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Mint makes improvements, but slows down categorizing

Published May 16th, 2008 in web apps.

Mint.com is tearing it up these days, and almost blew Wesabe completely out of the water if it hadn’t been for wesabe’s recent new features.

After a few minutes of using the UI I realized a core feature had changed for the worst, assigning categories to transactions.

Its used to have a popup that contained all the transactions, and you could quickly find the one that you wanted. Categorizing a long list of transactions was relatively simple and fast. Here’s that list:

The new version of this is a drop-down that you have to mouse-over to find the subcategories. Its a real pain, and put a serious dent in me keeping up with my tagging/categorizing. They do have an auto-complete, but its a hassle to tab over to that field, and you can’t just hit the “enter” button to save the tag and go back to your transaction list. Here’s what it looks like now:

The other issue with this is, that you can’t bulk edit the merchant and the category independantly. If you select 20 transactions, and want to make them all a certain category, it changes the Merchant name for all of these transactions to “Multiple Merchants”. I lost some data this way!

Oops, in the making of that screenshot I accidently clicked Save and lost two more Merchant names!

Anyway, Mint.com is still my favorite personal finance application, and I havn’t been searching for a replacement. These small quirks are a big enough pain to think about wesabe or buxfer again.

Profiling Angels: not an exact science

Published May 15th, 2008 in Uncategorized, angel investing and early stage investing.

Over the past two years at Angelsoft I’ve seen a lot of confusion from entrepreneurs, service providers, and even VCs, about what or who an angel investor is. This confusion causes problems in the investment/fund raising process process because knowing your customer/audience is half the battle, so I wanted to take a second to help clear some things up and hopefully kick off a productive discussion!

My over simplified definition of an Angel:

“An individual investor investing their money in early stage companies”.

Its critical to understand that this definition is broad, and a lot of different types of people fall under the definition of “angel”!! They could be successful entrepreneurs looking to invest in the next generation of entrepreneurs or they could be successful executives looking to get their hands dirty with small startups and higher risk investments. They could just as well be family members that unintentionally become angels by providing seed money to son/daugther entrepreneur, or they could be self proclaimed lone wolf angels investing big on their own and actively seeking deal flow.
Recently I’ve found two great posts on the topic. Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, wrote a very well structured post with the goal of entrepreneur setting expectations. He says:

Many young startup entrepreneurs tend to look at Angel Investors as a group of people with more money than sense (which sometimes is true) but generally not. They give no thought to the motivations of their Angels, what their Angels should get from the relationship, or simply why the Angel should be interested in investing. Like anything, understanding your audience is half the battle.

He goes on to propose a series of different angel types including The Family Investor, The Relationship Investor, The Idea Investor, The Once removed investor, and the Arc Angel.

Roger Ehrenburg at Information Arbitrage focuses on the Arc Angel or Super Angel profile here. He goes so far as to say that he thinks this new breed of angel is better equipped to deal with seed stage deals than any VCs. There is definitely some cross over here with Roger’s definition of a Super Angel, and Todd’s Arc Angel. I’ll profile the type of person we call a “deal lead” in a future post.

Please contribute, and let me know how you think of angels, and what all the different profiles might be.

NYC Bike Month

Published May 14th, 2008 in transportation.

One of the most exciting things about May is that its Bike Month!

Check out the insane amount of activities that have been planned.

Unfortunately I’ve been traveling like crazy, and I haven’t been able to make it to anything but the Kick Off event on the 24th of April. I’m gonna be traveling towards the end of the month, so someone please go check these out!

New wheeling transportation alternative

Published May 14th, 2008 in transportation.

I’ve been trying to get more involved in transportation alternatives in NYC, so I became a member a few months ago. As a new member I have to wonder if this Magic Wheel falls under their jurisdiction?

The $350 price tag is definitely high, and puts it on part with a new bike, but its size makes it an interesting consideration for the city. Its a segway meets razor scooter meets unicycle.

I’ll stick to my bike for now!

What has the internet done for you lately?

Published May 8th, 2008 in General, Uncategorized and internet.

Saw this video, well I didnt actually watch the video, but I liked the question and got inspired.

What has the internet done for you?

caused my hands and back to hurt
provided a job for me
caused me to stay up late many a night
caused me to spend too much time looking at my blackberry
allowed me to track personal finance/expenses (mint vs. wesabe)
spammed me
baconed me
finally gave me mildly ok places to download music (amazon mp3, emusic)
youtube for watching music videos at parties
notified me when good concerts where in town
lazy shopping (amazon, fresh direct )
allows me to pay bills without writing checks

Am I better off? What would I be doing without it? Probably something to ask yourself if you’re wondering where the value is in some of these web2.0 companies.

Great idea: CRM research bookmarklet

Published May 8th, 2008 in CRM, bookmarklet, great idea and web apps.

Some I’m throwing out some free ideas!

We have all these bookmarking tools, and we have all these clipping, notebooking, and research tools. But what are they all used for?

I tend to use them a lot for research on people/companies in my industry, and often times this would be really useful to have directly in my CRM system.

I’d like to see a bookmarklet that lets you clip content, and then associate it directly with a contact or company in your CRM. Store the notes/articles/clippings right with that particular entity, so that next time I look that person up I’ll know something about them, or have a conversation starter.

Great idea: bookmarlet for importing contact information

Published May 8th, 2008 in bookmarklet, desktop software, great idea and web apps.

So I’ve raved about CRM systems and managing personal contact information, but now I have a solution, which I hope someone has already built.

Someone needs to build a bookmarklet that lets you highlight contact information, and then with the click of a button send it to the right contact management tool (outlook, highrise, salesforce, etc).

I hate copying and pasting over the address, then the phone number, then their name….. the whole time worrying about errors in my data input.

You could highlight text in an email signature in gmail, you could highlight text on people’s websites, and then the bookmarklet would recognize the address, phone number, email, fax, and put them in the right places for that particular contact manager.

Obviously we would love an automated version that just recognized signatures in your inbox (Mac mail may have something like this), but a rapid contact importing tool like this would be the first step.

New startup taking bookmarking/archiving to the next level

Published May 8th, 2008 in bookmarking and web apps.

Here’s a little tool called Iterasi, that sounds like a big step in the direction of my ravings on tracking online data, collectively researching links and articles, and a recent post of an article on information processing online written long ago but lost.

Here’s what VentureBeat said:

Instead of just saving links, you use Iterasi to save all of the information on a page, including images and links, a process it calls “notarizing.” Log in to your Iterasi account and you can access the actual page. In the future, you’ll also be able to have the site to automatically notarize a page based on a pre-set schedule. You can also search the text within a page (which you can’t do with a screenshot image).

Eventually there will be one tool that grabs everything you read, lets you tag it, lets you hightlight certain clips, stores archives of everything, and makes it completely searchable online and offline! It might be a small startup like Iterasi, or it might end up being Google with a combination of products like Google Notebook, Google Co-op, and Google Web History

Information processing online: what I save and where I save it

Published May 8th, 2008 in Personal Tech and web apps.

This is the second post on a series of how I process information online, what tools i use, and what I think would be the perfect solution.

First, lets address the specific types of information I save:

I save Links
I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
I save specific clips of content within a page
I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
I save things to send to my phone via sms
I save clips of content that I want to email to people
I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic

Any of these things I save, I always want the ability to choose whether it is private, public, or shared to a restricted group of users. AND I don’t want them to have to have an account on the same service in order to see this information I’m sharing.

Private - just for me
Public - for everyone
Restricted Group -just a list of users I choose.

Now, how do I currently save each of these information types:

I save Links
- Delicious, Diigo, Gmail
I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
- Diigo, Scrapbook, Notebook, Clipmarks
I save specific clips of content within a page
- Google Notebook, Clipmarks, Diigo
I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
- Diigo, Clipmarks, Wordpress
I save things to send to my phone via sms
- “Send via SMS”, Google SMS
I save clips of content that I want to email to people
- “Gmail This”, Diggo, Clipmarks, Google Notebook
I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic
- Google Notebook

As you can see, there is a relatively concise grouping of types of data, but the choices for where I can store this data are rather mind boggling. I would like to reduce that clutter, and in further posts will try to propose a solution.

VC style due diligence on web apps

Published April 30th, 2008 in personal productivity and web apps.

When I have a need, and go to find a web application to meet that need, why does it seem like I have to do VC style due diligence on all the companies in that space to make my final decision.

Simple answers:
1) I’m super obsessive compulsive about web apps
2) There are too many web apps
3) Theres no central useful review of all of them

To decide on what social book/reading site I wanted to use, I went through dozens of sites, analyzed different metrics, and wrote two posts (1, 2 ) to find the one I wanted. The worst part, is that I ended up doing all that work to decide on a webapp, only to get invited to GoodReads a few days later, which hadn’t even shown up on my radar. I am now using Good Reads because all my friends are, and it has most of the features i want. Continue reading ‘VC style due diligence on web apps’