Personal Blog of Atul Patel

When opening a new TD Ameritrade account, I was asked to choose four security questions and provide the answers to them. I don’t even know the answers to 98% of them. You better go study up on your elementary school yearbooks before opening an account somewhere! And, I think for one of the questions — “As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?” — I recall wanting to be an astronaut, a firefighter, a scientist, a bug catcher, Bill Gates or a founder of Google, and filthy rich.

It will be interesting to see how security technology will improve on the Internet. Because, this is absurd.

• What is the last name of your favorite athlete?
• What is the last name of your best friend from high school?
• What is the last name of the maid of honor at your wedding?
• What is your oldest child’s nickname?
• What is the last name of your favorite author?
• What is your dream job?
• What is your favorite charity?
• What was the first name of your first girlfriend/boyfriend?
• What school did you attend for sixth grade?
• What is your spouse’s nickname?
• What is/was the name of your first pet?
• What is the first name of your oldest niece or nephew?
• What was your favorite place to visit as a child?
• What was your favorite book as a child?
• What is the last name of your favorite actor?
• What is the first name of the person with whom you attended your Senior Prom?
• What is the last name of the best man at your wedding?
• Where was the company Christmas party held in 2005?
• Who is your favorite cartoon character?
• What was the first name of your first grade teacher?
• What is your favorite TV show of all time?
• What is your favorite hobby?
• What is your favorite sports team’s mascot?
• Where did you first meet your spouse?
• What was the first name of your first roommate?
• What is the first name of your favorite musician?
• What is your favorite holiday side dish?
• What is the first name of your favorite aunt?
• What is the name of the school where you went to kindergarten?
• What was the first name of your first manager/boss?
• What is your dream car?
• What is your favorite movie?
• What is the last name of your favorite teacher?
• Where did you go on your honeymoon?
• What is the first name of your best childhood friend?
• What is the first name of your favorite actress?
• What is your favorite dessert?
• Who is your favorite fictional character?
• As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
• What is your favorite store?

It’s been a while since I envisioned a simpler web site for consumers to identify the best checking, savings, and money market rates at local, national, and online financial institutions. Back when my brother sent me a link to join ING Direct, years ago, I wasn’t really that bullish about online savings accounts. After working with lead generation in the financial services space, I could see that most of the industry was focused heavily on informing or selling consumers on debt-related products, such as mortgage loans, auto loans, home equity lines of credit, and debt consolidation.

Even vertical portals, namely BankRate, made finding information difficult because their portals were filled with editorial content and they made most of their revenue from how many banner ads you saw. You’d have to click “6 Month CD”, then “California”, then “Orange County”, then “Anaheim”, then “Top 100″ — 5 pages for a piece of information! It’s akin to surfing through mounds of information on Orbitz and Expedia to book an airline flight. Just give me the damn info! Farecast (acquired by Microsoft for ~$100mm) and Kayak.com, have done a great job simplifying the process.

BankAround.com was started with the vision to simplify finding the best place to save money outside the stock market (in 2008, a rough place to invest), and real estate (in 2008, who wants to go into this). BankAround profiles checking, savings, and money market rates, and allows users to search with a simple interface. James Chheng, the co-founder of BankAround, is really behind making it all happen! James is also a veteran of the online lead generation and financial services spaces. We’re constantly improving the site and plan to add more features in the near future, including bank profiles, faq’s, help and tutorials, rate alerts, more banking data, calculators, and the like. We are hungry for feedback, so please let us know your thoughts at feedback@bankaround.com.

The banking industry is going through a major transformation because of the credit crisis. The Indymac closure last week and Wamu’s stock plunge, are examples of the turmoil that is concerning consumers who are simply worried they will loose their deposits. While the brand names are a good place to bank (I bank at Wamu), if you can find a local credit union or thrift that provides you similar rates, why not go local. Just like you wouldn’t book a flight on an airline or airplane that was in the news for a major malfunction, you should be careful how you bank.

To top things off, American’s need to start to save more. Check out some of these stats:

• Only 53 percent of Americans say that they save at least 5% of their income, while only 57 percent of those not retired say they are saving enough for a retirement with a “desirable standard of living”.  (source: Consumer Federation of America)
• More than $1 trillion is currently stashed in bank accounts that pay 1 percent or less (source: Washington Post)
• Between 2001 and 2004, the share of U.S. households that had savings accounts dropped 8.1 percent, to 47 percent (source: Federal Reserve)

We can definitely do better!  Check out www.bankaround.com.

Add our widget to your site today.

Now that I’m reading The Four Hour Work Week, I’ve been in the mode of increasing the efficiency of my day-to-day life. My current focus is managing receipts.  While shopping this weekend, I asked cashiers at various retailers, such as Macy’s and Barnes & Nobles, if they would accept a receipt that was printed after being scanned, for a return and such.  While their only concern was that they couldn’t scan the bar-code of the receipt, they did not have any issues with the idea.

I also checked with the IRS to see if they would be okay with receipts that were electronically stored.  Luckily, based on Rev Proc 97-22, I can store an electronic copy of the receipt and it even “permits the destruction of the original hard copy books”.

I went on to purchase a NeatReceipts Receipts Scanner from Costco which allows you to scan receipts, business cards and other document.  Although the hardware is most of what you see, the product’s main pitch is its software that can parse through a scanned receipt and gather the merchant, category of purchase, sales tax, total, and payment method.  I think it worked great, but I was hoping it would parse through individual transactions.

I decided to search for a simple portable scanner, and guess what I found out?  Genius sells the same scanner as NeatReceipts.  At $80 (at Buy.com), the Genius SF600 scanner has all the components I unpacked from the NeatReceipts box.  I imagine that Genius is the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) of the NeatReceipts scanner.

So, basically, NeatReceipts values its software at roughly $100 — its retail price of $179.99 less the scanner’s OEM retail price of $79.99.  Of course, NeatReceipts purchased the scanners at a massive volume rate.  If, let’s say, the volume rate is $40/scanner, NeatReceipts values their software at $140!  Although it is brilliant marketing, I wouldn’t say the same about the software.  The software is a heavy load on my computer, has a rather ugly UI, difficult UX, and has a wannabe integration into Quicken.  You can’t sync transactions between Quicken and NeatReceipts, making it difficult to reconcile the receipts with the Quicken transactions automatically downloaded from the credit card’s web sites.  It has business card OCR, which is a great bonus, but I’ll just find something else for that.  Finally, it’s a bit strange that Genius claims that the scanner is only USB 1.1, while NeatReceipts states USB 2.0 compatibility.  Hmmm.

That said, I’m returning my NeatReceipts, buying the OEM’s scanner, and simply using Quicken — my personal finance software — to scan the receipt for the respective transactions.  Who cares that I don’t get a separate sales tax entry?  I already get the merchant, date, category, total, and credit card.

It’s not that large of a saving between NeatReceipts and the scanner, but I just don’t feel the value of the software is at the price it is being sold.  However, I would recommend giving NeatReceipts a shot.  I’m obviously over-thinking it.

UPDATE 7/15/2008 – I received my new Genius scanner from Buy.com and I’m up and running! Scanning directly into Quicken works like a charm.

Today, I was searching for “Cancun vacation homes” on Google, but then switched my search to just “vacation homes“.  What was very interesting is that although my second search excluded the word “Cancun”, the Sponsored Links on the right still showed Cancun-related vacation homes, as though the search terms persisted to my next search.

I sometimes loath how Google makes it difficult for entrepreneurs.  If you have an idea for Internet technology, Google has either launched something similar or has it planned.  But, how can you blame a company that uses common sense in a lot of what they do?  Maybe it is because they have enough capital to hire enough resources to think of all these things, or it is simply because they hire smart people.  Most of what they do, however, seems obvious.  I admit that something does seem obvious after you see it, but there are things I would do in my products if I only had the time and resources — not necessarily the PhD’s.

For example, if you perform the second search I mentioned above in a different browser, you’ll notice a completely separate set of Sponsored Links.  Why wouldn’t Google use IP address, which is cross-browser, to build the same context as you would searching in the same browser?  You can argue that IP addresses may be cross-computer, and therefore searches may not have the same meaning to a husband and a wife and their children, let’s say.  However, if someone’s searching for “Cancun vacation homes” on one computer, isn’t there enough to assume that another computer behind the IP address, albiet another computer, is searching for something similar when they search “vacation homes”?  What if the IP address was shared?  Well, it’s only a matter of time and resources for Google to utilize cookies and individuals logging into their Google accounts to decipher how many computers are behind a specific IP address.  If there was 20 people behind an IP address, like at a startup, wouldn’t there be some relevance between certain types of searches made by all its employees?

Anyway, I’m rambling.  But there are so many ways to improve things with common sense, and in Google’s case, with mounds of data.  You can’t fight Google’s ability to create great, common-sense products, like the Google Maps My Location (GPS without GPS).  (By the way, Cyril at Navizon already had launched this offering months ago, and this is an example of Google’s ability to make a young startup with grand ideas irrelevant.)

At two of my startups, Vidshadow and ThirdPop, we know what is obvious, what is needed in the market, what will crush the competition.  But it’s all about time and resources (money).  Wouldn’t it be nice to have Google’s bank roll.

I’m finally checking back in, and hopefully blogging again more frequently. That means, of course, more frequently than once in 9 months. I’ve been busy with several projects, and have been learning a tremendous amount about advertising and monetization across all the mediums — Internet, video, and mobile. Here’s a quick snapshot of all the projects I’ve been working on:

I’m finally checking back in, and hopefully blogging again more frequently. That means, of course, more frequently than once in 9 months. I’ve been busy with several projects, and have been learning a tremendous amount about advertising and monetization across all the mediums — Internet, video, and mobile. Here’s a quick snapshot of all the projects I’ve been working on:

ThirdPop – SMS Ad Network
Vidshadow – Digital Video Platform
CPM Advisors – Display Ad Network
BankAround – Online Banking Comparison
LoanGenie – Mortgage Lending Automation
InsideUp – B2B Lead Generation
And a few others…

Today we will hear about Facebook’s new ad network, SocialAds, which will one-up behavioral targeting by utilizing data supplied by its users to target advertising. Given the FTC claims that the Internet advertising industry does not have the capacity to self-regulate itself with regard to privacy, what will they think about a company led by a 23-year-old CEO. And then there’s the conspiracy theory in the video below. Let’s not forget that MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is popularly known to have conservative views. Maybe this video is just picking on Facebook. (Clearly it’s a bit of a stretch to assume these connections are part of a bigger plan.)

Alas, do-no-evil-Google comes to the rescue of the consumer to help us understand that searching on their portal is privacy-friendly. In the past, Google has publicly refused to share search data with the government, while others cooperate with the government. The subpoena would have helped solve crimes but would set a precedent. I didn’t follow that much after the media hype in early 2006. See the video below to get the Google warm and fuzzies.

I get a feeling Michael Moore is producing a movie on consumer privacy. I came across this video when reading two valleywag posts, here and here. This post does not represent my political views in any way, but are mere observations.

I still do not know what to think of the Do-Not-Track list concept presented by nine privacy organizations to the FTC today. As we browse the Internet, HTTP cookies are placed in our computers to track our actions — where we are now (current site), where were we before (sites visited), and what do we do (terms searched, articles read, ads clicked). These cookies are then read by advertising systems, such as DoubleClick and Advertising.com, to identify the best ad to show. I’ve provided detailed of this process in my previous post.

Essentially, we are all being followed, however the key difference is that this is less about security or identity theft and more about privacy — the marketing kind. The reason for this practice is to better identify which advertisements to show to us as we browse the Internet. I don’t exactly feel that this hurts. In a previous post, I’ve written about how ad serving, in general, slows my Internet experience, but I’m not against the advertising, just how long they take to load. Internet sites need to be paid for providing us content and services — bottom line.

Although this is worth a longer post than I am ready to write at the moment, but regarding this whole issue, I’ve recently been thinking about how the ads that I see aren’t relevant enough! For example, disregarding where I’ve been, you would think that a portal would know that in the area in which I live, there are fewer Spanish speaking individuals (from my observation). Yet, on occasion, I will see an ad for Terra Lycos, and if I click on it, it takes me to a Spanish landing page. This makes me appreciate behavioral targeting and even ask for more intelligence to go into the advertising engine on the Internet.

Back to the Do Not Track List. The idea behind this new DNT, follows the same evolution of the other do-not’s: Do Not Call, Do Not Solicit, and Do Not Mail (last one has been talked about, but not initiated, I think). However, I find that these are a bit more intrusive than seeing advertising on an Internet site. In fact, all these interrelated, because once my credit data is automatically mined by a computer (the Solicit part), I receive calls and mail! In any case, I find it hard to believe that

This initiative may be a far cry, especially because it involves browsers to incorporate new technologies and for consumers to be aware of them. It’ll be interesting to watch how this turns out, but I also see some interesting opportunities.

My next post will be regarding the new concepts around the Do Not Track list. To help some make sense of the meaning behind Internet tracking and behavioral targeting, I help explain it below. For a lot of people, this stuff is common knowledge. For the others, if you want to see it n action, follow these steps:

1) Clear your browser’s cookies. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Delete Browsing History… > Delete Cookies. Once I did this I had no cookies stored in my folder.

2) For this example, we’ll visit a mobile company’s site. Go to T-Mobile’s site at www.tmobile.com.

3) Now go to your Cookies folder. In Windows, this is found in your personal folder (XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<you>, Vista C:\Users\<you>). You’ll notice that there are a bunch of new cookies in your folder, from many ad networks. In this case, they were: YieldManager, TrafficMP, T-Mobile, RealMedia, AdRevolver, FastClick, Edge.ru4, DoubleClick, Atdmt, Advertising, SpecificClick, YieldManager.

4) Take a look inside one of those cookies (click-twice). What you see will have no meaning to you, but it’s worth a look. The AdRevolver cookie had the following in it. AdRevolver is an engine of BlueLithium.

freq
1193877518778+0-0+0
media.adrevolver.com/adrevolver/
2147484672
2741635456
29965039
2276626960
29891615
*
uid
9481629314759516
*

5) Now, the fun part. I know that MingleNow uses BlueLithium, a premier behavioral targeting ad network recently acquired by Yahoo, to show me the most appropriate ad. So let’s visit www.minglenow.com. Scroll to the bottom of the home page, and look on the left. You’ll most likely see a T-Mobile ad!

Also, check your cookie folder, and you’ll see three new cookies: MingleNow, QuestionMarket, and AdRevolver again.

This explains how cookies are placed onto your computer and later read to track your online activity.

After listening to John Doerr’s TED presentation, my mind started to think “green” thoughts. Along with the lights on at the local corporate building and the amount of plastic bags used to pack your groceries, it’s time to look inside the home. CNN published a story on the amount of power used by devices in “standby mode”, adapters that are in the outlet but not connected to a device, even microwaves with their tiny, fairly useless, digital clocks. The article states that “about 40 percent of the electricity being used to power your home electronics is consumed while they are in that standby mode.”

The article is worth some attention. I’m going to evaluate my home as well. As the article states, “If one in 10 American homes used only appliances endorsed through the program, the Energy Department estimates, it would reduce U.S. carbon emissions by the same amount as planting 1.7 million acres of trees.“

I was chatting with my father today and he’s been watching the news about Microsoft’s $240M (1.6%) stake in Facebook. My father has taught me a lot, and he is well in-tuned with the big businesses he invests in, among them Costco, Best Buy, Boeing, and, important to this news, Microsoft. He’s had a taste of social networking. My brother had worked at eUniverse where MySpace was initially incubated. A few weeks ago, he saw my LinkedIn blog badge and asked, if he should create a profile — which would read: Arun Patel, Boeing and Rockwell, 20 years. I figured, there’s probably no point.

The discussion is a perfect example of how things are moving at such a rapid pace, and I’ll admit that even at my age I’m loosing track. We see the hype in our little world, while others don’t even know what it is! There is a good article to read on the effects of Moore’s Law, The Law of Accelerating Returns.

(16:26:26) arunpatel: Microsoft to take $240 million stake in Facebook
(16:26:37) Atul Patel: yup
(16:26:40) Atul Patel: $15B valuation
(16:26:47) Atul Patel: 4-year-old company
(16:26:51) Atul Patel: 23-year-old CEO
(16:27:00) arunpatel: was that eUniverse
(16:27:15) Atul Patel: no, eUniverse was myspace
(16:27:43) arunpatel: what is Facebook?

This is very telling about Facebook’s (over)valuation of $15B.