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Sunday, March 29, 2009 |
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Credit Cards
Speaking of other credit cards, it is unfortunately not possible to have just an American Express card. Many small retailers and restaurants will not accept American Express. It is too bad that they often insult the card holder with comments like "we take anything but" the card you presented. I have resigned to the fact that I need to carry two cards. One easy solution is to have a debit card but credit cards offer two advantages. You get free money -- float -- for 30+ days as long as you pay your balance. Secondly, you get points, miles, or cash rebates. It was my experience that the miles and points are too restrictive to be valuable. I concluded the best deal in the long run is to get the cash rebate which averages out to 1.5% of your purchases. In the summer of 2005 I found the ideal card -- an ExxonMobil Mastercard -- issued and managed by Citigroup. The ExxonMobil card offered a 1% cash rebate on all purchases and 3% on their gasoline purchases for six months and then 2% (and now 15 cents per gallon). One of the prerequisites in selecting this card was that it work directly with Quicken -- which I have been using since 1984 (Quicken 1.0 for DOS). Each time I update Quicken it automatically goes to Citicards (and American Express) and downloads all new transactions. I have been a loyal user of the ExxonMobil card for almost four years. I pay my balance on time and they are usually helpful in the event of an issue with a merchant -- although much more difficult (write us a letter) than American Express (call and get instant temporary credit while the issue is resolved). A few weeks ago I discovered that my Mastercard transactions were not downloading. The error message delivered from Citicards via Quicken was "Your financial institution has rejected your request". No big deal. I have run into this error before. It will be fine tomorrow I thought. But it wasn't. It still does not work. Technical support at Citicards said the problem was that they do not yet support Quicken 2009. Quicken 2009 hit the market last summer and that did not seem like the right answer because it had been working. Looking around the support forum at Quicken I discovered that a lot of people were having the same problem. The card holders were very clear in their frustration but Citi was not listening. I sent tech support an email and to my delight they answered it the next day -- the email contained 89 words to give me a link to a web page with their answer which only had 63 words. Here is what they said. We appreciate your inquiry and regret any inconvenience. The ability to download transactions via Quicken previously was a website error that has since been corrected. The ability is no longer available as Exxon Mobil has not authorized Quicken use of the website. At this time no plans for restoration of the service has been identified or released. Thank you for using our website. In other words the fact that it worked was a bug and the fix is to not allow it to work. I can ignore their "purchase APR equals the Prime Rate plus 14.99% (with a minimum of 21.00% and a maximum 28.99%" because I pay my balance on time, but I can not ignore the fact that Citicards has decided to not allow their gasoline cards to work with Quicken. It really makes you wonder how such a huge organization could be so clueless and send an email that violates common sense. Their own bank and their own credit cards of course do allow Quicken downloads. This huge financial services company has a way of making you feel irrelevant. The only solution is to cancel the card. Now they have 92 million minus one card holders. The online application for a Capital One No Hassle Cash Rebate Mastercard took a few minutes and resulted in an approval within a few seconds. (I first verified with Quicken that the card transactions can be downloaded). The lesson for all businesses is that their customers are only a mouse click away from their competitors.
Net Attitude , On Demand , e-Business March 29, 2009 06:02 PM |
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009 |
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Google Voice
Like Skype, Google Voice is a free VoIP service in classic Google "beta" test status but I have already adopted it as my preferred service. While attending Demo in San Diego in September 2006, I became a beta tester for a VoIP service called Grand Central. The following year they were acquired by Google and after a quiet period of development, Grand Central was launched as Google Voice. Being a Grand Central beta tester got me an early Google Voice account. The feature I like the most is that you can install Gizmo -- a free VoIP program that runs on your PC -- and add your SIP number as one of your Google Voice phone numbers. When a call comes in a dialogue box pops up on your display. You click "answer" and then the call can be handled with a headset (I use a Plantronics noise-canceling model) which provides hands-free high quality audio for me and the caller. Another nice feature is that you can make a Google Voice call from your iPhone (or any mobile phone). All U.S. calls are free. A call to Norway is two cents per minute. With free conference calls and a boatload of other free features, Google Voice is going to put the heat on the telephony monopolists. It will also put pressure on eBay's $2.5 billion acquisition of Skype for which they later took a $1.4 billion write-down. The best way to reach me is still to send an email but now you can also leave a message for me at Google Voice. |
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009 |
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iPhone - Update No. 16
So I am sticking to my story -- the iPhone 3G is fantastic. There are some issues but Apple seems to be solving them. The primary change in their strategy is that Apple came to realize that the iPhone is much more than a "cell phone" -- it is a platform. The six basic elements of the platform are the iPhone itself, the network (AT&T in the United States), iTunes, the "App Store", MobileMe and, most importantly, the applications. With yesterday's announcement of more than 1,000 API's (application programming interfaces -- these are commands that programmers can use to cause the iPhone to do something; sense a GPS location, sense that the iPhone was shaken, etc., it is a certainty that there will be many thousands more applications for the iPhone. To get an app you go to the app store. To get the app on your iPhone you have to have iTunes. You are tied to Apple. It is what the industry calls a "lock in". It used to be that when you needed a new cell phone you would go to the store of one of the operators and pick from a multitude of brands and phones. Now that you are hooked on various applications and the data in them you need to have a phone that can work with iTunes which is where your apps and your data are stored. Guess how many brands work with iTunes? Just one. Apple's new OS 3.0 coming in June will offer 100 new features including a search capability across the entire phone contents, cut-copy-paste, multimedia email, and landscape mode for all the apps. There will be a lot of smartphone competition from Palm, HTC, Dell, Nokia, Acer, and many others. The phones will all have great hardware features but it is the app store that ties things together. The other guys will be building their own app stores but chances are that they won't do it as well as Apple. Apple knows how to make things easy and people seem willing to pay a premium for the ease of use and they don't seem to mind being locked in. I will certainly take a hard look at the new Pre when it arrives but I doubt if I would give up my iPhone.
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Thursday, March 12, 2009 |
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IBM Happenings: February 2009
The Internet has made the world much smaller and "flatter” and now the next turn of the crank will make the world "smarter". IBM is not using a metaphor -- they are not talking about the "knowledge economy" or the spread of education throughout the world. The company has a vision about introducing intelligence into the way the world actually works -- not into people but into the systems and processes that enable goods to be developed, manufactured, sold, bought, transported, and serviced. The concept of making things smarter lies in pervasive instrumentation, sensors and powerful computing -- enabling the control of what things do and how they work. A simple example is a garage door sensor. If a bicycle is left on the driveway, the door senses that something is in the way and stops the door closing process. A more sophisticated example would be a node on the power grid sensing that power consumption is increasing in one location and decreasing in another. As a result the node switches the delivery of power from the surplus area to the area in need thereby avoiding a brownout. Likewise a smart web server might notice an increase in demand and shift workloads to idle servers and power down servers that are idle. A hospital gurney being transported down the hall is sensed and causes a message to be posted to the patient's electronic patient record and a message is sent to their primary care physician notifying the doctor that their patient has moved from the ER to a medical floor at the hospital. The potential is boundless. Stockholm’s intelligent traffic system, created by IBM, has resulted in 20 percent less gridlock and a 12-percent drop in emissions by sensing how many vehicles are moving in a particular part of the city. In Norway IBM built a system for the country's largest food supplier that uses RFID technology to trace meat and poultry from the farm, through the supply chain, all the way to supermarket shelves. Smarter water? A collaboration between IBM and The Nature Conservancy is using computer modeling to simulate, monitor -- and potentially manage -- the behavior of river basins in the U.S., China, and Brazil. There are countless projects of an urgent nature that can take advantage of IBM's Smarter Planet vision to make the world more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. The result will be improved productivity, efficiency, responsiveness, profitability and huge societal benefits. IBM is well positioned to continue delivering on large complex projects around the world. The financial results from this should be significant. Take a look at the IBM 2008 Annual Report for more insight about what they are doing.
IBM unveils building blocks for 21st century infrastructure IBM helps clients set CO2 reduction strategy IBM completes acquisition of ILOG IBM reports 2008 fourth-quarter and full-year results Hospitals choose IBM to build electronic medical records |
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