ReadWriteWeb

RightSignature, the company that allows you to sign with a mouse, is making a play to serve as a core integration for the Software-as-a-Service market.

It's a trend we expect to see more from third-party providers that seek to establish anchor positions as agnostic tools for Salesforce.com and vertically oriented SaaS services.

Businesses under 10 employees account for a large portion of the US workforce. Yet the metrics associated with this market remain enigmatic, at best. And while professional organizations have tried to capture information on these workers - like the AIGA's annual review of design salaries - those surveys only show a slice of the pie.

Enter FreshBooks, a Web-based invoicing system focused on individuals and small companies. FreshBooks holds a wealth of data about this workforce - across a variety of disciplines - and they've asked their users for rights to share that data in anonymous aggregated form. The result? A unique glimpse into the numbers that make these businesses tick.

Yesterday on this blog Sarah Perez wondered how important is offline access for web apps? Her conclusion was that offline access is important now, but not as important as it once was. And that with the increasing ubiquity of Internet access, it is growing less important every day. I won't dispute that, but there is an important distinction to be made between offline access to web apps (as Google Gears provides) and desktop access to web apps (as Mozilla's Prism and Adobe's AIR provide). The latter is a very important step in the evolution of web apps.