Today Wallstrip has an interesting interview with Covestor CEO Rikki Tahta.
Jun 29
Jun 28
Jun 27
Good news for all Nintendo Wii fans and indie game developers.
Apparently Nintendo, learning from its mistakes in the past, has decided to open its newest console (the Wii) to developers.
Engadget has a brief article on the subject.
Jun 27
Wired is running a very interesting article about Michael Arrington, owner, writer, editor and undisputed king of TechCrunch.
Wired piece runs quickly through Arrington’s professional career and outlines his successes, failures and his disposition as an entrepreneur/blogger. Particular attention is given to the conflict which arises when, after you’ve invested in a company, you also review it on your blog, which happens to be one of the most followed on the web about startup and everything web2.0.
The article presents Arrington answer to such allegations:
Arrington doesn’t observe any such boundaries. He’s better today at disclosing his conflicts than he was when he first started TechCrunch, but he’ll tell you that it is exactly those conflicts — and his refusal to pull punches in spite of them — that give him his competitive advantage. “One of my friends, Tom Ball, is mad at me because I just trashed his startup, Jigsaw. He’ll get over it — I hope,” Arrington says. “I’m an investor in a company called Daylife, and I shredded them.” He’s also happy to use his friends as sources. “When I broke the YouTube story, it’s only because I was online at 2 am, and a friend told me about it.”
Quite right, I remember him (Arrington) trashing on TechCrunch more than one company he’s involved with. I agree with him, so long as said conflict is out in the open and every reader is aware that you may not be entirely objective in your review there’s nothing preventing your opinion from being as credible and qualified as anybody elses.
TechCrunch is an excellent blog, constantly updated with juicy news and insightful article and reviews. I read it every day, or at least I try, and can’t imagine how I’d get all the information I need to waste half of my day with incoherent and garbled musings without it/him.
One last point, something I’ve always been fighting with. I’d like blogs, bloggers, journalist, everyone who’s in charge of giving me news or opinions about something to be completely independent from the industry. Arrington and TechCrunch so far have been undeniably fair in their articles, but when you start building a business, get PR people involved, your neutrality goes down the drain and your allegiance goes to the highest bidder.
I hope TechCrunch stays exactly the way it is and doesn’t follow CNET down the big fat corporation road. The personal touch in all articles is essential and once your interests as an entrepreneur really start clashing with your fairness as a reviewer you’ll lose your credibility, which is everything to a blogger.
Having said that, to mimic Wallstrip, I’d say Long on TechCrunch.
Jun 22
Yesterday a wrote a post about Wesabe and Marc Hedlund, one of Wesabe’s founders, was kind enough to leave a comment clarifying some of my doubts and illustrate their improvements roadmap.
I’m reposting it here because I think it deserves more attention.
Hey, Steph,
I’m one of the founders of Wesabe. Thanks for giving the site a try and for writing up your experiences with it. Sorry to hear your experiences were pretty poor overall.
I definitely agree with you that there are a lot of things that we can do to make the site more usable, and upload and goals, which you mentioned, are two of the areas where we’re spending the most time right now.
On upload, other companies are taking approaches that are easier, but which will ask you to put your bank credentials into an unknown startup’s web site. Definitely, we know that many people are not concerned about doing that, but also that many people are very concerned about doing that. We wanted to start out with the most secure and safe approach, which would leave you in full control of your data, and then add more convenient approaches for the people who are less concerned about giving their bank credentials to a startup. We’re well on our way with that, and expect the upload process to be dramatically easier very soon.
On Goals, the usability of that feature is getting a serious upgrade very shortly, and I think you’ll find it a lot more like what you expected.
The areas of the site that are worth spending some more time with, if you’re interested, are the Accounts, Groups, and Tips tabs. In Accounts, many people have told us they get a lot of value out of being able to tag and see reports on their spending. We recently added some Flash graphs to that tab that have gotten a very positive reaction — see this for more details.
In Groups, a lot of Wesabe users have posted about their experiences with various financial topics, and there are new posts every day that people have reported that they find very useful. The Groups tab is a great place to connect with other people who may have gone through similar financial questions to those you’re facing, and can give you advice about how to get to the next step.
In Tips, a lot of Wesabe users have contributed specific recommendations for getting more for your money. I will say that I think Tips is changing pretty substantially in the near future, since I think we can make it a lot easier to use, as well, but there are still some great tips from people in the community, and great comments on those tips from people who have tried them.
In any case, I would encourage you to check out all of the sites and hopefully give us another try in the future as well. I think you’ll find that we give you the most control, by far, over your data and privacy, and put you fully in control over your financial information; we connect you with a rich and very helpful community of people who can help you find the best ways to get through financial questions; and we are very dedicated to listening to and responding to our users (including people who have tried and not liked the service).
I hope this helps. Please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other thoughts on the above or would like help with any of the features I mentioned.
Best,
Marc Hedlund, Wesabe
I’ll make sure to give Wesabe another spin during this week-end and post something more about it.
Jun 21
German Optelcom-NKF is my latest investment, and for change, I finally made the right decision at the right time.
Things started looking good in 2005 when Optelcom-NKF started acting on its best laid plan, acquired NKF, decision which I’ll explain quoting Edmund Ludwig (Optelcom’s CEO):
“One of the primary reasons for the acquisition of NKF in early 2005 was to bring together state-of-the-art video over IP solutions to a comprehensive fiber product line,”
After the acquisition Optelcom-NKF received a nice injection of cash thanks to the acquisition of Avaya by two private investment firms which made shares of most telecommunication equipment companies raise slightly.
On the 6th of June Optelcom-NKF finally rolled out its new technology, an encryption algorithm for VOIP communication. The C-44 delivers DVD-quality video performance at both high and low bit rates with Optelecom-NKF’s MPEG-4 compression algorithm.
I’ll get out of the position pretty soon since my return is made and I’m not big on long term investments. Here’s the widget from my Covestor holding.
Jun 21
It’s already all around the net, online service Wesabe has raised 4 million $ from Union Square Ventures. Techcrunch, Fred Wilson (obviously) and other news sites talked about the deal. I’m not going to talk about the deal or do any thoughts pouring on the future of the company. I’d much rather tell you about my experience with Wesabe and comment it from a web/usability point of view.
First a brief disclaimer, I tried Wesabe a few months ago so pages and functionality may very well have changed since then.
My point is, to cut it short, a user must be really driven to use Wesabe, you really have to give some hours up to learn how to use the site.
A few months ago I signed up for the service, downloaded their application and uploaded some data from one of my Citibank accounts. Here’s the first big hurdle you have to get over to use the service, you have to have an external application running on your client in order to upload your data. Arguably this is an acceptable obstacle for security’s sake, you’re not going to give access to your personal bank/credit card accounts to a third party. Nevertheless it’s a big job for the user (download statement from online banking, import it in the application, run the upload) which may cause some problems to the less skilled.
Second step, once the data is uploaded go to the site, log in and define some objectives. My test goal was “pay off credit card”.
The interface to define your aims if very well designed and fairly straightforward, so far so good.
I’ve set up my account and I’ve created my first objective, now what? I’m staring at a web page congratulating with me for the goal creation, that’s it, no suggestion of what I should look at or collaborative filtering of any kind there… Hello? Is anybody out there?
I was really close to giving up on the entire thing, then I decided to give it another chance, tried to search for something. The search results page was very clean and well presented, but I still couldn’t find the wealth of information I was promised during the registration.
The main critique I’d move to the search results page is that there’s too much text, I don’t want to spend time reading four lines of description and tags for every hit, I just want to see some figures and a few tags to be able to make my decision and give you your click-through in a few seconds.
Bottom line I never actually learned how to use the site. It’s a great idea and I know and read about many people who use it regularly and love it. I guess I just wasn’t motivated enough to keep clicking, or maybe I was just expecting it to come up with something like “Go to kings cross, on platform 9 3/4 you’ll find a small black briefcase containing the money to pay off your credit card debt”.
Mint, Wesabe’s most serious competitor is about to release and most of the people who’ve actually tried it say it’s a winner. Wesabe and USV still have the considerable advantage of having reached the market first, which basically means that Mint is going to be compared to Wesabe and not the other way around.
I believe Wesabe could provide great value even to slothful people like me, just keep building, improving the existing functionality, and for goodness sake make it more usable.
Jun 20
From my rationale on Covestor…
After all I’ve said about Linux desktops being a profitable business for DELL here’s what they come out with: (Quote from a post on Ubuntu forum)
“I had a surreal experience with Dell today.
My boss asked me to order a new computer for our small, non-profit business. Wanting to support Dell in their decision to sell computers with Ubuntu installed, I decided to order one.
First, I talked to a small business representative, who informed me that I could not order one of the Ubuntu-based computers through the small business department. I had to go through the “home and home office” department.
I called the Home office department. I asked the representative if I could buy one of the ubuntu computers for my company. She said (and I quote), “these Dell computers are designed for personal use only, as long as you use it for personal use, you can purchase one.”
So I lied and said I would….Next, I tried to buy it on our business credit card. They would have none of that. She told me that I had to buy it through a personal card. Now, as a non-proft, our business does not pay sales tax (10% in Tennessee). Had I bought it with my own card, I would have had to pay tax (~$90), which my company would not have reimbursed me for. So…..no Dell today.
I really wanted to support Dell and I am just blown away that they would REFUSE MY MONEY because I was buying it to use for a business. What company goes around telling its customers how they can use their products? What business model does that fall under?
More importantly, are they really supporting Ubuntu and Linux? They didn’t seem too supportive to me.”
Dell already had all sort of problems with its customer support and sales department which they seemed to be on their way to fix. Lets hope they have a good answer for this and take swift action because this article has already been slashdotted which means half the planet knows about it.
Jun 12
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgkq8bANjDY]
Jun 08
Covestor launched this Tuesday and I haven’t had time breathe ever since.
Fist off a brief introduction about Covestor, what is it? I’ll let the press release answer this:
Rikki Tahta, co-founder and Chairman of Covestor LLC, explains, “We all know people who are managing their own money, and doing a great job. Covestor is the only place that these proven self-investors can build their reputation and get the recognition they deserve. Our research shows there are tens of thousands of unsung heroes and millions of others who would be keen to invest alongside them.”
Covestor’s new service is easy to use. A free institutional grade track record is created for each member. Covestor captures real trades and holdings using a secure automated link into a member’s broker account…
The response and enthusiasm surrounding our launch was overwhelming and we had a really hard/fun time keeping up with all the code applications and contact requests.
After spending so much time developing an application it’s really rewarding to see so many people all over the world thrilled about what you have created. It’s been stressful, incredibly challenging giving the hurdles we had to face with limited resources, amazingly vexing but ultimately exceptionally gratifying.
We’re receiving more and more attention from the press, both online and offline.
We also noticed today that people started embedding our widgets in their blogs and discussing their positions on Covestor, when you see this happen after just a couple of days you just know that you got it right.
Oh, I almost forgot, here’s my factsheet on Covestor.
Please note that I will not answer any question related to Covestor technology directly on this blog. For any inquiry use the “Contact” form.
