If you still need to do your US tax returns, you had better get a move on. The April 15th deadline is fast approaching. If you don't already have a favorite tax return package, and you don't pay somebody else to prepare your returns, check out TaxACT. There is a free version that handles simple and complex returns, and you can do it all online or via a downloadable package.

How Long Does It Take to Prepare a US Tax Return?

The short answer is, longer than you would like. The long answer is, it depends, specifically on:

• Your knowledge of the tax code,
• The complexity of your situation,
• How organized you are.

How Using TaxACT Helps

TaxACT can make the job faster and easier by automatically completing the appropriate tax forms using your answers to questions generated by the software. Unless you have dedicated your life to understanding the tax code, this can be a real time-saver. The expertise built into the software helps you:

• Find all deductions and credits,
• Account for the latest changes in the tax code,
• Do the math correctly (one of the more common reasons the IRS rejects returns),
• Identify possible errors through an alert system,
• Find several options on how to pay your taxes and receive your refund,
• E-file your return (which speeds up the receipt of your refund),
• Complete a state return quickly at the same time by transferring all your federal information to state forms.

Getting it done fast is important. Getting it done right -- so that you don't over-pay or under-report -- is even more important.

About an Hour and Free

With TaxACT, those who have just one W-2 with zero to few deductions could easily finish their return in less than an hour. Those with two to four W-2s and a few deductions would likely finish their return in about an hour.

TaxACT follows a "freemium" strategy. The TaxACT Standard package is free for all taxpayers, regardless of income; it provides solutions for preparing, printing and e-filing your return and can handle both simple and complex returns.

Check out TaxACT's online tax filing solution.

Free Updates, Just Like the iPhone

With subscription accounting, a company can use the revenue generated from the subscription service and spread it across the life of the service while revenue generated from the device is accounted for immediately. This allows a company to present a gradual increase in revenue as more devices are sold. The revenue generated from the subscription service can then be used for other things, and in Palm's case, those other things will be ongoing R&D efforts leading to improvements to the phone.

For Pre owners, this means they, like iPhone and iPhone 3G owners, can expect to receive free software updates for as long as they have the phone under contract. (This is also why iPod Touch owners have to pay for their updates.) In other words, whatever the Pre looks like upon launch, it's only going to get better.

Not Just One Handset: More WebOS Phones Coming

Another interesting note from these new documents is the fact that, when referring to these promised updates, Palm didn't just say they were for the Pre. Instead, the documents state that the free updates will be for "customers of its webOS products, including the recently announced Palm Pre."

That statement points towards Palm's intentions to build an entire product line built on the webOS - something that was basically confirmed Thursday when, on a conference call with analysts, Palm Chief Executive Edward Colligan promised that a road map of smartphones and an entire application ecosystem was in the company's future.

This is where Palm differs from Apple. Apple built one software base and installed it on one handset, albeit one that has seen hardware upgrades over time (i.e. iPhone to iPhone 3G). Palm, however, is envisioning a software product line that can extend itself across a variety of handsets. For customers, this means more choice when it comes to handsets. And for Palm, they hope this ecosystem will return the company to financial stability - just like they had back when Treos ruled.

If Palm fumbles in any way, it could be the end for their company. Let's hope that's not the case. Anticipation for the Pre is high - all Palm has to do is deliver.

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:

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.

So what is the state of online accounting software? In this post we'll tell you about our awkward experiences trying out different packages. But we want to hear about your own experiences with online accounting software, because there is still much to learn about this market.

The Big Guns: Slow, Except Intuit

The existing market leaders in accounting software for SMB and personal use are desktop software vendors such as Intuit (with Quicken and QuickBooks) and MYOB. Relatively few of these have made solid moves towards web-based software.

One that has made moves to cover the threat of online software, is Intuit. It's had QuickBooks online for some time now, for small businesses. In January this year it released Quicken Online, its consumer offering. With Quicken Online Intuit is competing fiercely on price, with a 60-day free trial and then from as little as $2.99 per month. It differentiates itself from startup competitors by either offering lower subscription cost or being advertising-free.

It's hard to see Intuit not gaining majority market share of online accounting, given its resources and market leverage in traditional accounting software. Allen Stern of CenterNetworks had similar sentiments back in January.

A quick note about Google and Microsoft. We wrote a post end of last year called Online Accounting: The Next Killer App For Google Apps. 9 months later, still no sign of an online accounting app from Mountain View. As for Redmond, it too has seemingly little interest in this market.

Business Accounting: New Kids on the Block

Startups such as Freshbooks, Xero and Zoho are directly competing with the likes of Quicken, on purely accounting features - invoicing, payroll, expense tracking, etc. We have tested out several of these products and they all have impressive 'web 2.0' type designs, which make inputting data a pleasure (almost).

In this post we'll focus on Freshbooks. It offers online invoicing, time tracking and expense tracking. It has a subscription business model similar to Basecamp (from $14 p/mth onwards) and claims to have over 400,000 users. In our tests it was easy to use and had a lot of nifty features, such as getting a view of your outstanding invoices at a glance. It also has integration with Basecamp (our preferred project management service here at RWW) and offers an API. Freshbooks has an active forum and a browse through its forum showed a very helpful staff.

Another neat feature, which we pointed out in an earlier post today called Four Ad-Free Ways that Mined Data Can Make Money, is that Freshbooks offers benchmark data by industry to its users - e.g. compared to other graphic designers, maybe you're charging less and getting your invoices filled slower than most.

The only real downside we found was an inability to handle more than one currency per account. This is a major problem, but it's one that almost every online accounting service shares. Even the desktop accounting software we've been testing recently failed when it came to multiple currencies (and/or usability of that feature).

Still, Freshbooks is a breath of fresh air to online accounting, if you'll pardon the pun. We really want to be able to use it, so let's hope multi-currency support isn't too far away. Freshbooks has a number of supporters among friends of RWW, judging by the feedback we got via Twitter. Adam Metz proclaimed: "If you want to get paid on time, stay Fresh(books)". steaprok quoth: "Freshbooks is great, have used them for sometime, no complaints at all".

Other similar services

Another service worth mentioning here is Xero, a New Zealand based app that has actually done an IPO - on the local NZ sharemarket. In our tests a few months ago it had many useful features, similar to Freshbooks. However it is currently only available in New Zealand and it too can't handle multiple currencies. Like Freshbooks, Xero promises support for this feature by end of the year.

Kiwi friends of RWW liked Xero. Sigurd Magnusson of CMS SilverStripe told us that his company uses "Xero, except are forced to use MYOB to deal with U.S. Dollars (e.g.our involvement with demconvention.com)". Ben Young said that "I use Xero. Simply the best. Streamlines that part of the business for me whilst we are growing. Not location dependent...very handy".

Also check out Zoho Invoice (which claims to support multiple currencies) and Cashboard, two relatively recent entrants to this space.

Personal Money Management Products

Over the past couple of years we've seen a number of impressive new entrants to accounting software - products such as Mint, Wesabe, Expensr (acquired by Strands in April), Geezeo and Rudder. These products are focused on personal financing, such as budgeting and bank accounts.

Mint has received a lot of press (some would say hype). Currently Mint.com claims to serve nearly 400,000 users, manages over $12 billion in transactions, and has saved $100 million+ for its users. It recently released a new design, which we reviewed on ReadWriteWeb. The new design focused on the major new features added to Mint since their launch: enhanced budgeting tools, the addition of brokerage and investment accounts, mortgage accounts, student loans, and auto loans. In addition, we wrote, Mint has added six new "how to" guides that can help you with your major financial decisions. These include things like saving for retirement, paying off your student loans, buying a car, creating a personal budget, and more. The guides are the start of a new educational series for the site.

Mint seems like a great solution for US people who want to manage their money online. The downsides are that it's not international, there is no data import option (an important feature that many other online accounting packages have) and Mint doesn't cater to people who don't bank with large, national banking institutions.

This segment of the online accounting market - which is loosely termed 'money management' - is arguably the most exciting, because there are new software opportunities being explored. An example is moneyStrands, which we reviewed at the end of April. moneyStrands is employing recommendations technologies, such as enabling users to anonymously compare themselves to others with similar traits - e.g. demographics.

Conclusion

After all our testing, we're almost ashamed to say that we're still using custom spreadsheets to manage the accounts here at ReadWriteWeb. That's because multiple currency support is critical to our business, but sadly lacking in many of the products we tested. We'll check out Zoho Invoice though, as they claim to have implemented it.

Tell us in the comments if you're using online accounting software to manage your business or personal finances. What 'web 2.0' features have you come across in these products that have particularly impressed you?

top image credit: quickenonline

In September Google added a presentation application to its Google Apps suite, thus creating an online office version of the "holy trinity": word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. So what's next for Google Apps? What might be the next killer app? We think it will be an accounting system and in this article we will outline why. There are strong benefits to an online accounting service in Google Apps – both to users and to the targeted advertising-driven business of Google. [Ed's note: we are also running a poll at the end of the article]

Online advantages

To date, there have been a number of online accounting systems developed - e.g. Mint and Xero - which showcase some of the obvious benefits of online accounting:

• Collaboration: More often than not, accounts are prepared collaboratively by a business owner and their accountant ‚Äì and there may be a bookkeeper involved for all but the smallest companies.
• Retention of records: Typically businesses are required to retain their records for a fixed period of time by the tax authorities (six years in the UK).
• Accessibility: Typically the stakeholders are located in different places ‚Äì currently requiring spreadsheets to be sent back and forth between the various individuals.

There are a number of drawbacks in the solutions currently available:

Simplification

The greatest drawback from which accounting systems suffer is their UI. Accounting systems are invariably designed “by accountants for accountants”, which makes them overly complex for the small businessperson - who typically doesn't have accountancy training. At the end of the day, it's just debits and credits. Accounting systems need to be “Googlised” - in the same way that Gmail broke the mold from what had come before (compared to mainstream products like Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Outlook), accounting systems need a simplified interface that makes sense to business people.

Costs

Accounting software providers are well known for limiting the functionality in their “starter systems” - forcing users to upgrade to more expensive systems if they want to do much more than they can already do in Excel. Online solutions have exacerbated this problem by charging small amounts on a monthly basis forever.

What are the marginal costs of operating an online accounting system? They do not require significant processing capability, nor do they have significant storage or bandwidth requirements.

Basic online accounting systems should be FREE. There are significant opportunities to generate revenues from other sources other than the core functionality. Small businesses are overcharged for “limited” accounting systems. Offering free business services is familiar territory for Google or start-ups working off a cloud computing platform, such as Amazon Web Services.

Why Would Accounting be Attractive to Google?

Google could bring significant expertise to online accounting, thanks to their ability to deliver simple, effective online applications with high-performance and reliable infrastructure.

But other than providing an attractive service to small businesses, which could be integrated into Google Checkout and Google Docs, what else would make this proposition attractive to Google?

Historical information

Eric Schmidt stated this year that it is “Google's goal to organize your daily life". However he also said that "we cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google's expansion."

Let's revisit the records within an accounting system and consider them from a different perspective: what we have is a detailed multi-year repository of information about a small business. Remember, business owners are required to retain records for a certain period by tax authorities.

The records would include: what it has been bought, when it was bought, from whom it was bought it and how much was paid. This is the information that 'loyalty cards' regularly look to acquire. So it creates significant opportunities to deliver targeted and localized adverts. Undoubtedly Google could generate revenues from an online accounting application that exceed its low incremental cost. Yes, there are privacy issues, some of which Google faced when it launched Gmail. But consider this: the threshold a business owner places on his/her business records are lower than his/her personal information. You regularly share your financial information with your accountant and bank manager – but you wouldn't do the same for your personal data.

A business owner might also benefit from sharing this information to allow Google to present more cost competitive suppliers. Furthermore, it is not unusual for small business expenditure to be greater than an owner’s personal expenditure – thereby creating a more attractive opportunity for advertisers.

Other revenue opportunities

There are two exceptions to 'accounting systems should be free': one is payroll, and the other is automated submission of returns (VAT, income tax and national insurance).

Both of these business processes require updating and validating on at least an annual basis, to keep up with changes in national legislation. Almost all small businesses pay an accountant and / or payroll agency to handle these - but an online system could offer this at substantially lower cost. This might not be that far away, given the recent additions by Google of Gtaxes to their DNS records...

Lack of innovation

Sometimes it takes someone to look at things from “left field” to move an application forward. By way of example:

Online scanning. Since the launch of Book Search, Google has developed significant capability in scanning and the TesseratOCR technology. This could easily be used to scan invoices and bank/credit card statements – removing the tedium of its input. Furthermore, it will include additional information which would be valuable to Google. Rather than just record the flight costs, the invoice might include other information such as time, destination etc. These documents could be scanned or faxed – similar to the service provided by File123.

Mechanical Turk

If scanning documents does not appeal, why not use a service such as Mechanical Turk to outsource the manual input of less sensitive information, such as such as invoices. Scanned invoices could be randomly presented to different Mechanical Turk users to be input for a few cents.

Integration capability

Google already has a variety of services available that could be tightly integrated into an accounting system:

• Google Search; the use of scanning/OCR technology would create a much larger repository of information on which a user and Google could search.
• Google Docs; invoices, spreadsheets and charts could all be generated using existing applications.
• Google Base/Checkout; online traders could integrate their online presence on Base and also Checkout to integrate with the accounting system.

Tell us what you think in the comments - is Online Accounting the next business frontier for Google to enter? Or will one of the current crop of online accounting startups get there first?

Top image: 10e20.com