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Earmark & Dollarbird Apps Help Encourage Financial Responsibility, Not Careless Spending
If the plethora of “aspirational” shopping companions have left you with something of a bad taste in your mouth for encouraging overspending, here’s a palate cleanser: a couple of newer apps for iOS, Dollarbird and Earmark, are focused on making responsible money management as enjoyable as browsing through personalized feeds of product recommendations.
Well, almost.
Track Your Cash Flow
Dollarbird, which launched in July, is a calendar-like app which aims to mimic the way those living from paycheck to paycheck tend to still handle bill paying, expenses, and tracking spending – by marking up a calendar with what gets paid or spent when in order to figure out how much that leaves you for other necessities, like Ramen noodles or gasoline.
But the app doesn’t just appeal to the hand-to-mouth set. Because of its attractive looks, and smart feature set which includes support for things like tracking recurring transactions, bill reminders, CSV export, and automatic balance calculations, Dollarbird makes sense for anyone who wants to keep a closer eye on their cash flow, for better financial planning purposes.
The calendar interface gives Dollarbird an at-a-glance visualization of when you owe money for things like rent, utilities, car payments, or anything else you want to track, and can also serve as a way to keep a log of which bills have already been paid. You can use its built-in, color-coded categories or create your own, as well as add little notes to each expense, or enter in your income if you’re also tracking your available cash.
The app’s name comes from its own take on Clippy, with a little bird who offers up financial tips and tricks. (You can shut this guy off in the settings, if virtual assistants aren’t your cup of tea.)
Dollarbird is made by Halycon Mobile, a Romanian-based agency founded by Levi Szabo and Szabi Szekely which, since 2005, has focused on designing apps for clients. The company first released the app as a paid offering ($1.99), but is now in the process of making a switch to a more sophisticated business model (details to come), the company tells us. With the launch of its next major release, Dollarbird will include support for multiple accounts, syncing calendars between users (handy for couples or roommates), and other advanced features.
Dollarbird is available for iOS here.
Save First, Then Spend
Meanwhile, Earmark is a new social savings app released in August which encourages users to not just immediately spend their money, but push themselves toward frugality so they can save up for something they really want, whether big or small. It’s designed for those who justify purchases by cutting other areas of everyday expenses – like eating out, buying that morning coffee, resisting the latest gadget, and so on.
To use the app, you enter in your top five splurge items then track the things you don’t buy with those items in mind. For example: you didn’t buy that latte? You’re saving $X per week by quitting smoking? Those little things can add up. And as you limit your unnecessary purchases in search of a larger reward, you can optionally also move money from your bank account to a Dwolla account to keep the savings out of sight until your goals are reached.
Earmark also includes a social element, which allows Facebook friends to make suggestions as to what you should spend your money on, or give you feedback on your “earmarked” items. It’s like the flip side of all these social shopping apps, such as Wanelo, Wish, Wantworthy’s Fresh, Polyvore, Fancy and others: instead of having friends’ recommendations push users into spending money they may not have, the social involvement is meant to foster a more responsible approach to managing money. It’s a “yes, save for this” kind of sentiment, rather than a “yes, buy it now!” one. And that seems more practical in today’s still deteriorating economic reality.
Founder and CEO Josh Chambers, whose ad agency background saw him working with brands like Nike+ Fuelband, Reebok and others, explains that Earmark eventually wants to connect brands and retailers with potential customers whose purchase intent data is clear. They would be about to deliver you offers and coupons in the app, to convince you to spend your savings on their products, which is not a bad idea, and one that could give the app continued life even after users give up on what may become tedious – the manual entry of their every responsible decision.
The company just passed half a million in spending intent, since its release in mid-August, Chambers says.
Earmark is available on iOS here.
GoPro CEO Nicholas Woodman To Kick Off Hardware Day At Disrupt SF
It takes someone special to turn their company name into a verb. But that’s what GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman has done. GoPro is now synonymous with action sports. Skateboarders, surfers and overly enthusiastic parents don’t just film their antics anymore. They GoPro them.
The action camera company has made big moves lately, and with a recent investment from Foxconn, proved that hardware can be a viable startup business. I’m excited to have Nicholas Woodman join me for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF. Hopefully he’ll teach me how to surf.
The story goes that Woodman discovered surfers needed an affordable photography option on an around-the-world trip following the failure of an earlier company. Initially financed by selling shell necklaces and camera straps from his van, Woodman went on to found GoPro and eventually receive capital from Steamboat Ventures (affiliated with the Walt Disney Corporation), Riverwood Capital, Sageview Capital, Walden International, and U.S. Venture Partners.
GoPro and Woodman essentially created the action video camera market. Their runaway success spawned countless knock-offs, imitators just trying to capture a bit of the growing market. But despite stiff competition, GoPro has maintained its stance as the market leader. The company now employees around 500 people around the world. Foxconn purchased 8.88% of the company for 200 million dollars in late 2012, setting the market value of the company at 2.25 billion dollars.
Along the way Woodman has stayed true to the mission of creating a camera to capture extreme sports. The company didn’t branch off. It didn’t go downmarket or attempt to compete in other markets. Woodman had found his customer early on and remained dedicated to them.
If anyone can advise hardware companies, it’s Nicholas Woodman. He will kick off the final day of Disrupt, followed by another rockstar founder, Pebble Watch’s Eric Migicovsky.
General-admission tickets and exhibitor packages are currently available. Buy tickets here.
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Nicholas Woodman
GoPro
Founder, CEO
While the eight-person staff of GoPro was enjoying the success of their first HD HERO camera in 2009, founder and CEO Nick Woodman realized one thing: to support his vision, he was going to need a bigger staff. But before Woodman could think bigger, he had to start out small.
After receiving a degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, Woodman founded an online promotions company, Fun Bug. In 2001, Woodman sold Fun Bug and took off surfing and traveling the world. The decision inspired more than the personal – Woodman’s passion for surfing sparked the idea to create the now-popular wearable and gear mountable camera and in 2002, Woodman founded GoPro. After years of research and planning, the company released its first product, the GoPro HERO, a 35mm film-based camera that was worn on the wrist.
Made up of some of Woodman’s friends and family members, the early GoPro team established the company as a true innovator by continually iterating on the product, moving from a film-based camera to a digital still and video camera. A lifetime extreme sports enthusiast, Woodman was learning how to race cars when he was compelled to move the camera from his wrist to the top of his car. This simple idea led to an array of camera mounting devices – for everything from helmets to surfboards, and even dog collars.
Professors Union: It's Bad Policy To Measure Whether Colleges Help Students
One of the largest college teacher unions in the country has taken a rather odd education policy stance: opposition to measuring whether colleges are helping their graduates. In response to President Obama’s push to tie federal college aid to labor-market outcomes, the American Association of University Professors have issued a stern warning against the seemingly uncontentious idea of evaluating colleges before giving them money. “In reality measuring the output of our colleges and universities in a meaningful way is simply not possible,” writes President Rudy Fichtenbaum.
As someone with an advanced degree in the mathematics of social science, I fully appreciate the difficulty in quantifying post-graduate outcomes. But, Fichtenbaum’s opposition isn’t to any specific metric; it’s to the very idea of evaluation– not educational, not civic, not financial– nothing. He wants a blank check, even as colleges fail to improve student outcomes by their own standards.
“Quality education can give students skills that will be useful in helping them find jobs, but it is also about creating better human beings and giving students the knowledge to deal with the myriad of problems we face as a society. I have yet to see a test to measure whether or not someone has become a better human being.”
Put aside the fact that most of his association’s members are dedicated to quantifying every imaginable phenomenon on earth, higher education’s collective opposition to real-world preparation is causing America’s education woes.
Americans are graduating with an average of over $26,000 in debt and without the skills needed to find a job to pay it off. At least in the tech sector, 43% of jobs go unfilled for a month or longer — an indicator of the severe dearth of engineers in our talent-starved corner of the economy.
“But we will still face a major shortage of college-educated workers especially as baby boomers retire,” concludes a new Georgetown report, predicting that 5 million jobs in science, finance, health, and tech will go unfilled. The fact that colleges are not adapting to 21st century demands is a by-gone conclusion.
As a result, a cottage industry of adult-learning vocational startups, such at General Assembly and Enstitute, are filling the gap left by colleges. But, they can’t train millions of students.
To be clear, vocational training may not be the best way to actually educate an innovative workforce. General critical thinking and communication skills might be a better strategy. But, as the authors of Academically Adrift found, 36% of college students make no significant improvement on either these skills in 4 years. A whopping 35% spend less than 5 hours a week studying alone. Imagine trying to enter the workforce after 4 unproductive years of partying.
As a graduate student at the University of California Irvine, I once witnessed professors’ abject aversion to measuring improvement. In a closed door meeting, the Vice Provost asked the faculty steering committee on curriculum if they wanted to measure whether the students were learning anything. After no one raised a hand, he said “because we don’t want to know the answer.”
As shocking as the experience was, I never thought I would see anyone crazy enough to admit their aversion to evaluation in public until I read Fichtenbaum’s letter to President Obama. Now, we have more evidence that colleges are, indeed, worried that Obama’s plan is radically disruptive.
Figuring out a way to evaluate colleges will not be easy (evaluations of any kind are difficult). But, that doesn’t mean the federal government should write a blank check without asking questions. If college is supposed to make better citizens, then measure whether students vote and can answer basic facts about the government. If it’s supposed to make students more critical thinkers, then measure whether they can read a newspaper and make an argument (this test is actually known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which is the basis for Academically Adrift‘s conclusions).
And, if college is supposed to prepare students for work, then measure whether they’re getting a job. I’m not thrilled about the federal government defining the evaluation, but it appears to be the only way to motivate colleges that otherwise wish to maintain an existence of zero accountability.
Teacher unions are scared, because, as an organization of career academics, they’re not equipped to prepare students for a private sector they’ve spent their lives avoiding. Expect significant opposition to higher education reform.
Google Just Killed The Best Thing About The Chromecast (For Now)
Google’s Chromecast is a curious beast because it’s incredibly cheap and does exactly what it promises, but that hasn’t stopped from developers from (what else?) trying to make the $35 dongle even more useful. That’s exactly what esteemed Android dev Koushik Dutta did — earlier this month he reverse engineered the Chromecast to create an app called AllCast (nee AirCast) that let users stream stuff not just from their browsers, but straight from their Android smartphones too.
Sounds pretty great, right?
Well, thanks to a recent update pushed out by Google, AllCast doesn’t work anymore. To hear Dutta tell the tale on Google+, this was probably a calculated move to ensure that only Google-approved content providers could play.
Heads up. Google’s latest Chromecast update intentionally breaks AllCast. They disabled ‘video_playback’ support from the ChromeCast application.
Given that this is the second time they’ve purposefully removed/disabled[1] the ability to play media from external sources, it confirms some of my suspicions that I have had about the Chromecast developer program: The policy seems to be a heavy handed approach, where only approved content will be played through the device. The Chromecast will probably not be indie developer friendly.
Dutta’s tinkering with Chromecast didn’t end there — he managed to bake Chromecast streaming support into the popular Cyanogenmod custom Android ROM in early August, though to my knowledge the feature hasn’t yet been pushed into nightly builds. In fairness though, none of Dutta’s distributed work has been built using Google’s still-in-beta Cast SDK, so there was always a chance Google could muck things up for Dutta and devs like him.
When Dutta released the first beta version of Allcast, The Verge’s Casey Newton pointed out that Google would likely put the kibosh on it. After all, Google could easily score some points with major content providers by closing off parts of the Chromecast system that would allow users to stream illicitly obtained media to their televisions, or at least show that it’s committed to controlling its ecosystem. It’s a bummer for would-be Chromecast buyers looking for ways to get more out of the HDMI dongle, but Google never said that the Chromecast would be open in the way that Android is. I’ve reached out to Google to see if they want to weigh in, and will update this post if I hear back from them.
PlateJoy Launches To Help You Plan Meals, With Ingredients Delivered To Your Door
If you’re like me, you have a difficult time determining what to cook for yourself every week, and then wander around the local grocery store purchasing a collection of ingredients that may or may not fit together. And, a week later, you throw away whatever you didn’t use and start again. Well, a new service called PlateJoy aims to change that, by helping users create a meal plan and having healthy ingredients delivered to their doors.
As food services go, PlateJoy isn’t quite a meal delivery service so much as it is designed to make planning and eating healthy meals easier for its users. It follows on the trend of startups like Plated or Blue Apron, both of which ship fresh ingredients and recipes to users to be cooked at home.
All of PlateJoy’s meals are designed to be very quick and easy to prepare: Suggested breakfast and lunch options can be prepared in less than 10 minutes, while dinner is more like 30 minutes. And they’re all prepared with fresh, healthy ingredients that are delivered by a local grocery service near the user’s home.
I signed up and tried out PlateJoy for myself, just to see what all the fuss was about. When you sign on, you tell the service how many people you’re cooking for, and you’re offered the choice of different breakfast, lunch, and dinner items. As a user cooking for one, I chose both lunch and dinner, and picked three different options from each. That would give me enough food to last me about week, as each of those meals could be prepared twice… or, with dinners, I’d have leftovers for another night.
A day later, I had someone from Whole Foods at my doorstep dropping off a couple of bags of food. I also received a printout with recipe directions mailed to me (how quaint)! And with that, I was ready to start making meals. There was just one problem… I was feeling kind of lazy Friday night and so I went out to dinner instead. And then I spent all day Saturday hanging out with my girlfriend and a couple of friends.
Finally, on Sunday, I made my first PlateJoy meals — one at lunch, one at dinner. For lunch I had a chicken avocado wrap with raspberry vinaigrette, and for dinner I had salmon with strawberry salsa and brown rice. Both things that I wouldn’t have necessarily picked for myself, but both pretty good. And relatively easy to prepare, although I think my cooking times were a little bit longer than 10 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively.
Ostensibly, PlateJoy was created to help users plan meals and to reduce the amount of food they throw away, by delivering only what the user needs. On the back end it works to determine which ingredients can be reused between meals to eliminate waste and deliver just the right amount of each. It’s estimated that food waste costs consumers about $2,200 annually per household, or $165 billion annually.
As for the cost, I found it a bit high: For my six meals, I was charged about $100. I didn’t do a full-on calculation of the cost of ingredients, but figure I probably could have pulled them together for about $60 or less. But, that doesn’t include delivery or the cost of the service itself.
Co-founder Christina Bognet says the cost will be less per person as the service scales up meals — it’s cheaper to buy for bigger meals in general. And the company also will take into account ingredients that can be re-used week after week — for instance, the raspberry vinaigrette will last me a while.
For now, PlateJoy is launching in Boston and San Francisco, with help from grocery delivery partners Whole Foods and Peapod. Deliveries can be made next day, in any two-hour window between 10:00 am and 8:00 pm.
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