Last night, after much procrastination, I started my taxes—on my couch with a movie playing on the TV, using only my iPad. I was testing out an early build of TurboTax, which is now available for the iPad (in addition to the online and desktop versions). I got through the bulk of my taxes by the time the movie was over.
Taxes are never fun, even on the iPad. But the new TurboTax iPad app makes it fairly seamless. Anyone familiar with TurboTax will recognize the interface. It takes you through the same guided questions the online and desktop versions do, asks you about your financial situation, and keeps a tally of your refund up top (or, gulp, taxes you still owe). The app works in both landscape and portrait mode, and knows when to pop up a number keypad or the full keyboard.
Just like the desktop version, the entire app resides on your iPad, with no need to connect to the Internet until you file. It is free to download and do your entire taxes on, but once you want to file, it costs the same as other versions of TurboTax (starting at $29.99)
The one big drawback of the app for existing TurboTax users is that you cannot import last year’s data. You have to start from scratch. I thought entering all my personal and W-2 data on the iPad would be a pain, but it really didn’t take that long. And while you cannot import data from previous years, you can move your current year taxes over from the desktop version. So you can start on your computer and type in the bulk of the data, and then move over to the iPad and vice versa.
Next year, you should be able to import data from previous years. And who knows, with the new cameras in the iPad 2, maybe you will be able to simply take a picture of all your tax forms like you can with SnapTax for the iPhone (which only works with W-2s for now, but that’s a start).
I hate being on hold on the phone. I always feel obligated to keep my hand on my phone, and I have a chronic fear that I’ll finally make it off hold the second I put my phone down.
Well, it looks like there’s an online service that will finally assuage those fears called Fastcustomer. It’s ridiculously simple — a user just visits the website, types in a company and types in their phone number. After a few minutes, which they would otherwise spend on hold listening to bad elevator music, the user will get a call that will put them on-line with the customer service representative immediately.
The company also has an iPhone application that does about the same thing with a different interface. The application has a list of companies that the user can select. They tap the company and can then close the application and wait for the call to come. The application landed on the Apple App Store late last month. An Android application is on the way as soon as the company finds an Android developer, according to a post on Y Combinator’s news aggregator Hacker News.
The service on the website is free to use. The company said it has been on hold for more than 15,000 minutes, “because WE LOVES HOLDING,” according to its website. It uses Twilio, a telephony application programming interface (API) that gives developers a way to interact with dial tones and phone functions through programs.
The average person is typically on hold for more than 50 hours each year trying to resolve any number of problems, according to the company. That number seems a bit high, but I know I’ve felt at least a touch of rage listening to that infuriating elevator music.
The service is similar to Knockknock, a company funded by Dave McClure’s Twilio Startup Fund. But Knockknock users have to call into the service and record the name of the company and the department they want to get in touch with, rather than using an online form or an application. Knockknock is still in private beta, as well.
It does seem like a service like this is ripe for abuse — such as some bored kid on the Internet getting companies to call random people. So far, the company doesn’t have any plans to counteract that abuse — the team wants to see how the problem evolves and how to handle it in the future, they said in a post on Hacker News. But Fastcustomer is definitely something I plan on using the next time I have to get in touch with a customer service rep. Even if it is just to play a few extra minutes of Minecraft or a game on my Nintendo DS.
DEMO Fall 2010 alumnus Bump.com, a social network that links people through their car license plates, has raised more than $1 million in its second round of funding, VentureBeat has learned.
As the DEMO Spring 2011 conference wraps up, Bump.com’s funding news demonstrates how the event, which VentureBeat coproduces with tech publisher, IDG, often sees graduates move on to greater and greater business success.
CEO Mitch Thrower wouldn’t disclose exactly how much the company raised in its Series B-1 funding round, but said the round was oversubscribed — meaning there was more offers for funding than Bump.com was willing to take from investors. The round was closed in a little more than two weeks, Thrower said. (The service is not to be confused with Bump, a content-sharing application for the iPhone.)
Bump.com users take a picture of a license plate and pass a message along through the Bump.com application. If the driver of the other car has registered their license plate with Bump.com, he or she will receive a text message or an email message. They can decide from there whether they want to respond. Drivers spend more than five years in their cars honking at each other when they could be actually communicating with each other, Thrower said.
There are a lot of applications outside of the social networking aspect as well. There are billboards in Los Angeles that track more than 250,000 license plates every day. The company is also setting up shop at the Coachella music festival in April — where it will track license plates as they enter the music festival and deliver discounts to songs played by bands at Coachella.
That’s a lot of license plates and data. So the company works on Amazon’s AWS cloud servers instead of running the service on in-house servers. The company makes money by supplying users with a subscription similar to AAA — it includes free towing and discounts to some other companies. Around 7 to 10 percent of users that claim their license plate on Bump.com end up converting to paid users, Thrower said.
Bump.com also partners with other companies to help deliver better advertising data. Partners, for example, might ask how many motorcycle riders pass through a part of the freeway in a given part of the day — and Bump.com can deliver that kind of information.
The actual site is launching a closed beta at the South by Southwest music festival in Texas later this month. Bump.com has raised $1.1 million from an initial funding round led by angels and money from the founders and employees. Bump.com was founded in 2009. The company’s first round of funding, which closed before it presented at the DEMO Fall 2010 conference, was also oversubscribed.
Wireless consultant Chetan Sharma has just released an updated report on U.S. mobile data for the last quarter of 2010, and it points to the growth in the wireless market, in mobile penetration and in data usage. According to Sharma, the U.S. wireless data market grew 5% from the third quarter of 2010 and was up 23% from 2009 For the entire year, revenues were $55 billion, a figure that Sharma predicts will increase to $67 billion by the end of 2011.
As Sharma observes, the mobile market crossed a number of important thresholds in the last quarter of 2010. Mobile subscriptions crossed the 100% penetration mark, for example. And smartphone shipments exceeded PC shipments for the first time.
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But it’s important to note that these new mobile subscriptions aren’t all phones. In fact, the shape of the subscription market is changing quite dramatically, with connected devices outpacing the growth of paid and prepaid subscriptions quite dramatically. Connected devices – tablets, e-readers, and so on – are now 7% of subscriptions. That category isn’t simply the fastest growing; Sharma also predicts that this will soon become the most profitable. By the end of this year, connected devices will command double digit market share.
Sharma contends that multi-device data pricing plans will be an important key for success of this segment, as Wi-Fi isn’t always practical or dependable. He argues that operators who start to bundle devices under a single data plan will likely do well – an observation that coincides with AT&T's announcement today that it will start selling the Kindle through its stores.
This continued growth in connected devices is clearly important to AT&T, which now has to compete with Verizon for iPhone customers. According to Sharma, connected devices are now 10% of AT&T's subscription base. AT&T has edged ahead of Verizon in terms of the number of connected devices, but for both providers – for all providers in fact – the key will not simply be wooing subscribers but finding a way to adjust billing to keep pace with U.S. consumers' ever-increasing mobile data consumption.
Kazi Islam describes his job as “implementing the future”. He is the CEO of Grameen IT which runs the IT services of Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s biggest mobile carrier. Islam grew up in the U.S. become returning to his home country. ”I lived in the future. I went back into the past. My job is to implement the future” he says. Islam is convinced that emerging countries like Bangladesh will determine which technologies survive and dominate in that future. I talked to him about how technology has transformed his country and why tech companies need to pay attention.
Grameenphone is a billion dollar business in a country where the average revenue per subscriber is 1 or 2 dollars. One of company’s first innovations was the Village Phone scheme, established at a time when a mobile handset still cost $1000. The program gave villagers access to micro credit to buy a mobile phone that could then be rented out to other villagers. Islam told me that 10 years on Village Phone has become a victim of its own success as handsets and minutes dropped in price. Now you can buy a handset for 10 dollars.
“The village phone concept completely changed a nation through a technology. The measuring stick is how many people are using mobile phones today. 12, 15 years ago if you were telling me that 60 million people (in Bangladesh) would have a mobile phone, people would just laugh at you.” he explains.
GrameenPhone now provides a range of services which go way beyond the traditional scope of a mobile carrier. One of the most popular is BillPay. Paying a utility bill in Bangladesh, and many emerging companies, is an arduous business involving hours of queueing to pay the bill and then queueing again to confirm that the money was received by the utility.
BillPay allows instant payment via mobile. Islam told me that a surprising side effect is that “people are voluntarily going and paying. Before people would put it off. From the government side their revenue went up significantly.”
Buying a train ticket used to take a whole day. Now 50 percent of all train tickets are sold through mobile services and a huge number of tickets can be sold in a matter of hours. Grameenphone also provides a hotline where farmers can get advice on problems with their crops. “60 percent of our employment is agri-based. If your crop is infected, for example, you have no way of finding out what is really happening. You can make a phone call and describe. You can take a photo on a mobile phone and send it in an MMS”.
Mobile healthcare is also an important focus, in a country where 390 out of 1000 women die due to complications in childbirth and access to basic health information is limited. “On average our very optimistic number is that we live to be around 62 years. That means compared to the U.S. we live 10 years less. A significant part of that is because their mother was not healthy and their birth was not perfect. So we start with birth.”
I queried Islam on the biggest misunderstanding on how new technology is used in emerging markets. “The biggest misconception is that there is no business opportunity. In my mind that misconception comes from laziness.” He also thinks that making fast money should not be the first priority of an entrepreneur. In his opinion, this is one of the reasons that most startups focus on the US and European markets. “Worry about people first. Whatever technology you build if it is people-focused and ultimately people embrace it, you are going to make a decent living” he insists.
Islam also condemns technology companies for not taking the emerging countries, home of half of the world’s population, into consideration when designing new products.
“In none of them you will see a criterion which says that this particular product has to be applicable to emerging countries,” he says. “If you forced innovators to think about this the world would be different. That particular tick box is missing. If companies are still not thinking about emerging markets and emerging market populations, they are committing two big crimes. One is to themselves; they are missing out on the financial opportunity. They are also depriving these people of the benefit of this technology.”
When I asked Islam about the technology sectors in which emerging countries will lead his answer was emphatic: “Everything”. While developed countries have made huge investments in infrastructure like fixed line telephony, emerging markets are an open field. “In Bangladesh there are less than 250,000 fixed line phones but there are 66 million mobile phones. Emerging markets will dominate in line of what innovations succeed in the future. Mobile is a big example of it”. Bangladesh also has one of the largest deployment of individual solar home systems covering 300,000 rural homes. How is this possible when people are only making a dollar a day? According to Islam, entrepreneurs have developed new business models as well as technology to sell to this market.
One technology which Islam predicts will create an explosion of new business is mobile finance. Bangladesh is a cash-based economy where very few people have bank accounts. “The moment you solve the mobile financial part of it, your service industry is going to explode since the service providers can collect the money.” Grameenphone is planning to introduce P2P mobile payments and other financial services.
“If you look at Bangladesh, 10 years ago our per capita income was 200$. Today our per capita income is around $900. Can you imagine in the US people’s per capita income going up by 500 percent in 10 years? It is happening because of technology” Islam concludes.
I hate being on hold on the phone. I always feel obligated to keep my hand on my phone, and I have a chronic fear that I’ll finally make it off hold the second I put my phone down.
The service is similar to 
Wireless consultant Chetan Sharma has just released an updated 
GrameenPhone now provides a range of services which go way beyond the traditional scope of a mobile carrier. One of the most popular is BillPay. Paying a utility bill in Bangladesh, and many emerging companies, is an arduous business involving hours of queueing to pay the bill and then queueing again to confirm that the money was received by the utility.
Islam also condemns technology companies for not taking the emerging countries, home of half of the world’s population, into consideration when designing new products.