Archive | June, 2007

Wesabe Suggestions

by evbart on June 14, 2007 in personal finance, personal productivity, review

See my full review of Wesabe here.

My first suggestion for Wesabe is to create “training wheels”, a suggested series of tags, structured according to some higher level organization. Many users aren’t going to think far enough ahead to plan this out themselves the first time they use the service. Wesabe can prevent them from working themselves into a jam, and increase the chances they will have a positive experience with this type of guidance.

The personal finance categories I include are of the Microsoft Personal Budget Template , and could be a good starting place. Eventually it may be good to let the users themselves share their “personal finance categories” or “tag framework” so that other users can copy it if they like it.
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Wesabe: social personal finance

by evbart on June 14, 2007 in personal finance, personal productivity, review, web application

I’ve been using Wesabe for over six months now, and just finally had time to sit down and write about it. Its been picking up some traction on some top blogs like A VC and Gotham Girl, and I wanted to join in on the fun because i don’t think the analysis is in depth enough.

Part of the reason that it took me so long is because I was really compelled to give it a fair trial. The idea to be able to better manage your expenses, is a very interesting one that has a rather large potential market. Just about everyone I know has a bank account, and most of them are pretty unimpressed by the online services offered as well as by the idea of using Quicken or Excel.

Wesabe a very innovative solution for getting your financial data into a nice clean format that is ripe for analysis. On a higher level, they are using the wisdom of crowds to try teach us personal finance best practices. This isn’t a topic that most people are willing to share and talk about openly, so the social benefits of this application down the road are enormous. I absolutely encourage you to take a look at this service, and most of my analysis below is positive. My only criticisms are because they have done is such a great job so far, that it begs to be taken to the next level.
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Kiva.org – fav app of the moment

by evbart on June 7, 2007 in review, social entrepreneurship, Uncategorized, web application, webapps

Just got into Kiva.org yesterday. I had seen it many times before, but really wanted to see the site pick up traction before I spent much time on it. Cut me some slack! There were so many silly web2.0 companies coming out that I could never keep up.

Luckily, Rod, from 5280Angel in Denver, posted about his Kiva loans being repayed, and his active portfolio page was really what drew me in. I took a quick look at the rest of the site, which is brilliantly done by the way, and then signed to help finance a few loans.

The next day I received this in the mail:

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Useful Apps

by evbart on June 6, 2007 in OSX, review, Software

I’m a big fan of software that is actually useful. The rest is just clutter, and most of it falls into the clutter category.

Marc Andreessen covers his OSX killer apps of 2007, and has some pretty solid suggestions.

I agree with:

Netnewsire (though its slowly getting replaced by google reader)
VLC (couldnt live without it)
Ecto (though eventually I would just use Google Docs to publish)
Adium

I Disagree with:

Twitter (needs larger user base, integration with facebook is a step)
Flickr client (see my post about uploading pics)
Cocoalicious (i like the concept, but it never worked well)

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I want to watch Tennis on my computer!

by evbart on June 6, 2007 in tennis, video

My tennis obsessed girlfriend has been rubbing off on me lately, so now I’ve got the bug to watch some Roland Garros, live.

I hate TV, and don’t want cable, so I can’t just add the Tennis Channel to our tab.

Some baseball obsessed friends of mine mentioned that they could subscribe to streaming video of all the games, so I set out to find a subscription for Tennis. Needless to say, I didn’t find anything. It seems like the nature of the tennis tournaments, with both masters and slams being run by completely different groups of people, makes it impossible to offer all of these events in one location. The best I found was was MediaZone, and even that wasn’t very convincing.

The next stop for me was the Roland Garros website. Hmm, they have a video section. After about 30 seconds of searching, I found their video selection to be quite limited, and fairly behind the times. First, they require you to download various plugins. Web based video has made enough progress, where this shouldn’t be an issue at all. Forcing you to download 2 plugins is crazy! Second, they only have “re-caps” or highlights available online. The error I recieved when trying to view the live feeds looked something like this:

En fonction des accords négociés avec nos partenaires,
ce service est exclusivement ouvert aux résidents des
pays suivants :

Which means, that if i’m not a resident of France, Moncao, Andorre, Senegal, Ivory Coast, etc. I can’t watch the live feed.

I hope all these VC video investments start catching up, because there’s a lot of video out there thats going to waste if it’s not available online. I was able to find Roland Garros 2007 on You Tube until the French Tennis Federation made them take it down. The demand is here, and someone needs to fill it!

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Google Reader heading in the right direction… slowly….. but surely

by evbart on June 5, 2007 in RSS, Uncategorized, web application

A few weeks ago (or more) the Google Reader team announced that they had created a “Reader trends” page to report on your Reading habits. Some rss readers have included basic metrics, but I havn’t seen anything this in-depth. Looking forward to learning more about what I read, and where I read.

Today, the Google Reader blog just announced that they have added an offline mode to their application. Really looking forward to traveling in order to put this feature to use.

A few more features and they will clearly be ahead of the pack (aka authenticated RSS feeds, and a better way to organize/manage your feeds).

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Sharing Photos with Flickr (or any other service for that matter)

by evbart on June 1, 2007 in Personal Tech, photos, web apps, workflow

My friend and co-worker Jason recently came back from the Hamptons, and wanted an easy way to share his photos with all of the people that were there. He put together instructions for how to use Flickr groups, and was kind of surprised by how many steps where involved.

Honestly, I wasn’t so shocked. I’ve used flickr, zoomr, picasa online, and for local file management I’ve used ACDSee, iphoto, and picasa. None of them do exactly what I want, and none of them seem to propose an easy process for publishing your pictures.

These are all the steps nessecary to have a new person add photos to a
Flickr group:

  • Click the link on this invite
  • If you don’t have a yahoo account create one.
  • On the main page the first option says Upload Or, look at our uploading

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