Not as Painful using Wesabe

If personal financial management is a necessary evil then at least let it be quick and easy. This appears to be the premise of Wesabe.com, a free web-based application providing exactly that.

Wesabe delivers personal financial eye candy via a modular dashboard interface which has that 2.0 look and feel about it – the aggregated visual approach certainly makes for more interesting inspection than a regular bank statement. A series of column graphs, pie charts and expense clouds provide a snapshot of the user's financial performance during a given period.

The input process is performed by exporting bank transactions and uploading them to Wesabe.com – don’t groan, it’s easier than you think. Wesabe supports a variety of file formats including Quicken and Microsoft Money and your own bank should support at least one of these. The only hard part is finding the Upload button in subsequent months as it only appears when you mouse over it – shown below.

The next step is to ‘tag’ transactions with a description of your choosing, for example eating out, rent, gifts and so on. The first time will be the slowest, perhaps 5-10 minutes per month since there’s no existing transaction history. Next time you arrive at this step, Wesabe will recognise similar transaction descriptions and automatically tag them for you. Handy, no?

Wesabe provides the ability to join groups and discussions on financial topics that interest you, for example creating a budget, making mortgage repayments [*snore*] and so on. Although this might be compelling for some, the most useful feature IMHO is the data visualisation aspect – the user input/return equation is favourable for those who don’t have extensive time to better understand their finances. Whilst a user can add spending goals to their profile which provide an actual vs. target comparison, this requires more input. For the mobile users amongst us, Wesabe provides an iPhone application but with more limited functionality.

Since the site is free to the consumer and free of third-party advertising, Wesabe makes money by selling its service into major institutions. Various banks use the application to help their customers better manage financial matters and it’s the sort of product we might expect to find at theage.com.au within the Business/Money section – it’s actually used by telegraph.co.uk in the same way, “powered by Wesabe”.

Wesabe uses industry-standard encryption (no more details provided than that) and, with the exception of the login page, uses the secure HTTPS protocol for the entire session. The site does aggregate and anonymously access user data but for the purpose of creating more valuable information for the user. By analysing the spending patterns of the community, Wesabe can provide comparative commentary, for example, on the average expenditure per visit or per month at a particular merchant or type of merchant. Knowledge that you spend more or less on average than your peers is potentially very useful information.

Although sites such as Wesabe, and rivals like Mint.com, have the ability to automatically obtain banking transactions on a user’s behalf, it appears we are one step removed from this being located in Australia – the alternative for now is the manual process described above.

Wesabe is easy to use and performs well the task of aggregating and visualising financial information. But if you want to know why the Wesabe name, I’m not sure. It could be Spanglish for “we know” but the site doesn’t confirm it. The team must have a sense of humour though as I found this comment within the site’s html source code:

-- Maybe if we pretend the rotting corpse of IE6 isn't shambling around moaning "BRAINNNNNNSSS" it will go away. On the other hand, maybe what we really need is a shotgun.--

Written for PC Update magazine, November Edition.

[iPhone image courtesy of Wesabe.com]

[Thanks to @paulmeller for the heads up on Wesabe]

An Introduction to Android (Video)

From my presentation to GTUG. Enjoy!

An Introduction to Android (Slides)

Slides from the Android presentation at RMIT, comprising a high-level introduction on the new mobile operating system and developer platform. For more information on local activity, visit Android Australia.

Why would I use bit.ly?

This is the question I get from people who either don’t use Twitter or have never thought much about link sharing. But let’s go back a step, what is bit.ly?

bit.ly is a URL shortening service. It transforms a given series of characters comprising a URL into its short-form equivalent. For example, this 41 character link to a third party website (Google Groups) can be shortened to just 13:

Link groups.google.com/group/android-australia
Short Link bit.ly/1aEMpI

You might think this isn’t an overly impressive exercise, especially if you’re not a Twitter user limited to 140 characters of expression. That’s fair, what about this Google Maps link?

Link maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=rmit+university&sll=-37.826861,144.995165&sspn=0.009457,0.01929&ie=UTF8&ll=-37.807173,144.96416&spn=0.002365,0.004823&z=18&iwloc=A
Short Link bit.ly/iUUDS

The need to share this type of link is quite conceivably within the realm of everyday activity; organising a weekend away, having birthday drinks, what about a map link where the address block in your email signature used to be? The original link is 183 characters long. The bit.ly equivalent is 13 characters – and it’s always that long (or 14). Even from a practical perspective that makes the link far easier to remember, write down or share via email and so on.

URL shortening has actually been around since 2002 and there were already more than 90 providers of the same service in January 2008 (see here). bit.ly is a relative latecomer to the URL shortening party having only launched in mid 2008 but claims its users already click on 160 million links each week. [A quick check on Alexa.com seems to support this idea showing bit.ly having quickly surpassed TinyURL (see here)]. This growth is in part thanks to Twitter which selected bit.ly as their provider of choice.

So the first point to note is link shortening is useful for the purpose of sharing. Check. The next logical questions are how do I use it and how many people actually click on the link?

First the usage – there’s three ways to get your link shortened:

1. Go to the bit.ly website and copy/paste the URL
2. Add the bit.ly bookmark button (‘Bookmarklet’) to your favourites list
3. Add the bit.ly Sidebar button which creates a browser pop-up using JavaScript but doesn’t navigate you away from the current page

Next – and to my mind, most important – how many clicks are these links actually getting? Basic information readily available on the website includes:

• number of clicks your link received
• aggregate clicks through bit.ly to the destination URL
• global location where the clicks occurred
• conversations on Twitter which include the link

Other users may link to the same destination URL and everyone can access information relating to aggregated clicks, however, only signed-in users receive a unique link with a distinction between theirs and the total clicks figure. So create an account and sign in – anyway it’s free.

Ok so we can shorten, share and measure the link clicks. Are there any risks involved using short URLs? Yes, there are some.

bit.ly is only just over a year old. With growth like they’re experiencing, you better believe there could be server load issues. I’ve yet to notice problems with the service so hopefully they manage better than Twitter did during its usage explosion.

There’s also the issue of security. Prima facie, you can’t tell where a link leads and there’s no URL structure to provide the hints. bit.ly uses services such as Google Safe Browsing to flag 2-3 million links per week as spam (about 1-2% of total). Failing this there’s two solutions:

1. A plug-in created for Firefox provides you basic information about the destination URL
2. Just add ‘+’ to the end of any bit.ly link will show you the detailed information mentioned above; destination, page title, etc.

When hovering over the link bit.ly/13tmsi, Firefox creates a pop-up as follows:
Similarly, adding ‘+’ and following the link bit.ly/1aEMpI+ shows information including:

There’s a whole raft of implications for link tracking in a professional capacity and usage of bit.ly over Google Analytics – but this will have to wait until next time so stay tuned for more on this topic!

Written for PC Update magazine, September Edition: http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2909/2909article5.htm

Wolfram what?

WolframAlpha.. the world’s first computational knowledge engine recently launched by Wolfram Research Inc in the United States. If you’re not quite sure what this means, join the club. It took me some time to get my head around it. The best way of understanding Wolfram is imagine a calculator with a search box instead of a numeric keypad.

Wolfram is first and foremost a giant calculator with a built-in library of data models, algorithms and mathematical equations from all fields of study including engineering, physics, chemistry and finance. These formulas can be used to calculate the answer to any given set of inputs.

Wolfram is also a massive collection of curated data. Enter the input “commonwealth bank of Australia” and you’ll receive historical and real-time information about the company’s stock price performance, average returns and volatility.

This data is completely comparable against similar data sets. Entering the combined input “RMIT University, Melbourne University” returns a two-column comparison of students, fees, founding dates, school mottos and so on.

How is this useful on a day-to-day basis? Here’s two scenarios in which Wolfram could help:

• I’m a property professional and want a more accurate “back-of-the-envelope” calculation about the present value of a future stream of rental income cash flows. Enter the input “discounted cash flow” and you’ll be prompted with the fields necessary to perform the calculation.
• My daughter needs to calculate the area of a circle, but she’s left her book at school and I’ve forgotten the equation. Enter the input “area of a circle” and Wolfram returns either the equation itself, or the answer along with the steps it took to perform the calculation.

Wolfram has the ability calculate, compare or convert just about anything.. but In contrast to Google Search which can find information, Wolfram actually creates information – at least in a form that may not have been aggregated before. The fact that Wolfram takes the additional step and performs the calculation also distinguishes it from knowledge sites like Encyclopaedia Britannica Online and the community driven Wikipedia.

The features of Wolfram that impress me the most are:

• Presentation of the website: simple, neat and extremely consistent. This improves usability and reduces the delivery time of answers to my burning questions.
• The sheer amount of data and calculation capacity of the site. Wolfram hopes to implement “every known model, method and algorithm”. That’s a lot of potentially useful data.
• The site only produces objective data. “Only what is known, is known to Wolfram”. If the data is factual, this arguably makes it more reliable.

The features of the website where Wolfram points to its ‘Alpha’ label are the ‘fuzzy logic’ algorithms for user input, otherwise known as the hints which warn the user about syntax errors and make suggestions for better queries. The input support is almost non-existent on Wolfram at present, here are a few examples.

• Entering the input “commonwealth bank” yields absolutely zero results. Only by adding the words “of Australia” delivered the results.
• Typing in “twitter” yielded the definition “a series of chirps” – obviously not the information about a popular website with recent explosive growth that I was after.

This being said, Wolfram is an impressive site which will no doubt impress in the future and provide real value to computer users.

For now, the best way to use it is know what you’re looking for, use the field categories (geography, mathematics, etc) and use as few input terms as possible.

Written for PC Update magazine, July Edition: http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2907/2907article5.htm

Is Twitter better than Facebook?

Not better.. just different. 

Partially akin to a light-weight version of the Facebook Home page.. status updates/news/photos but with more emphasis on real-time. You'd expect it to be less personal because people don't need permission to start "following" you. But actually Twitter is being used as a very personal micro blog that's quite different to Facebook. 

Since I'm less interested in people who produce noise, I follow people who provide value to me in three ways:

1. delivery of unique insight: people's perception about a business, economic trend, industry, etc;
2. simple new-fashioned entertainment: make me laugh whilst I'm waiting for the train; and
   
3. tell me a story about people's lives: their daily habits, the way they think, their motivations are all the more interesting because they're real.

(Thanks for the question Kel... this is my answer).

Android is not a phone..

..it's an operating system! So why do people compare the iPhone to Android? Because at present there's only one phone running Android (that's been released to the market) and that's the HTC G1.

But if we did want to make a genuine comparison about product quality or user value (say vs. the iPhone) we'd need to consider consumer, software and hardware independently. Segment people into categories such as business user or media content consumer, look at an individual's needs for the device and then make a comparison.

As a cross-over of the abovementioned categories, I've been waiting for a touch-screen phone that still had a full qwerty keyboard.. (iPhone touch keyboard is too damn slow; case in point was the type-off I had with you Meller!).

To me the HTC G1 is not a bad piece of hardware, except for the short battery life.. the beauty of Android, however, is that we'll soon be able to choose from 10-20 devices (all running the same o/s) that better suit our individual needs.

Twitter is for a different breed of online social animals..

Whereas Facebook is a good lurking ground when you're sitting at the computer, Twitter is far better at connecting people's thoughts and activities in real time. Photo from a KOL concert (that's you Ruley), in the library, thoughts on K-Rudd's recent cash splash.. 

The twitter community does not frown upon the status update that says "Nick is eating chocolate cake".. largely because the people viewing it are of the same ilk. Posting the same comment on Facebook will draw 3 follow-up comments that say "Nick has too much time on his hands!".

Twitter-ers want to share with others and know what others are doing.. right now.

Sell less, sell more?

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 2:21am

Malcolm Gladwell often talks about Howard Moskowitz and his work in creating the best Pepsi (or the best Pepsis plural – see TED.com for a 20-min video overview). Howard’s research found the concept of a universal product – a “best” product that caters to every customer’s needs – was amorphous in nature and often difficult for customers to articulate. Enter the concept of variability. A series of product categories that polarise customers in an attempt to more accurately meet their needs. This style of thinking is largely responsibly for the 14 types of mustard, 36 types of spaghetti sauce and 71 types of olive oil we now see on the supermarket shelf. 

However, the book “YES! 50 secrets from the Science of Persuasion” – which is incredibly incisive IMHO – talks about research conducted by Sheena Iyengar and her findings on reducing the number of product choices available to consumers (the example used is one I expect many would identify with). Basically, when faced the decision on how to allocate your Superannuation across various funds on the basis of risk and return, do you make the allocation across the 40-something categories or do you fail to bother allocating it at all? The research showed that having only 2 fund choices increased participation by roughly 15 per cent compared with 59 fund choices.

Reducing availability of customer choice also worked extremely well for the US frozen yoghurt company Pinkberry (very catchy jingle at Pinkberry.com). They’ve got a total of 2 fro-yo flavours. Very different thinking to the traditional Gelato/ice-cream shop with a myriad of flavours to suit everyone.

So uh.. how many products to sell? 

iPhone is a Consumer Product, not a Business Tool

Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 12:52am

Ok it’s 4am and I’m sitting wide awake at the hotel in San Fran so I figured I’d keep my mind occupied by posting a review of my brand new Apple iPhone.

Before we begin, props to the Ken at Xujiahui for cracking this baby – the iPhone is not supposed to run on anything but the AT&T network in the US. Apple is auctioning the exclusive rights to one major provider in each country (smart) but they’ve yet to do a deal in China. The software hack takes about 20 minutes and is far superior I’m told to the original performed by some kid with a soldering-iron.

Ok so what makes me make sweet-sweet love to the iPhone?

• The touch screen is totally rad. All navigation, typing, etc is done with a flick/tap/pinch/hold.


• Being able to flick through album covers on your phone is V sexy.


• The weather app let’s you see the forecasts of anywhere in the world.


• Google maps is fun but this will be way cooler once the iPhone is officially released in China and the location based services kick in.


• Having an 8GB iPod (7.5 actually) in your phone is extremely convenient. If you’re listening to music and someone rings, the music fades out and the ring tone fades in. When the call ends, the music comes back all without you ever having to remove an ear piece or worry about missed calls.


• The microphone on the headset is also a button that allows you to pause/play and skip tracks. This means no more taking the thing out of your pocket every 2 minutes. I think these headsets were available since the old shuffle came out but I had yet to use them myself.


• The phone is WI-FI enabled. This means you’re bound to find broadband speed access somewhere close by.


• I used to think Facebook mobile (m.facebook.com) was cool but I was way off. It’s all about iphone.facebook.com! This thing is good. I mean... REALLY good. Hard to describe but basically it’s the same website but designed for the iPhone. Note: at this point I’d like to say if anyone is starting a mobile-apps business (consulting services that make your site more usable via mobile phones) I want to invest.

Without a doubt, the iPhone is V impressive – they definitely created a “wow-factor”. So what makes me want to flush the thing? In general, Apple focuses on simplicity and “look & feel” but often at the cost of functionality. Here's a few examples: 

• The phone doesn’t come preloaded with a Task List. For anal retentives like myself, this creates a serious efficiency issue. There is probably a widget/app available to download but I haven’t checked – partially because I don’t want a cracked phone anywhere near Apple’s homepage.


• The 2.0 megapixel camera is OK for taking photos of others during the day but terrible for the drunken photos of yourself and three buddies at night (yes, I do love those). It has a tendency to take blurred photos and there’s no button so you have to press randomly on the far side of the phone.


• YouTube via the phone is blocked in China (not sure if this is the case with all mobiles?).


• You can’t text message more than 1 recipient at once – that’s right, no group texts.


• You can’t forward text messages.


• You can’t copy and paste text.


• The above things are all annoying but THE most disappointing thing about the iPhone for me is the typing speed. Being touch screen means you can’t physically hold the buttons. Although this creates an issue when you’re walking or bumping around in a taxi, it’s not even quick when you’re doing the daily morning “in bed” check (addict). Unlike the BlackBerry thumbs, I’ve found the quickest typing is with the right index finger (EDIT: am now using two thumbs which is 90% as quick as the BlackBerry however I think I'm getting RSI!). Those of you in the know will immediately shiver at this thought..

So what has this meant for me on a day-day basis? I’m now running two phones and two sim cards. Although in China this is not unusual, it’s still not ideal (EDIT: just the one phone now but see above re RSI comment - although the no Task List still shits me). I love having the iPhone with me outside working hours (if there is such a thing). When cruising to work, at the gym or in cafes the thing is awesome. iPod, email, WI-FI enabled, dedicated iPhone facebook.

However, whilst google maps, album flicking and weather widgets are all good, in reality these things are only eye candy. If you’re an Apple ambassador (no Loz, I am not) then it’s easy to make someone jealous with this thing. Get them using the iPhone for a week though and they’ll quickly realise its limitations.

Ok so the above is neither researched nor peer reviewed and definitely not fit for HBR, but it did help me fill a solid hour. Actually it also gives me an idea for a V nerdish competition: iPhone vs. BlackBerry type-off. Someone organise it..