We've just returned from a very interesting conference. Yesterday was something of a small but important turning point for the VA community, the Internet and, perhaps, the world.

While the UK VA Awards have been running for four years now - bringing much needed recognition to those judged the brightest and best in the industry (and a credit to Carmen MacDougall and her team for the friendly, family atmosphere of it all) something even more important has been going on.

For the first time the VA industry itself received truly independent recognition on the world stage. This from a global company who are themselves blazing quite a trail with some really important innovations set to shake up their own industry.

While I've been a highly visible and vocal advocate of the VA industry for quite some time now (and we added a VA section on our ReceiptAngel.co.uk service around six month back) it is truly significant that the leading cloud accounting service Xero has created a category - alongside accountants and bookkeepers - on their site, as well as a scheme to accredit and support them. I may have become known as something of a 'trendspotter' over the last 30 years but this move - and all it entails and implies - is clearly hugely significant coming as it does from one of the most impressive and progressive new cloud-for-business services.

I was privileged to meet Rod Drury, Xero's CEO and co-founder, during his recent visit to the UK and was impressed by the openness, strength and depth of vision - from him and his company - which was in many way reminiscent of much that I saw on my most recent trip to Silicon Valley.

It was as a result his UK trip, their UK CEO Gary Turner told me yesterday, that Rod and the Xero team took the decision to be among the very first (perhaps the first apart from ourselves) to recognise and act on the growing and strategic importance of this community in the development of the economy here and around the globe.

It was some months back in conversations with Gary (and also with several others - who I suspect will not be too far behind now) I advocated the power and potential impact of having a talented army of hands-on advocates for any supplier - especially those such as an accounting cloud service aimed at the SME sector.

Their move confirms and points the way to the future riding as it does a raft of important and unstoppable trends. Especially the powerful combination of virtual working and micro-outsourcing with cloud computing itself. But also the continuing massive rise of bootstrapping, 5to9businesses and so alternative-employment.

No wonder Xero shone so brightly yesterday among the stars of the UK's VA industry.

Taken together the opportunity for virtual workers to 'Cloud-Commute' at a moments notice (present only as and when needed on a pay-as-you-go basis in a business no matter how large or small) this sets the stage for a major systemic change, already visible in it's earliest stages, in the world economy and our civilization as whole.

One small step for VAs and a cloud accounting company, but a giant leap for mankind?

(C) Barry E James 13 June 2010 - See more blogs at http://www.ReceiptAngel.co.uk/blogs