Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Intuit’

Google Launches Apps Marketplace for the Enterprise

Google launched an application marketplace today comprised of services from third-party providers that integrate with the Google Apps ecosystem.

The news has been anticipated for some time. In particular, it shows how much Google is embracing open-standards and leveraging its search and Google Apps platform to attract third-party developers.

Sponsor

Google made the announcement at its Google Campfire One event tonight. The emphasis Google is putting on the enterprise is apparent in how much attention the company put into the event. Over and over we heard that Google passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

It is that mark that Google is using as its hook for attracting developers to its platform. Developers will be charged $100 to join the program. With that entrance fee, they may add as many apps as they wish to the Google Apps Marketplace.

The marketplace supports OpenID to provide a single sign-on for developers. Authorization is integrated into the platform. The customers get access through OAuth, the open standard for authorizing users.

A “manifest page” is the foundation for the service. The developers provides information when adding the application to the marketplace that identifies it. Developers then provide additional information about the product.

The system is a controlled. Application developers submit the app for approval, which might take a few days.

Intuit provided an example of how the system works by showing how payroll could be managed. The customer accesses the account. With Google Apps integration, the customer accesses an account where they have the employee information. It’s that collected contact network that is then integrated with the payroll application.

Atlassian showed how Studio, its project management application, would integrate with GMail and Google Apps. Again, if the company is standardized on Google Apps, the information is available through the network.

Manymoon is another project mangement application that was demonstrated. It uses Google Apps to develop features such as a calendar, showing how a startup can leverage Google Apps to add features to its service.

Other companies that were a part of the initial launch include Socialwok and Appirio.

At its core, the marketplace is built upon Google’s search capabilities. Google Apps can be extended with applications. In turn, developers have access to the built-in capabilities of Google Apps.

Perhaps the greatest value to customers will be if they are centralized on Google Apps. If so, they can get some pretty powerful capabilities of the marketplace.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer on making Intuit more Mint-y (video)

Aaron Patzer, who founded Mint.com and served as its chief executive until it was acquired by Intuit for $170 million, stopped by the VentureBeat office this week to talk about his new job, and about his vision for the future of personal finance. Patzer is now Intuit’s vice president and general manager of personal finance, which means he’s in charge of both Quicken and Mint (which is continuing as a separate product).

“The good news is the whole Mint leadership is over at Intuit, and I run the division,” Patzer said. “So Intuit’s vision for personal finance is our vision of personal finance. We get to define it. So that means we control what the next versions of Quicken are going to be doing, and Mint as well.”

In the video below, Patzer talks about founding Mint, moving to Intuit, and what features are coming in the months ahead.

Going forward, VentureBeat plans to run a video interview with a CEO every Thursday. Okay, we’re breaking the rules with our very first video, but come on, Patzer gets in by virtue of being a tremendously successful entrepreneur. And a big thank you to both Patzer and to you for putting up with some of rough spots as I figure this whole video thing out.

Read the whole story…

TUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, TUAW Interview

At the age of twenty-six, Aaron Patzer founded the financial website Mint.com. In many ways Mint was much like an Apple product: it had a simple interface, it was easy to understand and use, and many of Mint’s early adopters became very loyal evangelists. Word of mouth spread, and just 18 months after its launch (Mint officially went public in 2007), Mint had added its one millionth user.

To the dismay of many, Mint sold to Intuit in September 2009 for $170 million. I say dismay because many users of Quicken products had been less than thrilled with Intuit’s offerings for some time, and some people were concerned what a twenty-year-old company that seemed stuck in its ways would do with a popular user-friendly Web 2.0 startup.

Out of all the negative press, perhaps Mac users could be forgiven for having the most anxiety over the acquisition. Many had abandoned Quicken Mac 2007 in favor of Mint.com. Mac users wanted to move on from the stale Quicken ecosystem and go with something simple and easy. Now, that simple and easy solution had moved to where the users had escaped from.

Luckily, Intuit wasn’t like other companies who buy smaller start-ups just to eliminate a competitor. Intuit recognized that Patzer and his team possessed the much-needed original financial software ideas and UI design mojo to put a spark in their aging products. In November 2009, Intuit made Aaron Patzer VP/GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group — which left him in charge of Intuit’s personal finance offerings, including Quicken for Mac.
It was January 2008. At Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs had just unveiled the MacBook Air. Over at Intuit’s booth, the company was previewing an anticipated update to Quicken Mac 2007 – one that didn’t require Rosetta to run and didn’t have an un-Mac-like UI. Unfortunately, the UI that Quicken ended up with consisted of a Cover Flow-esque interface. It was 2008 after all, and Cover Flow was the hot new UI element, but this was a finance app. We didn’t need glitz when we just wanted to see how much cash we had in the bank. That aside, the single-window interface was a welcome change. Intuit announced that Quicken Mac 2007’s sequel, Quicken Financial Life for Mac, would ship in the Fall of 2008.

Fall 2008 came and went. At Macworld Expo 2009, Intuit previewed a new beta of Quicken Financial Life for Mac and delayed its release again until Fall 2009. I was an early tester of the new beta, and it was buggy; the user interface looked friendlier than it actually was – in other words, the beta was everything you had come to expect from an Intuit product for the Mac. July 2009 came around and, no surprise, Intuit announced it was delaying Quicken Financial Life again, this time until 2010. 2010 – four years after the last version of Quicken for Mac came out (2007 was released in 2006). This time Intuit released a statement all but admitting that the company had failed at providing the Mac with usable financial software:

Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks. We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.

At the same time, Intuit announced Quicken Financial Life for Mac would be available for pre-order from Intuit’s site on October 12, 2009. Guess what happened? That’s right. But at least this delay was only two months. By the time the product actually did go live with pre-orders many, including myself, thought it was too little, too late.

Luckily though, something happened at Intuit between the pre-order delay in October and the December pre-order release: Aaron Patzer was put in charge of Quicken Essentials for Mac (they scrapped the Quicken Financial Life name for a reason I’ll get to in a moment).

I interviewed Aaron by phone yesterday and he had a lot of things to say about the frustration Mac users have with Intuit. Perhaps that’s because he experienced the same frustration with Quicken – and that frustration led him to found Mint.com. Speaking with Aaron, I could hear the passion in his voice for simple products that allow users to easily access their data in a straightforward way.

Those original ideas and UI design mojo I mentioned earlier? Aaron put them to work right away. “When I first saw Quicken Financial Life, it had Cover Flow for no reason,” he laughed. Cover Flow? No reason? Gone. “Quicken for Mac 2006 and 2007 were C/C++ programs that looked like bastardized versions of the Windows product. Little things matter,” he told me. “In the old apps you would think you were supposed to press Command-A to select all of the entries in your registry, because that’s what Command-A does on a Mac – it selects all. But in Quicken Mac 2007 it would actually bring up your accounts list. It’s little things like that, that you could tell the people [writing the program] weren’t real Mac aficionados.”

Aaron himself uses a 15″ MacBook Pro. The team that he spearheads for Quicken Essentials is a group of “Mac guys who live and breathe this stuff.” The team consists of “five or six developers and three guys on QA with product managers coming on and off and the graphics guys switching between the Windows and Mac versions.”

Speaking of Quicken on Windows, Aaron himself wrote the spec for the next version of Quicken for Windows (2011, due out later this year). Why is that important? Because Aaron has a clearly defined vision of what the future of financial software will look like. “You’ll start to see the mess of all the [Intuit] products merged together. Longer term it shouldn’t matter where you use your financial application, whether it’s on the Mac, Windows, or Linux. I want to get everything to parity [on] the features and actually do the back-end so it’s all a consistent single data model – probably based on Mint – and then just skin the front ends (applications) to look like a Mac product, to look like a Windows product, to look like an iPhone or an Android app – to take advantage of the unique advantages of those platforms. But the back-end would be the same so you can just migrate any time you want to from Mint.com to Quicken Essentials for Mac to your Android phone or iPhone.”

Well, that sounds awesome, but what about people that have years worth of old Quicken data? “Eventually we will make it so you can just one-flip click your 20 years of data into the cloud and pull it down on any of these devices – that’s the holy grail and it’ll take over a year to do that,’ he says. “But you can see that already in using the new QEM – it’s using a lot of the same user experience paradigm (the way you budget on the Mac, the way you click through the pie charts) and that makes the back-end easier.”

That’s the larger picture, and after listening to Aaron’s enthusiasm, if anyone can make it happen, it’ll be him. Let’s get back to Quicken Essentials for Mac, though.

“It’s called Quicken Essentials for Mac because it’s what we consider to be essential for most users – about 80% of users.” It’s not just what Aaron and his team think is essential; it’s what people tell them they want. “We do a lot of usability studies, that’s why Mint turned out the way it did. We applied the same to QEM. We went to people’s homes and watched them use it. The majority of them just want to know: How much do I have? How much do I owe? How much do I spend on gas and food? How many times do I go to this restaurant? How many times do I go to Starbucks? What investments do I have? Let me set a budget to control my spending.” Yeah, but what about the thing many arm-chair reviewers talk about? “Only 6% of users across all platforms use bill pay,” Aaron says. “Most people still go to their bank’s website to pay a bill.”

What about other requested features, like deeper investment tools? That’s where the future of Quicken on the Mac comes in. Intuit isn’t abandoning the Mac platform anytime soon; in fact, they’re embracing it: “For the next version of Quicken for the Mac we are planning two SKUs: Quicken Essentials and a Deluxe version which adds the deeper investment tools – history of investments, stock lots (buying shares of one stock at different times), etc.”

You may rightly point out that Quicken for Windows and even the old Quicken for Mac supported these investment tools and that Quicken for Windows supports bill pay (for the paltry 6% who actually use it), but give it time. Aaron has only been on QEM for four months now, but has already helped completely reinvent Quicken on the Mac in that short timespan (yes, it’s finally a Cocoa app). Though many may complain of the lack of investing/bill pay features, I can only liken Quicken Essentials for Mac to QuickTime X. Both apps have been rewritten from the ground up to replace clunky legacy code that would have slowed their scalability in the future. Just as QuickTime X is missing some of the features of QuickTime 7, Quicken Essentials for Mac is missing some of the features of Quicken Mac 2007 – for now. But because of the clean-sweep rewrites, these new applications are just the launching point for the programs into a better, more feature-rich future.

I’ve been playing with Quicken Essentials for Mac for a few days now (I’ll have a full review of it on February 25) and I can already tell you, I’m a convert. I abandoned Quicken for Mint, but QEM has brought me back into the fold. It’s worth it for the Cocoa rewrite alone.

What else does Intuit have in store for the Apple community? Aaron told me that after Mint releases its Android app, the team will be adding features to the next iPhone version. Some of those features include adding manual transactions – the ability to enter checks that haven’t cleared yet, and an easier way to enter cash. “Doing that on the iPhone is probably the most useful way to do it because you are usually paying cash in a cab or buying a quick coffee with it.” Another thing under consideration is an ATM locator. “We know which bank accounts you have so we can tell you which ATMs in your area are not gonna charge you a fee.”

Also expect to see an iPad app. “Yes, it’s something we’ve been looking into. Ideal implementation would be Mint’s pie chart that you can click through and dive into to see Food-Dining-McDonald’s, etc. Where you could use pinch to expand and contract.” But the iPad app won’t be available at launch and probably not before late summer at the earliest.

What about Aaron’s brainchild? I use Mint for all my US accounts, but what about my UK bank accounts? Will the rest of the globe soon be able to utilize Mint.com? “Mint is working with the Global Division at Intuit, planning how to internationalize our code base.” As Aaron points out, that’s one of the advantages of such a large company taking over a Web 2.0 startup – the startup can use the company’s resources to go further than it could have on its own. As for that large company? Well, something tells me that acquiring Mint and Aaron Patzer is the best thing that could ever have happened to Intuit – and you can take that to the bank.

TUAWTUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Do Commercial Vendors Deserve Equity?

If you asked startup founders whether they would rather give away 5% equity in the company or one of their toes, many would choose the toe. CEOs like Zynga’s Mark Pincus have always argued for startup founders to “own their destiny” and maintain control and ownership of their company. That’s why it was surprising to read VC Deal Lawyer Chris McDemus’s recent article entitled If You Provide a Strategic Technology or Outsourced Service, Consider Taking Some Equity in Your Fee Structure.

Sponsor

Early-stage startup companies are used to giving away equity to advisors, IP lawyers and key staff, but McDemus argues that those vendors who provide core technologies should also build an equity agreement right into their service contracts. McDemus gives the example of Mint’s acquisition by Intuit and how if Yodlee had taken some of Mint’s equity for providing the backend of the service, the company would have made great money on the sale. While this might sound like a good idea for service providers who risk abandonment, the idea is likely to ruffle the feathers of many a startup founder.

The fantastic thing about startup companies in 2010 is that they’re iterating faster. Rather than stumbling in the dark for a few years before launching a product, many have launched in a mere six month engineering cycle. In fact, we’ve even featured companies being built in a week or a weekend. If vendors asked for cash AND equity as part of the commercial license, I wonder how this would change development.

While service providers risk abandonment after startups get acquired by bigger companies, they may also risk abandonment for pursuing the equity route. Alternatives to an equity-seeking vendor might include open source technologies, using competitors who do not demand equity, or in a worst case scenario, building the core technology from scratch.

If the bulk of your business’ technology is built in association with a commercial vendor and that vendor asked you for equity, would you give it to them? If yes, why? If no, how would you cope?

Discuss

Read the whole story…

The Evolving Online Finance Ecosystem

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. Today we’ll take a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2)
Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3)
Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4)
ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

That segmentation makes sense to us, to let’s look now at how the online finance market is shaping up.

Sponsor

Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance. Up until April 15, the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how finance software has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping online finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

In our overview of Personal Finance, we explained how free tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe are making it easy for consumers to monitor their income and expenditure. The current market leader in personal finance is Mint, which was acquired by Intuit in October 2009. Today Mint has more than 1.7 million registered users, about 700,000 of them active every month.

The online small business accounting market is less well formed at this time, which means there are opportunities for startups. Particularly as for years now small business owners have had to suffer relatively expensive and complex desktop software – such as MYOB, Intuit QuickBooks and Microsoft Office Accounting.

Internet DNA

In an August 2008 article, we wrote that many of the small business accounting software incumbents were struggling to make the transition to online accounting. That was one reason why leading financial software firm Intuit acquired Mint, to import some Internet DNA. Just months later and Intuit is already planning to phase out Quicken Online and replace it with Mint.

Just as Mint came out of the web 2.0 world to re-shape the Personal Finance market, it will likely be a web-based company that does the same to the small business accounting market. It may end up being Xero, a completely online accounting service which was founded in July 2006. Xero hails from New Zealand, but is aiming for global success. Full disclosure, ReadWriteWeb uses Xero to manage its accounts. We’ve found the integration with online banking systems to be impressive, the design slick, and functionality such as multi currencies useful. Perhaps most importantly, Xero has the support of many accountancy firms.

Playing in Multiple Markets

According to Xero founder Rod Drury, another trend in the online finance space to watch is that "each vendor might play in the adjacent market as it’s good exposure." We’ve seen this happening for years with the likes of Intuit and Microsoft. But now even the small players, such as Xero, are doing it. Drury says that for his firm, doing personal finance "creates a great opportunity to talk to banking partners and enables us better access to banking web services." He added, "it’s a useful marketing tool, though the primary monetization is upsell to the business product."

We’ll discuss Cloud ERP products in a separate post, so for now please tell us your thoughts on personal and small business online finance tools. Which products do you use, whether for personal finance use or your business?

Image credit: An&

Discuss

Read the whole story…

How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before.

Sponsor

Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we’ll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance.

If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

Mint: Leading the Charge

Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit’s Quicken Online.

Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you.

Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta. Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week.

Mint’s success didn’t go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn’t plan to compete in the market anymore.

Beyond Mint

While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it’s by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint.

ClearCheckbook.com, for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online.

A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe, for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint.

Since acquiring Exepnsr, Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo – which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting.

Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax, for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K.

Going Mobile

Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe, for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone – either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert.

Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America, Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example.

When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due.

What’s Next?

Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software.

This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Quicken Essentials for Mac available for pre-order

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software

Quicken Essentials for Mac is finally available for pre-order. Too little, too late if you ask me. Its taken three years to get this next version of Quicken for Mac out the door. In that time, worthy alternatives have risen, like iBank and Mint.com.

While I won’t give it a review until I’ve tried it, it seems that Intuit should just give up until they want to make a financial software package that the Mac deserves. Here are just a few of my peeves from the Quicken Essentials for Mac FAQ (bold added):

1. Can I track my investments?
Yes, Quicken Essentials for Mac allows you to track the overall value of your investment accounts and the value of your specific holdings. It will not, however, track investment buys and sells, nor will it provide some advanced investment performance reports. If you need more more advanced investment features, try Quicken Mac 2007.

2. Can I export my data to TurboTax?
Quicken Essentials for Mac does not support that capability. If you’d like that functionality, we recommend trying Quicken Mac 2007.

3. Can I pay my bills within Quicken?
While you cannot pay bills within the product itself (”direct bill pay”), you can track your bills and make sure you have enough cash to pay them when they’re due. A few alternatives available include using Quicken Mac 2007 or using the bill pay functionality on Quicken Bill Pay.

Did you see that? If you want to do anything useful, you have to buy their three year-old product.

I ditched Quicken for Mac years ago, moved to iBank, then eventually quit that and moved entirely to Mint which has a great iPhone app [iTunes link]. How good is Mint? Good enough that Intuit has since purchased it. I can only hope they plan to leave it good enough alone.

Thanks Gilbert

TUAWQuicken Essentials for Mac available for pre-order originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Intuit gets into the customer management business

Intuit, the company best-known for financial software like Quicken and QuickBooks, is expanding its lineup today with Customer Management, an application that brings Intuit into competition with established sales software companies like Salesforce.com.

Many of the small businesses that buy Intuit software use relatively primitive tools like a spreadsheet or a whiteboard to track their customers, said Intuit product manager John Flora, because more sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) software doesn’t really address their needs,. Even though companies like Salesforce offer CRM for small businesses, that software is basically a stripped-down versions of an application that was really built for sales teams within large companies.

“It’s like trying to sell a soccer mom a new car by taking an 18-wheeler and taking the wheels off the back,” Flora said.

What makes Intuit’s product different? Flora said his team focused on simplicity, so Customer Management provides what small business owners need need — namely, a way to see and update all customer data in one place, including contact information, pending tasks, upcoming appointments, and more — without overwhelming them with features. There’s a BlackBerry version that lets you view that information when you’re out of the office, and Intuit plans to support other smartphones too. Businesses can synchronize data from QuickBooks (so you know if a customer has an overdue bill, for example), as well as contacts from Microsoft’s email program Outlook.

The pricing is small business-friendly too, Flora said, at $9.95 a month for up to five users.

Customer Management includes collaboration tools like shared calendars and tasks. Also worth noting: While Intuit offers both traditional and web versions of its flagship products, Customer Management is online-only – another sign that Intuit sees web apps as a big part of its future.

Read the whole story…