If your life is like mine, you face an overwhelming array of ways to spend your time. Some of these time investment opportunities seem to hold the promise of greater success. The potential value of other opportunities remains more mysterious, such as those emails from people who sound familiar but you just can’t quite remember why.

Still other “time consumers” seem more necessary because we feel expected to perform them – reading the morning papers and fresh content on our favorite Web sites, for example. After all, don’t our bosses, clients, and colleagues expect us to keep current on our rapidly changing world?

But how necessary – and how valuable – are these time-investment opportunities, really? more

After New York’s Supreme Court ruled last year that online retailers are required to collect sales tax on orders they receive through affiliate Web sites based in the state, it was always pretty much a certainty that other states would pile on with their own versions of the “Amazon tax” (see my blog here). But I have to admit I’ve been a bit taken aback by how fast that’s happening this year. No fewer than five states — Virginia, New Mexico, Mississippi, Vermont, and Colorado — have jumped on the bandwagon in the past few weeks. more

Nice to see the Wall Street Journal headlining some good news this morning — “Tech Spending Bounces Back as Profits Rise” — and let’s all cheer some impressive earnings reports from Cisco et al. IT spending, which was in the pits much of last year and 2008, has been staging a modest comeback. A December study from Gartner projects total IT spend in the U.S. (for both products and services) at around $960 billion for 2010, up from $930 billion in ‘09.

What I’m wondering is how much, if any, of that money will be heading corporate tax’s way. more

Hook ‘em.

As an Austin, Texas, resident, I’m proud to see the University of Texas McCombs Business School sitting (nearly) atop BusinessWeek’s list of the “10 Best Undergraduate Business Schools for Business Ethics.” (The magazine will publish its 2010 rankings in the spring.)

These lists are, well, lists (as any company or university that has jumped through the submission hoops for these “Best Of” publication exercises will tell you). Still, nice to see that BusinessWeek considers ethics worthy of ranking here. ###

A pair of software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers is riding the growing movement of financial management software to the cloud as quickly as they can. Intacct announced strong growth in 2009 despite a generally poor economy. Xero (pronounced zero), a New Zealand-based company, is targeting small businesses, including businesses with as few as three people, for as little as $19 per month.

Traditionally, financial management software was licensed and deployed on-premises. Packages from companies like Peachtree or Oracle were feature-rich, big, and costly, and required a dedicated server. Beyond the acquisition cost, the software was costly to support and maintain. In addition, sharing information among users was cumbersome.

SaaS and the cloud change the nature of financial management software. Rather than acquiring, implementing, and accessing a heavy-footprint software package on-premises, users log on to their cloud-based financial system with just a browser. The application and the data reside at the cloud provider. more