Technology

Google’s blog today provides a decent overview of the SOPA/PIPA issues that are the cause for many websites today altering their appearance or all together blocking access.

I am a long-time user of Quicken software to track my accounts.  As a former employee of Intuit, I have always been a fan of their mission to simplify people’s financial lives.  But this mission hasn’t always translated into good product experiences.

So a couple of years ago I gave Mint a try and was very happy with their service.  It was (and still is) free and it offers a good view into the state of your accounts.

At least, it used to.

For some reason, investments have always been difficult to track. To my knowledge, there are no good tools that are reasonably priced that allow you to track the performance of your investments.  The biggest problem seems to be separating out initial investments from dividend or other returns.  Inevitably these get counted as additional purchases instead of reinvestments.  Mint suffered from the same algorithmic problems but I was willing to live with them.

But now it’s gotten so much worse.  I’m not sure if Mint is not being well tended to by it’s new parent company or if this is just some strange anomaly with my account .. Here’s a snapshot of my latest investment report from Mint

To me, the initially alarming aspect was the RED chart.  This is indicating by how much my investments are underperforming against the S&P 500.  This chart showing that I’ve had essentially zero growth in the last 6 months.  That’s disappointing (especially since I have a rather large portion of my accounts in an S&P 500 index fund.  It’s also not accurate.  A manual calculation shows that I’m doing relatively well against said index.

But perhaps worse than not reporting on the returns of my investments correctly, there’s something else horribly wrong with this report.  Horribly wrong.  (Unfortunately, for me).  And that would be, the value of my investments.  When I look at my account balances (as reported in Mint), my actual investment balance is somewhere oh .. let’s just say, WELL South of the number that is reported in this snapshot.  Where the hell did this number come from?  If only Mint operated as a bank and I could make a hasty withdraw..

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the tech blogs about Google:

Their forays into social have been criticized, The quality of Android over iOS is questioned, the future of the Chrome OS is uncertain, their Google TV platform seems crippled by old-world media.. Perhaps most disturbing, they’re being called the new Microsoft <gasp>.

I am a stockholder, a fan of many of their services like Google Voice, Gmail, and an owner of an Android phone so in many ways I think Google is a great company.

But where I am concerned personally, and the criticism that I’ve seen that I think is most alarming is in their search results.

Search is still the core of Google’s business (well, to be fair, advertising is the core of their business.. search is the most used interface that exposes customers to their ads) and I’ve seen some alarming changes to the quality of the search results that Google provides.

Some of the criticism is around Google surfacing their own content and services higher on search results pages.  This does not bother me as often that content is valuable.  Other criticism, that does resonate with me, is about the useless content-farm sites that fill the Google results.

I experienced this heavily just recently while working on my car stereo install.  Throughout the process: of selecting a stereo, determining the compatibility with my phone and researching installation issues I was plagued with horrible, useless search results.  What appeared at first to be a highly relevant result would end up being (upon clicking through to the site) a useless page with scraped content that was buried somewhere on the page with no relevance.

This has happened to me on several occasions lately and seems relatively new to Google.

After a while, bad results become easy to spot: many of them come from overly generic domains and many times the same preview content is displayed for multiple results.

These highest-ranked search results render the entire search useless.  Navigating through page after page of these useless content sites make it impossible to find the quality, relevant results.

Whether Google will be able to break into social, whether they are able to compete with Apple, whether they are able to fend off Microsoft are all good questions.  If they can’t maintain their search product it’s hard to imagine them succeeding.

A few months ago I decided to upgrade the radio in my car, to make my now 10 year old vehicle a little more interesting to drive. Since I hope to have this car for another 10 years, the ~$500 investment made sense to me.

I started out on Crutchfield, where I last bought a car radio back in 1989 (from their printed catalog, natch). The experience was very similar – pick out a radio, check the compatibility and then place the order. The web made the experience a little easier, but only just.

Since I’ve got the space in my dash, I opted for a double-height, touchscreen unit.  The first learning: Car radios have standardized sizes, either single- or double-height.  This was not the case back in 1989 when there were still slight variations in sizes.

So the car radio industry has learned in the value of standardization.  Or so it appears at first blush.  When you go to plug that radio in, you’ll soon enough learn the harsh reality that the wiring harnesses are different from vehicle to vehicle.  This is just unacceptable these days.  All radios have the same connections – speakers, antenna, power, possibly some steering wheel controls – and the interface for all of these should be universal.  But this is where Cruthfield shines.  They offer (free of charge) connector units with clear instructions that make it easy to connect the right wires to the right places.

The second learning: Customer service pays.  I knew enough about wiring up a car radio to know that I couldn’t just buy the radio from Amazon and save ~$50.  I knew that by paying that extra amount I would have access to Crutchfield’s customer service.  Throughout the install I had to contact customer service 3 times: once because I ordered the wrong part (replacement shipped free of charge); once because of difficulty with the steering wheel controls (replacement part shipped free of charge); and another call to the steering wheel interface company to validate my thinking and wiring (thinking was spot on, wiring unfortunately, not).  There is still an absolute value to these services – there are times when I know what I’m doing and I only want to pay the cheapest price and there are times when I don’t when I am willing to pay for some additional services.

Companies today need to understand who they want to be: The low-cost, no service provider or the full-service, higher-price provider.  Falling somewhere in between is following a path to failure.  Pricing information is too readily available to consumers and if you charge more without providing additional service, you will be ratted out.

With the unit fully installed and working, the third lesson is bad user interface makes for a bad experience.  While I like the features that the new radio provides (bluetooth, navigation, ipod integration, etc.,) the interface is really clunky.  The screen is not pleasant to look at, the buttons are not in consistent places, and key functions are not readily available in the default screens.  Too many gadgets today are plagued by horrible interfaces.  With a consolidation in capabilities, the best way to make your product stand out is through an excellent interface (hello.. Heard of  Apple?)

The Fourth lesson?  Allow configuration and customization.  With such a bad interface, I wish there were more option settings where I could set up the screens the way I want.  This is something Apple doesn’t really do, as they believe (often correctly) that their implementation is best for most users and therefore has no need for customization.  Even in Apple’s case, with their great designs, individuals will always appreciate being able to put on their own personal touch.  Non Apple products?  Don’t even consider that your interface is the best with no need for customization/modification.

Finally, the fifth lesson: Apps!  In the iPhone/Android world, apps rule: Your devices (and it doesn’t matter what it is: fridge, car stereo, television) needs app integration.  All devices benefit when you open up the capabilities to inventive developers.  I’d love to be able to install apps (the obvious ones like Pandora, etc.,) to my car stereo but there are other possibilities as well: points of interest are another obvious choice but what other capabilities could be thought of?

I usually have a point and shoot camera with me – or at least, I used to.  In the past year I’ve stopped carrying it around, and instead I’ve just relied on my cameraphone.

What’s surprised me though, is the reason.

It’s not that it’s a burden to carry around a single-utility device.  Yes, it’s great that my phone now checks my email, my bank statements, my friends’ updates .. as well as taking pictures and making phone calls.  And yes, a point and shoot camera does none of those aside from snapping photos.

The reason that I no longer use my point and shoot camera is that it doesn’t connect to the internet.

I love the instantaneous posting that cameraphones enable: quickly posting a photo from a vacation or a get together with friends.

So why then haven’t camera companies (yes, you Nikon, Canon, et. al.) embedded wifi capabilities into their cameras?  There are still plenty of times when the cameraphone just won’t do: low lighting, zooming, and the like.  And people still (at least for the time being) do bring along cameras for special occasions – vacations, parties, etc.,

But for how much longer will this last?  How long can you expect the general public to take the camera home, download the images to your computer and then upload them online?

Yes, there are a few models available – but it represents maybe as much as 5% of the cameras out there?  Meanwhile you’d be hard pressed to find a cell phone without a camera..

On my recent trip to Greece, on a few occasions, I found myself putting the camera away and pulling out my cell phone for the sole purpose of.. capturing a photo – how insane is that?  Just because I wanted to share the picture quickly.

So I’m adding this to my wishlist for my next camera.  I want the Nikon D700 replacement to be wifi enabled.  I also want the next iteration of the high-ISO micro 4/3rds camera to be wifi enabled too.

Come on guys, if you want to stay relevant, you need to move a little faster.

I just returned from a couple of weeks in Greece: Crete and Athens.

The trip was great and I’ll post some photos soon but I wanted to briefly mention what went well (and what didn’t) with the electronics on the trip.

The Good?

I left my laptop behind.  How awesome not to carry that weight.  A smartphone works totally fine for keeping in touch. The only need I’d have for a laptop is backing up and processing photos.  Backing up I can do with a dedicated backup unit (that’s the size of a small portable hard drive). Processing photos can wait until I get home. For this trip, Meghan brought her laptop so I backed my photos up to that.  I think in the future she won’t be bringing along the laptop either.

Another good?  USB charging.  It’s so nice being able to use USB cables to charge.  It’s nice to be able to carry around a couple of small USB cables and charge so many things.  What’s not good?  Having dedicated chargers for the different camera batteries, headphones, iPhone, etc.,

Another?  Public Wifi.  Not only the usual cafes, etc., but Athens provides a few locations throughout town with publicly provided Wifi.  Nice!

The Bad?

My iPhone is unlocked so I brought that along and purchased a Vodafone SIM card.  While I was able to make a call or two, I couldn’t for the life of me get anything else to work.  The Greek text messages that Vodafone sent didn’t help!  On previous trips I either purchased a SIM card in a language I could understand or I had an international AT&T plan. Purchasing a local SIM is the way to go, but dealing with the language barrier will be tough.  In retrospect, I could have looked into buying a SIM on the layover in Germany – at least I could have better understood the language..

Another bad, my iPhone is painfully slow.  I have the 3G (not the 3Gs) and with the latest OS installed it’s just awful to use.  Especially compared to my newer phone.

One more bad?  Many of the places we stayed didn’t have WiFi (or only had it in the lobby area).  This was a minor nuisance. We could plug the laptop into the ethernet connection but my smartphone was out of luck.  I was surprised by the lack of embrace for Wifi.

The Ugly?

I decided to download a free app on the iPhone (while in a public square, connected to free public wifi).  What an awful experience.  For a free app (in a controlled app store) I had to enter my password only to learn that my credit card info needed to be up-to-date (I didn’t have a salutation and my expiration date was old).  Despite the fact that I have credit available in my iTunes account and DESPITE the fact that I was trying to access a FREE app I had to update my credit card information before I could proceed.

Fail.

People can complain about the Android app store all they want but I find the experience to be SO MUCH BETTER than the iPhone app store.