: writing a document online and sharing it with others (via Google Docs, Office Live, Zoho, or whatever you use) is one thing. Entering sensitive financial information into your browser is harder to adjust to.

So what is the state of online accounting software? In this post we tell you about our awkward experiences trying out different packages. Also do check out the comments, because there’s a lot of new info there.

Jaiku Returns With Unlimited Invites

When Google acquired the microblogging service Jaiku in October of last year, many people had high hopes for Jaiku’s future. Would a Google-flavored Twitter soon show up everywhere from iGoogle to the upcoming Android handset, we wondered? Instead, news from the company slowed to a trickle and the doors stayed locked to newcomers - signs that many took to mean Google had essentially abandoned the service. But this week, things are happening at Jaiku once again - most notably, unlimited invites are now available. Is Jaiku poised to make a comeback?

Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. This week, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don’t necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

RWW Live: Online Music (Special Guests From Imeem, Yahoo Music, Rhapsody)

In this week’s episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.

The show included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.

You can listen to the entire show here (select Episode 6):

Along with the podcast show, we also ran a poll: What are your favorite online music streaming services? See the results below, and vote for your favorites:

What are your favorite online music streaming services? (multi-choice)

Google Moves to Mainstream RSS With A Simple Name Change

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction. What can be done to make RSS more mainstream? Google plans to roll out a small but simple feature that could go a long way. We wouldn’t be surprised to see every blog publishing service follow suit.

“Follow this blog” is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they’ll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company’s RSS reader. It’s a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

See also: Speed Up RSS? FriendFeed’s Going to Try

“Facebook Helped Me Win,” Claims Politician

In Tampa, Florida, a local politician is giving credit to Facebook for his recent win in the primaries for the local County Commission. On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was Wrong

Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you’ve made that argument in conversation before (and we know many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you’d be wrong. Google claims that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own, when they find it using YouTube’s new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Weekly Wrapup, 25-29 August 2008

Quickbooks, one of the leading accounting packages for small businesses, has just released web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone. The iPhone version, seen to the left, sports a very slick UI and allows easy, at-a-glance access to all of your financial information, entered into Quickbooks Online.

At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.

Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it’s not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.

If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I’m not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.

You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping “Demo.”

See original here:
Accounting on the go: Quickbooks for iPhone and Blackberry

In a software package it is. Alfresco announced that Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, will offer Alfresco Labs 3 as part of its partner repository.

Ubuntu is an open source OS containing several applications — a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging, etc. And now - ECM functionality, too.

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Canonical Bundles Alfresco Enterprise CMS and Ubuntu Linux