Krugle - It won’t survive

Revised: Krugle - It might survive
Revised: Krugle - It will survive, their people in power get it

After reading Robert Scoble post on Krugle I ran over to krugle.com to see what type of advertising I could get (we write software development tools so it should be a nice fit), this is there business model right? Some red flags went off when it became a chore to find advertising info. Finally I came to their “Contact Us” page where I found Bill Daniher VP Finance & Corporate Development as the contact for advertising. More red flags - Why is a VP of Finance handling advertising? Maybe their VP actually do work, so I send him an email. He responds back that Krugle doesn’t have an automated way to do this yet, but he can manually add an ad to the site for a selection of keywords. I’m thinking this is going to be ugly to deal with, but still worth a try. I give him the word we want to proceed, what are the next steps? His response? Well, there is no response. So your a start up and someone wants to buy your service and you don’t respond? Not good. My email probably slipped thru the cracks, but that is why a VP shouldn’t be handling this. Then I read today that they partnered with Yahoo! to do their developer code search. I sure hope Yahoo! is paying them enough to survive, otherwise it won’t.

This is a big reason a lot of .com companies don’t survive. They put more stock into partnerships and VC funding then doing what they need to do—earn revenue and become profitable.

Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 7 comments.
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Congrats to US Bank and their Web Engineers

As much grieve as I give banks and credit card companies today I experienced the easiest online system ever, bar none. I have my mortgage and my checking account with US Bank. They’ve been my mortgage company for ~6 months now and I always went into a local branch to make my payment (i.e. transfer from checking) because I was told by my closer that she had US Bank and they charge $15 for an online payment, sorry but on principal alone I wasn’t paying an extra $15. Anyways today I log into my banking and notice a “make payment” button under my mortgage. I click it, it “knows” I have a checking account and prompts to enter any additional payment amount. I click submit, it then wants a confirmation submit button clicked. BAM, I’m done. 3 clicks to make a payment. I didn’t have to create a new account, verify my account number, add my checking account as a payee account or any of the other crap that some banks make you do (Remember banks make money when your late with payments, it’s in their best interest to make the online experience a bad one). This is how it is suppose to be done. Somehow the engineers at US Bank figured out how to integrate a checking system with a mortgage system, something I know Bank of America has no clue how to do.

Written by Tim on February 15th, 2007 with 4 comments.
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