Why Mint Won

Interesting article on why Mint won out over Wesabe….who I, being a Mint user myself for 3+ years, have never heard of, but found the ‘digital’ rise and fall interesting nonetheless.

A few two things I took out of this:
• Leverage the stuff people are already doing, and don’t recreate the wheel
• Reduce the interaction the user has to take, instead of a bias toward teaching the user
• Accuracy only has to be ‘okay’ for the general public to like it
• User Experience matters


http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/04/technology/wesabe_vs_mint/index.htm

Live Mesh - the great promise of the cloud, realized

For anyone who hasnt checked out Live Mesh yet, I highly recommend it. After a simple setup process, you can add folders direcly on your local PC or Mac that look and feel *just* like the folders on your computer. You can then files, photos, music, whatever and sync them to the cloud. I've used Windows Live SkyDrive and although it offers more space, I really think Live Mesh is the way to go- it just 'acts' like your computer and you dont have to learn a new website.

Whats even better, you can install the Live Mesh app on your Windows Phone add folders on your Windows Phone and have it sync to your PC folders over the air- it also works with Mac. Super

HP+Palm: its a tablet play

I read this article recently that mentioned how the HP acquisition of Palm spells trouble for Microsoft & Windows Phone.

I have to disagree. The article focuses on Kin, which is basically a rev’d up Sidekick with no app store. Danger was purchased late in the game and MS’s exec team couldn’t pull Kin & WP7 together in time, once MS decided in early Jan 2008 to switch directions on WP7 and go with the Dorado client. Ballmer has even said they will merge over the next couple years when they get their shit together ;).

Windows Phone is also making a larger play in the app world, and I think more developers will be attracted to it once they have a familiar toolset and how good the OS is. The xbox/XNA game piece also gives it an edge over competition, including Palm who has a fledgling app store right now.

Overall I think HP is making a tablet, rather than a phone, play here. They’ve got to compete with Dell who is repositioning themselves in this market, adopting Android as their tablet OS.

The iPhone OS scaled very well to the iPad and I can see HP doing the same with the WebOS. The HP Slate is a good device although bulky, and Windows 7 doesn’t scale well on touch devices yet. Microsoft is already working on comparable OS’s and I think once they nail Windows 7 on tablets they’ll be a leader in the space (take Courier for example).

HP will still continue to produce PC’s with Windows 7 on them, but the future is tablets.