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• 7:07 pm on September 14, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

  Simple is not that simple! 

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  Few weeks ago, I got an email from Simple telling me that I am one of the new customers they are accepting into their private beta. To be honest, I was really excited. Simple’s main goal as I understood it was to make banking simple. It took me a while to discover this is not going to be the case, at least not for me.

  After signing up, waiting for my card to arrive, and poking around their interface and list of services, I discovered that even trying to use Simple is not going to be that simple.

  First of all, you have to transfer money from your bank to Simple. I knew that beforehand, but once I had the card in hand and had to do this for the first time, I realized that it is not as easy as I thought it would be. It takes time (ACH transfers take time) and it costs $3 per transaction (Wells Fargo charges for ACH apparently). Also, since this is a debit card, you would have to use all the money in your account, exactly, or simply transfer money back to your account if you decided the service is not for you.

  $3 might not sound like a lot of money, but I currently pay $0 to use my debit or credit cards so there is no reason for me to pay in order to use another debit card especially that I am getting money management services from Mint.

  What made this worse for me is that I would have to give up using my American Express and Visa card which earn me rewards and help me collect Miles. Again, this might not sound like a lot but once you start collecting rewards and redeeming them for nights at hotels or airlines tickets, you start realizing that since you are spending the money anyway, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be getting some sort of return.

  Don’t get me wrong, Simple is off to a great start when it comes to simplifying banking in general, it is just that there are too many things to take care of before this becomes my main card.

  Although the interface is great, the search functionality seems to be amazing, and the money mangement services they provide seem to be fantastic, I didn’t feel like it is worth the trouble, the cost, or the time.

  Will keep an eye on the startup though, it looks like they have a great team of talented engineers and designers.

   

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• 7:24 pm on December 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  What is Microsoft’s vision? 

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  Two decades ago, Microsoft’s vision was clear and Bill Gates was executing brilliantly on it. His vision was to simply put Windows in the center of everything making it the most popular platform on earth, helping developers build hundreds of thousands of applications on it, and deliver it to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

  Looking back at that vision and how Microsoft succeeded executing it, you have to wonder about Microsoft’s current vision. The leadership at Microsoft has changed, the times have changed, and the competition is stronger but the same old vision remained the same.

  Microsoft is still putting Windows, an operating system that was built for the “PC era”, in the center of almost everything while other companies are inventing new markets, building new devices, and innovating on many different levels to disrupt many different industries.

  If you look back at the last twenty years, you will need to think for a while before pointing at something or an industry that Microsoft has invented or innovated in except for the XBOX (and of course, Kinect). There has been tons of small innovations here and there inside of existing products like Office and even Windows itself, but Microsoft missed tons of opportunities in many different markets including Mobile, Music, Movies, Tablets, and tens of other markets Microsoft either ignored or simply entered way too late to make a real difference.

  Microsoft is not only losing its fan base, they are also losing marketshare by refusing to “update” their vision and maybe even their strategy. The company has become too big to move quickly, something Google is trying to avoid by continuing its efforts of getting the best talent and producing the most innovative products as quickly as possible by giving engineers inside the company the opportunity to make new products, launch them to market, and test the waters to see if they will succeed.

  Microsoft’s official mission statement is “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential”, that’s very nice but completely vague and means absolutely nothing. It is like saying my goal is to “change the world” but I am not saying how.

  What Microsoft needs right now is the “Think Different” ad campaign. They don’t need it to restore the trust they are slowly losing from their customers (especially small businesses and college students), they need to tell their employees what Microsoft is all about.

  Microsoft’s problem is not with revenue, they are doing well and will continue to do well the same way Yahoo is still making profit. Their problem is that their future is uncertain under the current leadership. Windows should no longer be the center of everything because Windows will no longer be relevant as it is. It needs to be redefined, re-imagined, and reimplemented. I am not sure if Windows 8 has done that. The Metro interface is really cool but it is not really redefining what Windows is the same way Apple redefined how tablets should work or what Music Players are (regardless if you agree with their definition or not).

  Microsoft needs to “Think Different” and Ballmer needs to define a clear vision for his employees and the general public. After that, he needs to leave, someone else with a more technical vision needs to lead. Bill Gates had a real passion for technology. In addition to building a very successful company, he had a passion for technology. Ballmer doesn’t have that passion, at least, it is not more important to him than simply reporting higher profit margins. A CEO’s job (in my opinion) is not to make money, it is to make money while making sure the company is innovating and building a solid future for itself.

   

• 1:24 am on December 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  One Quick Thing Facebook Can Do To Help Users Fight Spam 

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  I was looking through my Facebook feed the other day and thought that Facebook is not really doing enough work to ensure the integrity of its original applications. I noticed one simple application spammers use all the time, video!

  It is really easy to set up a link in Facebook that has a thumbnail which looks exactly like a Facebook video only when you click on it you are taken to a completely different site.

  This does not work with images because once you hover over an image, there is a hover over effect that gives you feedback to indicate that this is actually an image that was uploaded and will be served through Facebook. You might not think of it that way when you actually use Facebook but it becomes an important part of the user experience.

  The solution (for this specific problem) is simple. Make a hover-over effect for video! Make it so the play icon gets a shiny white background once you hover over it. Simple, right?

  It is just a though! I wonder if that would actually reduce video-related spam, and if it does, by how much!

   

• 12:54 am on December 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

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  Microsoft’s Biggest Mobile Problem Isn’t That It’s Late, It’s That The Phones Aren’t That Great

  Amazon entered the tablet market and made a splash. We think it would do the same if it entered the smartphone market.

  And that’s really the biggest problem with Microsoft’s phones. There has been no splash. There has been nothing special. Sure, Microsoft gets some critical hosannas, but those people are really damning the company with faint praise.

  Not a single review of the Windows Phone mentions some game-changing feature from Microsoft. They all say, (in essence), “Hey Microsoft made a pretty darn good phone.”

  There’s absolutely nothing about Microsoft’s phone that makes you sit up and say, “Holy crap! That’s uhhh-mazing. I HAVE TO GET IT.”

   

• 10:31 pm on December 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Facebook ( 3 ), Google ( 6 ), Social Network, Twitter   

  Thoughts on Google+ 

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  A new report by Paul Allen has estimated that Google+ is 62 Million users strong and adding more than 675,000 users every single day! 

  Once I read that report, I clicked on the “Stream” icon to check Google+, something I have not done in a while. I do check the notifications that appear at the top of every single Google page I use, simply because it bothers me to see that box with anything but a zero, the same way it bothers me to see my Inbox with anything but a zero count for unread emails.

  I don’t know if Google+ has 62 or a 100 million users, the real numbers are unavailable, and the last announced number was 40 million during the earnings call. I do know, however, that Google is not going to give up easy. They are in this for the long run and they will continue to integrate Google+ into every single product (most importantly, the Google bar at the top) making it central to using any service from Google and that will defiantly increase the number of people signing up to try the service, but that’s what’s important, they are signing up to try it. What really matters is the number of people who remain active afterwards and nobody except Google can give us the number of active users.

  I thought about the numbers Paul Allen presented and I really think they don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that he is dedicated to giving an estimate every couple of months, I follow those posts and wait for them but the reality is that Google+ doesn’t matter to me (yet).

  It is simple, none of my friends, family members, of people who I really care about are there. Or let me put it differently, none of them are not available anywhere but Google+. Most of them are available on Facebook and/or Twitter in addition to Google+ so there is no real need for me to follow them there since I already follow/friend them on a different social network!

  I know this is a basic problem for any social network but when Facebook says they have 600 or 700 million active users, they actually mean people who login to use the service at least once a month. That’s the number that matters because it tells me that the chances are, my friends are on Facebook, in fact, the chances are few of my friends are using Facebook right now!

  I do think Google+ is a well-designed social network. I think hangouts are cool, the stream is clean (so far) and the integrated chat “client” is much much better than Facebook’s, but a social network is a social network, it is not really about the technology behind the scens, it is about the number of active users that I know.

  Google+ might be gaining users by the millions everyday but till I need to switch to Google+, I wont. The value is not really worth me taking the time to take my whole “online life” to Google+, it is already on Facebook and there is no good reason for me to change that anytime soon.

   

• 11:10 pm on November 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bing, Google ( 6 ), Search, Siri ( 2 ), Yahoo   

  Search 

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  Siri is an amazing product. It is easy to use, understands the meaning of your sentence (to some extent) and helps you find the information you need. In a way or another, Siri is more than a voice assistant, it is a search engine.

  You might argue that Siri cannot do everything Google does, but search is not defined by what Google can do.

  When we talk about market share in relation to search, we include the big players: Google, Bing, Yahoo, and few other companies, but we forget that search is no longer a text query translated into ten simple blue links that take you to a different location.

  Using Yelp to find reviews is search, asking Siri a question is search, and looking up the price of a ticket on Kayak is search. It might not be search as we would like to define it but that is in fact search.

  We need a piece of information and we are using a service or another to find that information. There is no reason why a search query in Google that is looking to find the “best restaurant in San Francisco” should be considered different than looking up the same information on Yelp. Yet we continue to ignore the fact that search has evolved and all the big players provide only part of it. The 100% marketshare they talk about is not a 100% of the market, we are not calculating all queries.

  If I want to calculate all queries that I use every single day to look for information, it doesn’t all involve Google, Bing, or any other “traditional” search engine. I use Amazon to look up products, Yelp to find good restaurants, Facebook to find more information about people, Linked In when I am looking for a professional or a company, Glassdoor when I want to research reviews about a company, and others. I do use Google, I use it a lot, but not all the queries I write into a search engine everyday are written in Google’s text box. Most of them are not.

  When I think about that, I also start thinking that my use of Glassdoor for example, doesn’t really equal using Google since it is a universal place to search for all or most information online, while other websites (like Amazon) are indexing specific information relating to a specific topic or industry. While this is true, I still consider using Amazon to look up a product (not necessarily to buy it) is a form of search.

  The reason this is important is because the way we think of a “search engine” has been the same for years and it needs to change. With the amount of information on the internet, there should be an easier way to get to information without having to go through ten or twenty blue links.

  I know Google, Bing, and others are working on that, but till then let’s at least define search in a different way so we have an open mind when we think about completely changing the way we look up information online.

   

• 10:48 pm on November 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Apple ( 2 ), Apple TV, iOS   

  Apple’s next generation Apple TV moves closer to reality 

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  Apple’s next generation Apple TV moves closer to reality

  Apple TV is going to be an important part of Apple’s continuous success in the future.

  iOS release history tells us that as a product in development moves even closer to release, it is assigned a proper codename. Not only an identifier like “3,1″ but a codename such as N94 (iPhone 4S) or K48 (original iPad). The next-generation Apple TV has reached that stage. Thanks totoday’s beta release of iOS 5.1, we have on our hands the codename for this new Apple TV (3,1).

   

• 7:15 pm on November 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Facebook ( 3 ), Google ( 6 ), Groupon, IPO, Linked In   

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  Facebook’s Offering Next Year Could Raise $10 Billion, Valuing Company at $100 Billion

  The social networking firm is now targeting a time frame of April to June 2012 for an initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter. The company is exploring raising $10 billion in its IPO—what would be one of the largest offerings ever—in a deal that might assign Facebook a $100 billion valuation, a number greater than twice that of such stalwarts as Hewlett-Packard Co. and 3M Co.

  The most recent IPO, an $805 million float of discount-deal service Groupon Inc. on Nov. 3, has plummeted 42% in price in the past five trading days after surging in its first day of trading. Business-networking service LinkedIn Corp., whose stock more than doubled from its IPO price on its first day of trading May 19, has since fallen 36%, but remains 33% above its IPO.

  Facebook is not the same as Groupon, or even Linked In (not to put both companies in the same category together). Facebook has a real business model, and a vision regardless of the fact that you might disagree with it.

  It would be interesting to see how the Facebook IPO is going to affect their talent acquisition.

   

• 4:10 pm on November 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Appstore, Facebook ( 3 ), iPhone   

  Facebook, Fix Your iPhone App! 

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  I used to access Facebook from my iPhone more than I access it from my Mac. The reason is simple, it takes me a minute to check my notifications, messages, friend requests, and latest posts in my stream which is a minute I can spare whenever I want wherever I am. That’s the point of having an iPhone app!

  Lately, however, I have been trying to avoid using Facebook on my iPhone. I barely open the app and in most cases I only open it so the number on top of the icon can go away.

  The reason behind that is also simple, Facebook’s iPhone app is horrible! Absolutely horrible.

  It crashes all the time, doesn’t work right, displays the wrong information, takes too long, and confuses me. I end up spending way more time looking things up on my phone to the point where I simply close the app (after clearing my notifications) and move on.

  I am surprised that Facebook has not put enough effort into fixing this especially since their iPhone applications is one of the most popular on all iOS devices. I am also surprised that people are not complaining enough about this.

  Facebook’s application also needs a quick redesign, the Twitter app on the iPhone for example works just right. It takes few seconds for me to check the latest status messages, see my notifications, and move on when I am using the Twitter iPhone application. That’s what an application for the iPhone should be.

  Facebook, Fix Your iPhone App!

   

• 4:28 am on November 27, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardware, Interesting, Sensors, Twine   

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  Twine: Listen to your world, talk to the internet

  This is a pretty awesome device, you can take a look at the video below or donate (and maybe get a Twine!) on their Kickstarter page.