Mobile Hippie

In the course of handing off a project to another company, I just had the opportunity to say “just build them Boxes and Arrows on Drupal and they’ll be thrilled.” While I was merely using hyperbole to make a point, it got be thinking. What do they use to deliver their content?

The answer is PublicSquare. This is a subscription-based service for creating an online magazine with a community component. I’ve always like the layout and general functionality of Boxes and Arrows and now I know what they use to serve up their content.

I plan to look into this a bit more as the idea of a subscription-based magazine CMS intruiges me. I would have signed up for an account today, but it turns out that they have an expired security certificate on their account sign up page. I wonder if they know that?  (It expired on December 6, 2007.)

I just took a look the features and FAQ for the new Movable Type Community Solution.

The community solution boasts the following:

• Member registration with extended user profiles
• Forums
• Community blogs
• Custom fields
• Recommendation engine
• Sort-by-popularity

The feature set overlaps heavily with Clearspace X from Jive Software.  I’ve seen Clearspace up close, and I think it is a great product, but a community site based on the code of Movable Type 4—with its extensive plugin architecture and significant user base—could be a significant competitor.  Equally compelling for smaller organizations would the combination of WordPress and BBPress as both are completely opensource—free as in beer, but arguably less stable due to the more rapid release cycle. The growth of solutions in this space has been rapid. There seems to be plenty of room in the blog/community solution space for more players. It should be an interesting market to watch grow over the next couple of years.  

I just took a first look at Mint, a new financial management tool that just won a place in the TechCrunch40. I am impressed. I’ll follow up with a more in depth review once I’ve worked up the nerve to share my online banking information with them…that’s a big leap for me. Until then, here are a few salient points:

• Fast. Signup is quick and easy and the tool itself it lightning quick.
• Free. They fund themselves by presenting you with offers from banks and credit card companies who can beat our your current interest rate. You don’t have to accept any of these offers to take advantage of the free account.
• Easy to use. Mint downloads all of your transactions through your banks online services. (The list of banks is impressive. All three banks I use for checking, savings or credit are in their database.) Once transactions are downloaded, their algorithm goes to town figuring out how you spent your money and giving you shiny reports and pie charts. Mmm, pie charts.
• Claims to be secure. Sorry, this is something I am hesitant on. They appear legit in every way. The banks trust them. They are TRUSTe certified and they use a third party service called Yodlee to verify your account credentials so they don’t have to store them on their servers.

So the only thing that really scares me about this service is how much they will know about you in such a short period of time. They will know where you live and exactly where you spend your money. This is even scarier than RFID in some ways… but it is also the one thing I can’t stand sinking time into on a weekly basis.

I have been using either Quicken or Moneydance for about 12 years now. I rely on that software to tell me how well or how poorly I’m doing financially at any given moment. However, it is a lot of work and a constant headache. Especially since I have to manually download a QIF from one of my financial institutions and “import” it to get transactions. Such a PITA.

If I get up the nerve to go deeper into this, I will post screenshots. (No, I will not include my transaction info.)

Google adds Presentation to Google Docs. Interesting tool. I particularly like the feature that lets you publish the document and share a chat room and the presentation at once. Pretty quick way to set up a meeting. That said, I’m probably not giving up Keynote for it.

Campaign Monitor’s September 2007 Newsletter is packed with great stuff. Besides the design gallery, which is always a treat, the newsletter highlights David Griener’s treatise on the state of email standards (great read) and throws out an article on email authentication–which is so very timely. Don’t get me started on the new suppression list feature–handy–and the new women’s t-shirts! (Okay, so I’m not really in need of the women’s t-shirts, but I’m sure they make someone happy.)

Jive Software just released version 1.6 of Clearspace. Congratulations guys.