I love getting my finances online. I can look up info on my WAMU Checking account, Citibank credit card (with ThankYou Rewards), my 401k, and my direct deposit paycheck stubs. ADP iPayStatements provides the paystub in PDF format, but it is an awful website. I can review my Pay Statements or my W-2 forms, which is great. I can also get email notifications when new statements are available. Since we no longer get paper copies, this is great. The only issue is the way the website is constructed. They don’t let you ‘Open in New Window’! So my multi-tasking browser is stuck dead in the water with the following message: “To protect your sensitive information, you cannot access iPayStatements from this browser window.”

Okay, so no second browser window is not the end of the world. But they are going further and screw with Adobe Acrobat’s settings. So Acrobat’s default setting is to “Display PDF in browser”. This means that the browser window is open, and the PDF is displayed within Internet Explorer or Firefox. I hate this concept because it limits the toolbar, can crash/stall your browser, and is usually inefficient since I usually download the full PDF so I can view later. This ’security’ limitation is a pain, and will cause me to hate the site. I went to look for help on the topic at ADP’s website since the PDF was not displaying initially, but the only answer I got was to either install Acrobat (meaning I didn’t have it already) or upgrade to the newer version.

Someone over at ADP needs to learn how to make a website more user-friendly. Until then, I am only going to visit to get my W-2 and 1099 forms once a year.

While researching possible stocks to invest in, I found a blurb about the upcoming launch of Zecco.com. It sounds like a nice idea. People sharing ideas and news on stocks. Then they will also have the option to execute stock, option, and mutual fund trades. I think I heard someone say that they would be offering free trades (no commission). I don’t know how that is possible, but that feature won’t be available at launch. It looks like a lot of their ad sponsors are from financial services companies. I am a bit worried about the idea of users spreading news/rumors and pushing stock prices in the wrong direction. Indiviuals don’t have to disclose the same things large companies and analysts have to. So I don’t trust blogs to give honest stock recommendations…

Its interesting to note that commission fees are dropping. I remember paying $35 per trade and I now pay $12.95. I also don’t have quarterly or yearly fees on my Schwab account. TechCrunch has an interesting take on this new service.

Okay so lets take this whole web 2.0 thing to a new level, how about open source business plans? I have created a backpack page for us to work on a brainstorming for healthy business ideas. I propose we focus on two key tasks to start, first what are the principals a “healthy lifestyle” business should abide by? See my initial thoughts and add your own in the main body section.

Second who are possible customers, what are the key segments that we could target with a business?

By combining these two areas I hope that we can combine principals with target customers to find a unique opportunity that will launch a ground breaking business.

Clearly business terms are also needed to govern this space, here is my proposal:

1) All are welcome to use the thinking to establish a business on their own, if you do post ideas to this page they are available for any member of the group to use.

2) Any business’ that do start using these ideas must credit extra8 as an inspiration and must always include extra8 promotion on their site and in any physical location.

3) Revenue and Profits, the real reason to start a business, in my view these are the property of the crediting organization and owners of the business, with risk comes the reward. If we do find some good ideas we may want to create a sub group to actually work on launching the business and then this group would share the revenue in some yet to be determined fashion.

Thoughts? Interested?

Check out Business Plan 2.0

You have got a plethorea of services that start with “Windows Live”:  Windows Live Messenger (WLM), Windows Live Mail (WLM) [wait, which one is WLM?!], Windows Live Local (WLL), Windows Live Safety Center (WLSC), Windows Live Expo (WLE), Windows Live Favorites (WLF), Windows Live Search (WLS).  Then there is another set of “Live” services: Windows Office Live (WOL) and Windows OneCare Live (WOCL or WOL).  But the worst came today when I found out about the new Windows Live Local Search Free Call (WLLSFC).

At a company with over 60,000 employees, and a committee could ruin much of the work they do by making a huge mistake in naming.  I don’t mind getting rid of MSN, which has a slow, clunky, non-innovative history attached to it.  I understand that the naming works with the new organizational structure, but it makes no sense to the consumer to add extra words or letters. 

Why not make MSN into just Live?  Live Messenger, Live Mail, Live Search, Live Local.  You could even play off it for advertising Live (change it to live as in living).  They could do something even better, and get a whole new word/letter/phrase similar to “i” in iPod and iTunes.  Branding is a huge pain and I think they are digging a hole with the new naming pattern.  People can hardly tell what services are without long names like “Windows Live Local Search Free Call”.  That is an absurdly long name, which could have been called Live Search Connectoid.  I am partial to the word “connectoid” because I think it sounds interesting and unusual.  Microsoft is trying to continue domination of the desktop by keeping the word Windows as a top buzz word.  I think they are excluding users of Apple or Linux platforms who can easily access the Web 2.0 software being used.

When Lucent spun the Enterprise Networks Group out in 2000 it had to come up with a name.  They picked Avaya, pronounced uhv-EYE-uh, because it would set them apart and capture what they were doing.  Google was a made up word that came from the word googol, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and the founders liked the definition of “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth”.  Red Hat came from a lost Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes).  Cisco is short for San Francisco, Intel came from INTegrated ELectronics and HoTMaiL as it was originally spelled was constructed with the letters HTML, which were used to create the web-based software.

What do you think of this new naming scheme from Microsoft?  How would you change it?

PS: I do really like the name Microsoft, and it would have been nice to see them stick that back in.  They have made great software.  I know the name has had a bad reputation with games, but the Xbox has changed that around and given birth to Microsoft Game Studios. 

I manage them by saying “just buy me a beer next time we go out” or “I’ll buy lunch next time”. I think this tends to work in the long-run, as long as you have friends that are relatively in the same personal financial position as you. But I honestly have never analyzed in detail what my exact position is with money I have lent out to and money I have borrowed from friends and family. How would you do that anyway? Keep all the receipts? Input them into an Excel spreadsheet? Input every transaction that involves more than one person paying? What a pain!

So my next question is what are the things that cause these debit and credit balances among friends? Well, here are some that I run into:

• Not having correct change to pay for my portion of the meal at a restaurant
• A single roommate being the contact person on apartment-related bills (water, electricity, etc.)
• A single person paying for food or refreshments at a party that is actually hosted by a number of people
• Receiving “employee-purchase” items from friends who are not giving them as gifts
• Just plain loaning money to someone who does not have enough cash with him

Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom have come up with an innovative and, most importantly, easy way to keep track of this mess. They created BillMonk to “ease the strain of finances on friendships by providing a tool that manages social money in a manner that is easy and fair.”

You can go on the site and sign-up for a FREE account. From there you can easily enter your debits and credits with people. You can also enter them from your cell phone, while at dinner, or at a bar, or at Target or something. BillMonk then takes care of keeping track of who owes who, and can let you know this information using a standard web browser or your cell phone.

What a great and simple way to solve such a nagging, ubiquitous problem. Check them out and let me know what you think!

There’s a good post on TechCrunch about this whole “beta” fad that companies are partaking in to release web applications. It talks about the balance between making your site public too early and keeping it under wraps too long and going to market too late in the game.

It seems that when you distill the “beta” fad down to its elements, the purpose of it is purely for marketing. I doubt that any public beta has really benefited more from being public than private in terms of adding functionality and fixing bugs. A properly run private beta can be just as useful. But as far as marketing goes, TechCrunch provides some great pointers on how to use this marketing strategy.

The one thing I would add to this list is to write software for yourself. Create an application that you will use and then use it. You are your own best critic. If you don’t like it or don’t think it’s useful, then there’s a good chance that other people are going to feel the same way.

Hello Meebo! This is an impressive little web application I came across this week. From the about page, it is a team of young and talented individuals that has combined AJAX coding and Web2.0 design principles to create a useful application. For people in a more corporate environment (like me) where there is specific technology in place to block access to desktop IM clients, Meebo is particularly attractive, as there is nothing to download.

As you can see from the screen shot, the site is still in alpha, and there a few annoyances that still need to be worked out (i.e. the site hasn’t yet implemented cookies to remember the passwords - typing in 4 username and password combos is a bit of a pain in the butt), but I will definitely be keeping an eye on this over the next few months. I will be impressed if they are able to get some of the advanced functionality of these IM clients working over a simple web application (i.e. getting the voice part of GTalk working, or hooking into cell phones). Also, because it is a web application, as they add new functionality I like the fact that I won’t be needing to update a downloaded client - it will just work.

Hopefully some fun functionality will be built in over the next few months, but for now I’ll be content just to IM with friends from work!