Innovation at Wells Fargo

Hardly anyone expects banks to be thinking of new innovative practices when it comes to banking at ATMs. However, over the course of the past couple of months, I have been impressed with Wells Fargo’s new ATM features that have made my banking experience a pleasure.

First, they have introduced a “no envelopes required” process where I dont need to collect all my checks, add the dollar amount, lick the envelop and stash it in the ATM. Instead, with OCR technology Wells Fargo ATMs can now automatically scan up to 10 checks and calculates the total amount for me! BTW, they have gotten the total right each time .

Second, its more of an obvious usability innovation. Every time I go to the ATM, I tend to withdraw a fixed amount. Last month, Wells Fargo asked me if I wanted to make the fixed amount my default which I promptly agreed to. Ever since, when I withdraw money, I see the fixed amount as my default choice!! No more punching numbers, confirming, etc.

I have to give kudos to Wells Fargo for making my ATM experience a pleasure.

AnswerU.com covered in Boston College newspaper – The Heights

AnswerU.com got some nice coverage in the Boston College newspaper yesterday. I had spoken to one of the editors of The Heights last week and was quite impressed by the quality of questions Michael had asked.

MIT Students Centralize “answers”

AnswerU.com just launched widgets

We just launched widgets which will allow anyone to share their school’s question on user’s blogs! People can also directly ask a question from the widget box. We have made it pretty straightforward and have given users multiple options:

• Show AnswerU’s or your school’s most latest questions
• Show your most recent answers
• Show the top rated questions
• Display questions by category

Crunchboard vs. Craigslist

VS.

I posted a Director of Engineering at AnswerU in both Crunchboard and Craigslist. It costed me $75 for the Craigslist post and $200 for Crunchboard. The latter is quite steep for a young startup like ours but after having heard good things about the quality of applicants coming through Crunchboard, I was willing to spend the extra dough.

Unfortunately, Crunchboard hasn’t worked out for us at all. We have definitely received fewer resumes than Craigslist and also, the quality of resumes has also been poor. On the other hand, I am quite surprised by the high quality of resumes that keep coming in from Craigslist. Even the traffic that Crunchboard is sending to AnswerU is woefully low (we will be lucky to have daily traffic of two users from Crunchboard).

I am still trying to figure out what happened. Its been over a week – we have 3 resumes from Crunchboard and 25 from Craigslist. Based on the resumes, all 5 people I plan to call are from Craigslist.

So, what did I get for my $200? A lot of Executive Recruiters emailing and calling me to work with them – uggghhhhh!

Amazon launches Askville

Amazon launched a new Question and Answer service called Askville. Its interesting that Google announced that they were shutting down Google Answers on 28th Nov. and here we have Amazon launching a Q&A service.

The difference between Google Answers and other Q&A services by Yahoo, Microsoft and now Amazon is that its not monetary based ie. you dont need to pay $$ in order to get your questions answered. On top of it Google had built an “expert” selection system where they had to select users who were deemed “experts” in certain categories. Unfortunately, such a system fails to catch up with the “long-tail” – its just not scalable.

Going back to Askville, does anyone see how similar it is to Yahoo Answers in terms of the UI? Try and ask a question in both these services and it feels like Amazon has just copied Yahoo Answers screen for screen. Now, what Yahoo Answers has going for it is the “Scale” of Yahoo – Yahoo has effectively used its reach and distribution platform to build traction for the service. I believe it now has 60 million users and 160 million answers. So what does Amazon have that can compete with this scale? Its top rated reviewers. These are folks that the Amazon community has identified as “experts” in certain categories. Amazon has the opportunity to target these set of users to build a community of answerers and questioners to ensure the high quality of the system.

I am curious to see if they can pull this off and whether they can get these top reviewers to start sharing their knowledge. Good Luck to the Amazon Askville team!

Ruby on Rails in India

I have spent the last couple of months looking for Ruby on Rails development partners in India. I have had the opportunity to meet and talk at length with some of these companies. Here’s a partial list of folks in India who are doing some good work (the list is not in any particular order):

• Vinsol in Delhi (They are focused solely on RoR projects)
• Better Labs in Pune (They have lots of consumer facing RoR projects under their belt)
• Synerzip in Pune (They are currently in the process of building RoR expertise)
• Persistent Systems in Pune (They have a strong J2EE background and are delving into RoR projects. Out of all the companies listed, they are by far the largest company in terms of headcount, revenues).

The other hub of RoR action seems to be Chennai but I didn’t have an opportunity to visit any teams there.

Non-Designer’s Design Book

I ran into this great article on C.R.A.P. -stuff to think of before you start designing your website. One of the biggest problems that early stage companies suffer from is the lack of great designers in the founding team. Of course, the fact that most early stage companies cant afford great designers further exacerbates the problem. At AnswerU we face the problem every day. How can we make look and feel decisions when we havent done surveys, interviewed potential customers, etc. The reality is we just dont have the bandwidth, time or resources to make it happen. Instead, one needs to draw up on all prior product development experience and go with intuition. On top of that one needs to mine/decipher the user data from apps like Google Analytics or CrazyEgg real close.
When thinking of website design the author (borrowed from Robin William’s book – The Non -Designer’s Design Book) states that one should consider 4 basic principles – contrast, repitition, alignment and proximity. While we were designing AnswerU, we had an undergrad from MIT do some of our design work. One of the books he would carry around was one which showed which colors worked best (contrasted) with which. At that time I didnt think it was a big deal but then when I looked at his finished work, the difference was striking.

While this article above does a great job in ensuring how you could make your site look good, entrepreneurs need to take this a step further. Just having a good look and feel is not enough, the site needs to have enough cues that force the user to interact with it. There are lots of examples of sites that probably didnt follow the C.R.A.P. principles but what they got right was how to get a user to quickly interact with the site – eBay, Craigslist, MySpace, RockYou, Digg, etc.

Whats broken with Yelp.

I would like to start by saying I find Yelp to be a much better alternative than Citysearch. I hardly use citysearch anymore. But I find Yelp broken in a big way especially given that they want to be a social recommendation engine. Heres my biggest problem with Yelp:

I search on a restaurant, I find that the restaurant has a total of 4 stars out of 5. Do I decide to go tothe restaurant based on the cumulative rating? No, I dont cos I want to hear what the reviewers who have dined at the restaurant are saying. Now, I will read the top 3 – maybe 5 reviews. The first problem is that I cant imagine anyone going beyond 10 and still finding anything relevant that other reviewers havent said before. Its like Google search – who the hell goes to page #5 to see the search results.

Unfortunately, what Yelp fails to do unlike Google is showing me the results according to the reputation, feedback of the reviewers. Would I believe a person who has reviewed only one restaurant or someone who has reviewed hundreds, should I believe the lates reviewer or someone who reviewed the restaurant 6 months back? Yelp needs to develop some sort of a reputation model on top of simply users giving 4 or 5 stars to restaurants. What they need to allow me to do is to return to the site after visiting the restaurant and give the user whose review most matches my own experience a thumbs up or down. Then use the feedback to weigh the order in which the reviews are shown.

Their relevance engine needs to use parameters like freshness of review, feedback on the user’s rating, users rating itself, # of reviews the user has given, etc. to rank the reviews. This will make my Yelp experience more satisfying!

Yahoo has no choice but to buy Facebook

After the Google-YouTube announcement, I think Yahoo has no option but to buy Facebook. I wonder if Facebook’s sale price is going to go north of the reported $900 million – $1 Billion that we have been hearing.

Google suddenly looks better positioned in content than Yahoo. On the other hand, I have no idea what Microsoft is doing with all the money it has. Is it just going to wait and watch and see Google rule the internet advertising space or maybe its time for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo and Facebook in one sweep.

Yahoo Facebook Deal Not a Good Idea for Yahoo Just Yet!

This commentary is a little old as the latest news is all about Google and YouTube. Anyway, I want to present my thoughts on why the Yaho/Facebook del doesnt make any sense to me just yet. Here are my reasons:

• “Breakup Fee” that Yahoo will need to pay Microsoft for the advertising platform deal that MSFT and Facebook just signed. Its rumored to be under $10 million.
• Risky product strategy – from a closed, private, trusted network, Facebook has opened itself to compete more directly with MySpace. This is what happens when you take in too much VC money and suddenly the 15-16 million college market is too small compared to the reported 80-100 million MySpace users. Of course, there are many critics who point out that by looking to rapidly expand its user base, Facebook missed the opportunity to go international (UK, Australia, Canada). Instead, there are local “Facebook” copycats sprouting in each of these countries and reportedly doing ok. To be fair to Facebook, as exciting as international sounds, the advertising revenues for international social networking sites pale in comparison to the US. Bottom line, buying Facebook right now is a huge risk as Yahoo has no clue how the opening of Facebook is going to playout. It would bein Yahoo’s interest to delay the deal and wait out the next couple of months to see if Facebook can seriously challenge MySpace without losing its loyal college base.
• Potential damage to Yahoo culture – according to me this is the most worrisome aspect of the deal. Yahoo has around 10,000 employees and they claim to be “down-to-earth”, fun people (I interned at Yahoo and without generalizing, I do believe that Yahooligans are great). While at Yahoo, I noticed that the new additions Flickr, Upcoming, del.icio.us, are the new rock stars at Yahoo and they have been great additions to the Yahoo team. But these acquisitions were reportedly in the $30 million range. In speaking to Yahoo execs I can clearly say that they are absolutely in love with Flickr. From the outside it seems that Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, is regarded as a rock star – she gets how to build social apps, grow them virally and of course succesfully exit. Imagine in this mix of $30 million successes you throw in Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team who have been acquired for $1 Billion!! What happens in exec meetings, who is the new rock star, who do Yahoos listen to, what about all the 40-50 year old senior vice presidents? Do we listen to a highly successful 22 year old or these senior execs at Yahoo who might have spent some serious time at ZDNET, AltaVista, Frito Lay?

In spite of these major challenges, you can never tell what the Corp Dev team cooks up. Facebook’s user base is the 18-24 year olds where Yahoo’s influence is quickly waning. They use MySpace, IMs (AOL, MSN mostly), blogs, Google. I dont hear college students talking about Yahoo anymore. This must be a scary thought for Yahoo and maybe enough for them to buy Facebook?