Jot Thought

Well, it took us about a week longer than we thought, but we just released a major upgrade to Paybackable. There are 2 key elements to the release:

1. The ability to create company accounts and add employees
2. We added paid account plans

We also rolled out a new look and feel that was created by real designers, as opposed to Kevin hacking around.

So we’ll be giving DHH’s “advice” a whirl and trying to actually charge money for a useful web service.

If you know any small companies who want to simplify their online expense reporting, please send them our way

QuickenMobile , a cool little app we built for Intuit, was launched at MacWorld this week. It sends you text messages with balances and recent transactions for your bank and credit card accounts. We built it in JRuby on Rails to interface with Intuit’s java-based aggregation web service and deploy within their java stack. Here’s the beta sign up screen.

In addition to the transaction aggregation and sms capabilities, one of Intuit’s own, Zach “Money” Moneypenny built an iPhone interface for the application. He was working the show when we stopped by - here he was bringing it up on his iPhone.

Have to say, it was cool seeing something we built being demoed at MacWorld. We even heard that a senior member of the Google mobile team found it to be pretty cool. It was also very nice to see the other apps the Quicken team were showing off. In addition to QuickenOnline, which also just launched, they were demonsrating the coming version of Quicken for the Mac. What I found particularly interesting is that the entire program is being re-written from the ground up using Cocoa. From what I saw, it looks great. They’re about to go into Beta and both Ben and I signed up. Here’s a pic of what I like to call Cocoa Quicken…

We didn’t spend a ton of time at the expo, but while we were there it was pretty crowded. The logistics of getting in were terrible - our passes didn’t have promo codes, which the registration software required, there were tons of different lines with the exact same signs above them, and the badging process was a hilarious cluster. I’d be curious to know the results of a process excellence evaluation of IDG’s logistical approach. But I shouldn’t complain - I wouldn’t want to solve that issue for a living.

We did stop by the MacBook Air, though it took some effort to actually get your hands on one. It was kind of funny that everyone one wanted to pick them up and play with them, but you had to keep them over the counter. Made for an interesting dynamic (see pic below:)

Our final stop before heading out was to chat with the folks at NeatReceipts, who were showing off their receipt scanning solution for the Mac. We’re talking to them about integration with Paybackable and our “kinda secret” forthcoming app. Stay tuned for more on that.

Last weekend I grabbed my PowerBook and headed to Yahoo! for HackDay. It was certainly one of the best developer events Iââ¬â¢ve ever attended. I was so busy during the week that I did not have any time to come up with a decent project. Nonetheless, I cleared my schedule on Friday and drove down to Yahoo! to check out some of the courses they put together. The schedule was filled with developers discussing the Yahoo! APIs. I particularly found the YUI library interesting. It looks like they are building some really great tools and I am looking forward to using them on some of my future projects.

Later that night, I met up with my friend Zach, we grabbed some dinner, and we headed back to Yahoo!. We returned around 8:00pm and walked in to the building to find about 200 developers socializing, hacking away, and playing Guitar Hero on a 15ââ¬â¢ projection screen. There were so many talented developers. Most of the people I spoke with were front-end developers who were experts with Flash. They spoke to me a lot about ActionScript 3, Flash 9, and Flex 2.0. It sounds like Adobe is doing a lot of very innovative things in this space. They have really started to tackle the development community rather than focusing on designers. These technologies have begun to intrigue me. I will certainly be evaluating the Flex 2.0 framework over the next couple of weeks. I am curious to see how people will end up using this technology. I have a feeling it will change the way Rich Internet Applications are developed.

After an hour or two of socializing, people started to head outside for the concert. Yahoo! got Beck to play a private concert for all of the developers at HackDay. I knew that there was going to be a band, but I had no idea it would be such a big name. It was a really great show.

After the concert, Zach and I met up with a young developer named Mo. We came up with an idea to create a small Flash application that allows a person to upload a photo, a sound file, and then animate the mouth on the photo to make it look like the picture is talking. We were thinking that it would be funny to use this as an online karaoke recorder. You would be able to make a picture sing a song and then send it to your friends. After a couple of hours of working on the project, Mo completed the portion of Flash that animated the mouth on the photo by using a microphone. It looked pretty funny. Essentially, you could define a mouth on the photo and then speak into the computers microphone. The Flash would use the amplitude of the sound from the microphone to animate the mouth on the photo.

Zach and I worked on creating the back end of the site. We created a REST style web service that would allow the Flash to save the data it recorded to the database. We would then be able to retrieve this data to play back the recording at a later date. This is when things started going down hill. None of us had much experience with Flash and we ran into a lot of issues once we started integrating the front and back end. By the time it hit 8:00am in the morning, we all began to fade. My brain just quit working and what would normally take about 10 minutes started to take about 30ââ¬âœ40 minutes. After being awake for more than 24 hours, we decided to go home for a quick rest. I figured that we were not going to have time to complete the project by 2:30pm that day but I was okay with that. I was at HackDay more for the experience of the event and networking than to win a prize.

After resting for about 3 hours, I headed back to Yahoo!. I arrived at approximately 1:00pm and quickly realized that we would not end up completing our project. So, I ended up speaking with some other teams and socializing for the rest of the event. Mo decided to go ahead and present what we had completed. He created a short video about his time at HackDay and youââ¬â¢ll be able to see what we built. His presentation was hysterical.

I spent the rest of the day speaking with various developers and did a little recruiting. It was nice having so many talented developers in one place. The energy at the event was great. It reminded me why the Bay Area is such a great place to be for software development. There is so much talent here and I am expecting amazing web products to be built here. I am looking forward to launching a couple of my own products and hopefully make a mark on this rapidly growing industry.