Abhishek Tiwari

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Yes, that is the recipe for making Mojito or Mint Julep, depending on whatever you are into. No, I am not making this a cocktail friendly blog, it was just my cutesy way to discuss some feature recommendations for Mint, the new personal finance service. I wrote about them few weeks back, when they had launched. I had rave reviews on their offering and encouraged my readers to try them out. No wonder, they won the TechCrunch 40 award.

This post however takes a different angle. I have been regularly using Mint for past month or so. I am what you call the repeat customer, using it twice a week on average. The reason I stuck was due to the fact that I have been looking for such a service for a long time. I had nbeen a Quicken user for sometime but left it while moving to Mac. Apart from their crappy mac UI, their software in general is pretty complex. I couldn’t see myself using it twice a week.

Anyways after using Mint over past few weeks, I have some recommendations (the Sugar and Rum, if you will). Hopefully the team there can digest these and incorporate in a later release. I am not pointing out any obvious bugs here, only feature recommendations as a regular user.

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This morning during my daily FeedGrazing (yay, I invented a new term ;-)), I came across an interesting job related video on Xobni’s blog. For those who don’t know, Xobni is a hot new start-up trying to address Email overload challenges (that topic is left alone for some other post).

They have created this video as a Job post to attract new talent to join their workforce. The video, created in a very fun and cute way does the job very well. It explains the work environment, the people and the overall culture of the company. Here is the video (more on their Jobs page):

Frankly this is a very unique way for companies to lure in the right talent. Most posts on any job sites are text based and inherently dry. Most of the time they are copied from other places. They almost never convey the culture and environment of the company. Read more »

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This is an update to my previous post on this subject. Amazon MP3 downloader does support storing songs in iTunes. It’s a preference option hidden in its menu. Thanks to Scott for catching that.

So that makes things a bit easier to deal with. I would still like to see Amazon get rid of the downloader and directly place the song in my iTunes.

Eliminate as many steps as possible and make the experience seamless. That will be a great way to compete with iTunes.

Alternatively Amazon can go fully in the other direction. They can develop a full blown iTunes replacement application. Their developer community already enables great applications with the amazing set of AWS framework. They will have to ensure that its as seamless as iTunes.

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Few weeks back I wrote about NBC breaking up with Apple in order to sell its content elsewhere. The popular knowledge at the time was that NBC will leverage Amazon’s Unbox service to sell their TV shows. In addition NBC also announced partnership with FOX to launch a new web video distribution service called HULU. Not to mention that NBC.com itself hosts videos of all its shows and users can access episodes for the whole season.

In that post, I predicted that NBC may dabble into alternate business models. They may offer access to free content purely based on ads, something which Apple does not provide. Following were my exact words:

I believe many more media networks will go down this path and explore their own delivery methods. Many (including NBC) will leverage ad based model to inherently make the content free.

Lo and behold, today NBC made a press release, announcing a new service called “NBC Direct“. The idea is to offer ad supported free downloads to users for its popular shows. The service will launch its beta program in October and will offer downloads on windows PC. The content will be available for viewing for 1 week after download and will expire after that.

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I have been itching to write about this service for past few weeks. I have been part of their beta test program and am managing my finances through their service. Unfortunately they had a press embargo and hence I couldn’t blog about them. They officially launched yesterday at TechCrunch40 and lifted the restriction on bloggers.

Mint is a new service, which is taking on the likes of Quicken and MS Money. I have been a long time user of Quicken and wasn’t quite happy with it. Not all my banks supported Quicken and it was too complicated to use.

Now Mint tries to simplify all of that. It has a very simple interface for adding your banks and credit card accounts. Within minutes I registered all my banks with the service. I must say that some banks require additional registration information like ING Direct, which can cumbersome at times. Once registered Mint automatically downloads all the transactions from the banks and stores it in the account.

Once you have registered all your accounts, Mint automatically organizes all the transactions into pre-defined categories. These categories help understanding the nature of the transaction. In addition to the categories the service allows you to tag any specific transactions with your own data. One can change categories can even set rules for transactions of certain nature. Very similar to email rules, but simpler.

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