Welcome to the Mclowd Newsletter, our monthly communication to Trustee Users, Marketplace Professionals and Partners.
Introduction
Last month I was in London and managed to catch up with an old mate Rob Coleman who runs a company called Unifi Communications.
Rob immediately grasped the Mclowd Model because he had recently posted a legal question on a UK-based crowdsourcing website.
The answer required just a few moments from a qualified lawyer, at a cost of only £33.00
While there are no doubt some transactions or questions that still justify a more traditional ‘context’, there are enormous amounts of knowledge-based work that can now be processed through frictionless networks such as the Mclowd Marketplace at discounts of 60% or more.
Platform Update
We have now added historical ASX data as well as the ability to edit the market value of individual assets, both important steps towards improved year-end tax reporting.
Release notes regarding this and other items from version 1.3.2 can be viewed here, and as part of the website refresh we will be publishing a side-by-side comparison between Mclowd and BGL SimpleFund, along with a product roadmap for bridging the gaps that currently exist.
That the Platform continues to evolve so quickly is in itself validation of my comments about the Power of the Crowd. Everything that has been achieved in the last 18 months is attributable to crowdsourced resources. Mclowd is in essence the Crowd – a group of highly dedicated individuals leveraging all of the tools for online work that are now available to SMSF investors (and other users of professional services) via the Marketplace.
The Marketplace
There are now more than 50 accounting and funds management professionals in the Marketplace, with more joining every week.
We are constantly adding new functionality, with the following improvements in development:
- The ability to specify milestones for Fixed Price Tasks
- Simplification of the logic for messages
- The ability to create a Private Task (to which individual Marketplace Professionals can be invited)
User Forum
The User Forum is now live and as mentioned previously will be moderated by Trustee Mark Reynolds.
While we are always happy to receive feedback via the Ask a Question or Suggestions pages of the website, those are 1:1 conversations that are not visible to other Members of the Mclowd Community, so use of the Forum will benefit everyone through the sharing of knowledge.
The Terms of Service will also be amended to make it clear that the content of the Forum (and in due course the SMSF Wiki) are not Mclowd IP, but rather subject to creative commons licensing.
Digital Disruption
Around the time of the launch of Mclowd Deloitte Consulting released a White Paper entitled: Digital Disruption – Short Fuse Big Bang.
The paper estimated the speed and scale of the impact of digitisation on various industries, and not surprisingly the finance and professional services sectors featured prominently in Deloitte’s analysis.
In fact nearly a quarter of the Australian economy is service-based, and many of those industries will witness per-unit price deflation of up to 90% in coming years because of the economics of cloud computing and crowdsourcing. (Mclowd is simply a digital manifestation of those trends).
That such enormous amounts of leverage (both public and private) continue to be injected into the Australian economy indicates that the micro and macro-economic implications of this process are not yet well understood.
Thanks again for your continued support of our efforts to improve net returns for investors.
Kind Regards
Ashley Porter
Managing Director
Mclowd Pty Ltd