Amid all the turmoil surrounding the Google-YouTube announcement I spoke with MyBizHomepage’s CEO Pete Justen. I was very distracted during the call and the poor guy had to contend with that. Anyway, the company, which is launching formally today, provides a way to translate Quickbooks data (and data from other accounting software) into accessible, easy-to-understand visuals and English.
I said, why doesn’t Intuit do something like this? Justin responded, “I don’t know.” The site is a free, ad-supported service (that’s where it gets interesting to me) that is intended for small businesses, but is also being used by large companies according to Justen.
As a software front end that makes Quickbooks easier to understand, it’s a no-brainer. But what’s more interesting to me is that the site potentially becomes a kind of small-business portal. Justen said they’re encouraging SMEs to use the site as their homepage (hence the name). He also talked about integrating a range of functionality and community features into the site — search is already there — all built around the data dashboard concept.
As part of the sign up process MyBizHomepage will be collecting SIC codes, demographic information and other company details. That can all be provided to advertisers (and potentially other businesses) who want to market to specific segments. So it becomes a B2B marketing tool or perhaps even a marketplace where SMEs can market to and seek out other SMEs.
It also becomes, assuming the company can build usage among SMEs, another channel for large entities and others who want to reach the small business market more efficiently. All this is somewhat hypothetical right now, but it gets pretty interesting.
Here’s the company’s press release from this morning.
Screenwerk 
October 12, 2006 at 9:30 am
[…] I was over on Andrew Goodman’s blog reading about Business.com launching Work.com, a new small business content site. One of the primary ambitions of all such sites is to aggregate large numbers of small businesses and create an efficient marketing channel for third-party advertisers. Earlier this week, I wrote about MyBizHomepage, which is not a content site but has similar marketing channel ambitions. […]
October 12, 2006 at 9:41 pm
[…] Tonight I was over on Andrew Goodman’s blog reading about Business.com launching Work.com, a new small business content site. One of the primary ambitions of all such sites is to aggregate large numbers of small businesses and create an efficient marketing channel for third-party advertisers. Earlier this week, I wrote about MyBizHomepage, which is not a content site but has similar marketing-channel ambitions. […]