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TMG's Jeff Russell on the Future of Payments - The CU Water Cooler

2012-01-10T11:35:05-05:00

Jeff Russell from TMG Financial Services gave a great talk at the Water Cooler Symposium about the future of payments. Where are the technologies that have everyone talking, like NFC and PFM, and where are those technologies going? What is the threat level from outside players, like Google and Apple? Jeff has some sharp insight, and you can watch it in the video below or over on the CU Water Cooler website.

2011 CUWCS - Jeff Russell from Tim McAlpine on Vimeo.

A model of the iPhone 4 rendered entirely with style sheets

2012-01-03T10:06:22-05:00

by Jimmy Marks

Pulled in this interesting link from our Twitter feed - it's an iPhone rendered in pure CSS3. What is CSS3, you ask? It's the next iteration of style sheets that focuses on high functionality without a lot of extra code or data-guzzling plug-ins. It's not a "working" iPhone, it's merely a simulacrum, but it is very neat.

So, why should you care? Because what used to take a lot of heavy Flash animation and lots and lots of time will now be easily rendered with simple styles. Imagine creating new applications for your website that would interact not only with a user's mouse, but with their fingertips as well. Many browsers are already showing everything CSS3 can do and even some of the older ones are updating and upgrading to bring everyone in on the fun.

A treat for the senses that actually informs? That's every Internet user's dream. Things like this are showing us just how far we can go.

Marketers Most Certain of Email ROI; Other Kinds, Not So Much

2011-12-16T10:08:08-05:00

From eMarketer:

...only 47% of US marketers believe they can effectively measure the return on investment of email marketing, and other types of marketing saw even smaller percentages. For social media marketing, only 26% of marketers think they can effectively measure ROI.

Email's top of the heap in this survey, and for good reason - with the right program, dialing in on who opened, clicked and acted can mean the world to a marketing pro.

The New, New Twitter: 10 Big Takeaways

2011-12-12T16:36:46-05:00

The New, New Twitter: 10 Big Takeaways

From SplatF [http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/new-new-twitter/]

“This is the beginning of Jack Dorsey’s real vision for Twitter combined with Dick Costolo’s vision for a real-time social advertising product. The main components: writing and Tweets, obviously; having conversations with other people; discovering what’s happening in the world through Twitter; and seeing a promoted message from brands here and there.”

Eventually, you have to make money. Twitter knows it can’t be free without someone paying the bills from here on in.

Security and Privacy Plague Mobile Web's Forward Motion

2011-04-28T11:48:46-04:00

A new article from eMarketer examines concerns that consumers have expressed about mobile - chief among them, privacy and security.

by Jimmy Marks

It used to be that "The Internet" was something you used in your home. You had to have a computer connected to the web via cable. Then came the idea that the Internet was a practical business tool - email revolutionizes communication! High-speed Internet makes websites more robust! Wi-Fi is the new guard - the web without wires, in every Hotel, Airport, Starbucks and McDonald's in your neighborhood.

Mobile is the latest wave on the shore. The same Internet that used to demand that we buy large tower CPUs and big monitors now only requires us to have a smartphone and our thumbs. But there's something troubling about that - it's the same Internet. Which means the same problems and the same fears.

Take a look at this chart from eMarketer. There are concerns among smartphone users about apps that track their various patterns (you've already heard about the iPhone tracking issue to be sure). Smartphones and tablets emit and receive data - what does that data say about the user? Is the picture flattering?

When it comes to moving your financial institution forward with mobile, how are you allaying concerns about security? Did you do a good job of getting your customers to trust your OLB and website? If not, try to recover the fumble for mobile - it could make or break you in the long run.

Mobile Tags and QRs are the Talk of SXSW

2011-03-22T10:45:25-04:00

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a yearly even in Austin, TX dedicated to music, film, and interactive technology. This year, one SXSW goer gave the award for "most discussed/noticed technology" to QR codes or, more broadly, 2D barcodes of any ilk.

From "The Flack" blog:

I'm talking 2D barcodes (i.e., QR Codes, Microsoft Tag...) that link the physical world to mobile. My client John Puterbaugh, CEO of Nellymoser and a pioneer in the development of technology that seamlessly delivers rich content to mobile devices, summed it up when he said on his PSFK panel:
"2D barcodes codes are to mobile what the URL was to the Internet."

A ringing endorsement.

So, right now, you need to go to The Flack and look at all the cool shots he took of QR codes in the "wild" of SXSW. A lot of good brainstorming fodder to be had.

(Special thanks to Christopher Morris for the link, via Twitter)

Tech News Roundup

2011-03-09T11:12:42-05:00

Every week, we here at DigitalMailer come up with a number of articles and resources that we share with one another, talking about the "next wave" of finance technology. Here's what caught our attention recently:

Electronic channels at “social banks.” (from BAI)

Fixation on Location (from GonzoBanker)

Cloud Computing is Greener (from Harvard Business Review)

Why Community Banks Need a Product Advantage (from BAI)

There IS an app for that...but why? (from CU Soapbox).

Sorry, did I miss something? Passwords aren't the problem.

2011-02-08T09:53:27-05:00

by Jimmy Marks

Wait...what did this article just say?

From Business Week:

The Problem with Passwords

They're annoying to remember, insecure, and costly for companies.

Average amount it costs a business to field a phone call requesting a password reset: $10

Proportion of help desk calls that are password-related: 30%

Users who choose a common word or simple key combination for a password: 50%

Wow, that's surprising. But is it really a problem with passwords, BusinessWeek? Someone calling for a password reset has forgotten their password. That's not the password's fault, that's human error. Yes, we as a society have a lot of passwords to remember. It's frustrating, sure. But it's also worth the time it takes to add entropy, and why? Because every site is of some importance to its user.

What if someone busted into your Facebook account and started saying racist/sexist things or working to get you in trouble with your company? I've seen it happen to people before. It's awful and it really makes trouble for the victim. How about your email? making your email easy to crack leaves you open to all manner of ills. Getting all your other passwords is a snap for the guy who breaks into your email inbox because he can hit your online banking provider and start screwing with your money, or cancel accounts, or break in later for his own purposes. And what happens when the hacker in your inbox starts jamming your email address into "forgot password?" forms on your most visited websites? It's a recipe for disaster.

To be fair to BusinessWeek, I'm not sure this was meant to be a full article. I think it's a sidebar snippet that got repurposed. There aren't a lot of suggestions about how to make security better. There ARE, however, some interesting numbers suggesting how hard it is to guess a password that's X number of characters long and Y degrees of complexity.

From the same "article":

Length: 6 characters
Lowercase: 10 minutes
+ Uppercase: 10 hours
+ Nos. & Symbols: 18 days

Length: 7 characters
Lowercase: 4 hours
+ Uppercase: 23 days
+ Nos. & Symbols: 4 years

Length: 8 characters
Lowercase: 4 days
+ Uppercase: 3 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 463 years

Length: 9 characters
Lowercase: 4 months
+ Uppercase: 178 years
+ Nos. & Symbols: 44,530 years;

The more characters - uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols - you add to the password, the more secure it is.

And I'll put a nickel on the bet that you've started thinking "more than eight characters?!? Who can remember that!"

You could. If you cared. But we've done a bad job as web professionals and managers of information. We've conditioned people to think of passwords as another step in getting the information you want, not the first line of defense against intrusion and destruction. Forgot your password? We can reset it. I don't know who manages password resets primarily by call, most sites use a system of emails with specialized links that go to reset pages. But if it really costs you ten bucks to reset a password by phone, eat the cost. Why? Because getting blamed for lapsed, broken security will cost you a lot more - in lost business, bad publicity and possible lawsuits by victims of phishers, scammers, hackers and other ne'er-do-wells.

So what's the solution? Get serious about passwords and layers of protection. Require passwords to have the unusual, difficult-to-guess characters that keep customers safe. Toy with multi-factor identification. Lockout anyone that tries a password more than five times. Lockout anyone that's been inactive for five or more minutes.

Be smarter than you are convenient. Don't be to blame when someone's information is compromised...or when your own is.

Tablet Crazy: Consumption or Creation?

2010-12-15T14:00:00-05:00

by Rob Banker

I’ve heard (I don’t know where, so I could be making it up) that conventional wisdom says that iPads are consumption devices. ”Buy one for your Granny so she can surf the web and answer the occasional email”.

On the surface, I see that. Tablets like the iPad (got one, love it), Samsung Galaxy Tab (got one, love it) and others (don’t have one) make great limited purpose devices for web surfing or reading email. That doesn’t mean, however, that they are simple devices meant strictly for content consumption. Any pundit saying so is short-sighted or getting kickbacks from a desktop PC maker (you know who you are, Thurrott).

The iPad (or specifically iOS) and Samsung Galaxy Tab (or specifically Android), are operating systems. What that means specifically is that they were not designed to be used as is. They’re designed to be extended. And that’s what developers are doing.

I’ll focus specifically on the iPad and just talk about a few of the apps I use for content creation. Apple provides Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. They’re directly analogous to MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and equally as useful (arguably) as their Microsoft counterparts. As an example, I recently wrote a 70 page software manual for DMI’s EDMS system on the iPad using Pages. It was similar to writing a document in MS Word, if not better. While Pages is a fully functional word processor, it eschews the bloat of systems like Word and let me focus on the task at hand while still giving me ability to use styles and graphics. When it was time to distribute the document, it exported directly to a PDF. When I needed to share the document internally, it exported to MS Word (almost — the incompatibilities were minor) perfectly. I’m sure that begs the question — why not just write it in Word? Well, with 20 hours of battery life and less than a pound, sitting in a coffee shop and working on the document was liberating.

There’s plenty of other tools… Try OmniGraffle by the OmniGroup (www.omnigroup.com). It’s a great diagramming tool and design tool. I use a program called Sketchy for creating software UI designs and it integrates directly with Balsamiq (www.balsamiq.com) for the desktop, another great software design tool. Another tool for project and task management, OmniFocus (also from OmniGroup) is my constant companion for keeping track of everything that goes on in IT @ DMI and it syncs realtime with OmniFocus Desktop and iPhone.

There are artists creating amazing work on the iPad — see this amazing gallery at The Telegraph (thanks to John Gruber @ www.daringfireball.com).

Try the plethora of photo editing, social networking, and blogging (www.tumblr.com) out there, too. Yes, Facebook and Twitter can be creative. Try following @hotdogsladies or @lonelysandwich on Twitter (they can get a bit saucy. You were warned). You’ll see what I mean.

All of the above doesn’t even begin to cover the possibilities for creating the apps you need for your business. DMI is actively working with CUs on vertical applications for loan origination, branch kiosks, and image capture. Depending upon the need, apps can be created quickly to serve any purpose you can think of.

Don’t believe the hype. Tablet computing is a new wave in computing. It won’t replace the laptop, but it will force laptop makers to reconsider how they build laptops and how they’re marketed. Apple already took a page out of it’s own playbook and updated the Macbook Air (got one) as a powerful but small computing device with the ability to run all full-scale applications anyone could need. Tablet computing will force application developers to think about how they create applications. Tablets discourage bloatware, one of the leading problems with PC computing now.

Be sure to contact DigitalMailer about the possibilities for both mobile and vertical applications available and possible for your organization. If it can be built as a desktop app tied to a desktop, it can probably be built as an app that allows your employees mobility away from the desk and the freedom to engage members face-to-face.

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Rob Banker is the EVP/CIO of DigitalMailer, Inc. To learn more about everything DigitalMailer’s technology can do for your business or financial institution, call us at 866-994-4900 ext. 115 or email us at info@digitalmailer.com.

Time to Mobilize!

2010-11-03T10:49:07-04:00

by Jimmy Marks

No, I don't mean get a crowd together and start throwing things (or overthrowing them) - I mean make my websites accessible via mobile devices/smart phones. It used to be enough to make a website cross-browser compliant. But nowadays, mobile is encroaching on the territory once reserved for the desktop and laptop personal computer. Apple's done their part by making the iPad and iPhone 4 the hot property. Google's responded with the Android platform. Blackberry refuses to be counted out. The three make up the lion's share of the mobile market, and appealing to users of all three platforms/phones is a big part of our company's next phase.

Now, when I say we're "mobilizing", I don't mean we built a separate website for mobile use. We're using the same website but with an eye to mobile and smartphone users. Increased ubiquity is a good thing - it means you don't need to make separate versions of your websites, you just need to be aware how they look on mobile devices.

We have an iPad here in our offices (it's neat!) and two iPhones of differing generations. We have an android phone, a few Blackberry phones, and even the odd 2G phone with limited web capability.

One of the big learning curves was figuring out what worked and what didn't. Right off the bat, we noticed a few hampered aspects of the site:

Dropdown menus - When you can't "hover" (which you cannot do on an iPhone or iPad), you have to find a work-around. Changing the Javascript used for our menus by one string changed how these menus displayed on mobile Safari. A little research, you'll often find, goes a long way.
Flash video vs. HTML 5 video - With the advent of HTML 5, video will no longer require Flash player to display. Which is good, because Apple products aren't supporting Flash player with increasing frequency (if I'm the first you're hearing of the war on Flash, I'm sorry, but where've you been?). I'm working on a way to display HTML 5 video on everything BUT Internet Explorer, which is undergoing a metamorphosis. Different writers and tech gurus are promising different things from the newer versions of Internet Explorer which continues its reign as king of the browsers for who knows how much longer.
Shrinky Dinky Display - With resolutions increasing, we should always be mindful of readability as it applies to small-screened devices. How much does a user have to "smudge" to see content? Can you keep the reading experience fairly simple and give that user a clear indication of the content and next steps they need to take to initialize a conversation with you? Let's hope so.

Has everything gone smoothly? No. Things rarely do in the world of UI development. If I can impart on you the wisdom of my experience, I say you need three things to really make things easy on a "mobile ready" transition:

A live testing/preview site that you can see developing work on. That makes it easy to share links across platforms and devices. Create a sub-domain. Easy.
Knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3. These are the future, you need to know them now. Great books are available everywhere, the ones I'm buying are from A List Apart. Easy-to-follow guides are the best guides. Spend the money.
Feedback, feedback, feedback. You need people to tell you what they're seeing and provide you with insight on their user experience. Ask for their help, they'll give it.

Which reminds me, go to DigitalMailer.com on your mobile device and let us know what you think in the comments section. We'd appreciate it!