• Ten One Designer’s Blog – This will open up some really interesting possibilities for the iPad
• Communities Dominate Brands: Full Analysis of iPhone Economics – it is bad news. And then it gets worse – A brave look at the real economics behind the AppStore

• Panic Blog » Coda Notes: a Safari Extension – This Safari extension sounds amazing, can't wait
• All things spatial: Law of “exponentialism” of online advertising revenue and online business value – An interesting look at how to peg the value per user per month to your site, in terms of advertising revenue

• Kyle Conroy’s Personal Blog and Portfolio – Should I have bought that Apple Product? – Jeez, be a darn sight better than having all those old iphones lying around
• Academia and the decline of wealth in America – Jacob – This article proposes that we (W. Europe and N. America) have less buying power than our parents and explores some of the historic reasons why that may be the case – interesting reading

• The Technium: 1,000 True Fans – A very inspiring piece that suggests that artists and small businesses creating their own products actually only need about 1000 true fans to generate a decent revenue
• Mac & the iPad – Another really interesting and inspiring article about Steve Jobs, it gives an insight into his design process

• Khan Academy – An amazing collection of 1200+ videos on anything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance
• JWB’s blog: Joel on Software – a summary: 2000 – Joel's blog is required reading for anyone in the tech sector – here's a nice slice to pique your interest

• Rare Steve Jobs videos now online – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech – Fascinating set of video interviews with Steve Jobs from 2003-4, interesting to hear his views on what would become iPhone and now iPad
• Kickstarter – Wow this is interesting, could be a run for the money for our VC friends

• Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? – This article argues fairly convincingly that techies can seriously benefit from doing an MBA
• Yankee Group Blog » Blog Archive » Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion – After 34 years of practice, Apple has mastered the art of making a successful tech device
• http://www.sandia.gov/~sjplimp/mapreduce.html – The open source implementation of MapReduce, got a few spare machines lying around?

I’ve been a First Direct customer for around 10 years and while their service is better than average, their standards for quality are like many other banking sites, massively below average consumer sites and therefore falling way short of customer expectations.

Let’s take the example of bank email.  Ever since I first became a customer of First Direct their concept of email consisted of the  following 2 features:

• a flashing link on your accounts screen that would tell you if you had a new message
• the ability to click on the link, then you would be able to view the message ONE TIME ONLY

So if you ever wanted to track conversations with the bank (remember they don’t allow you to use regular email for security reasons) it was impossible.  Also impossible was seeing any message for a second time, so you’d better be sure that you dealt with all aspects of the message the ONE time you decided to click on it, because it would be lost to oblivion as far as the customer was concerned any time after you clicked on the ‘view email’ link.

Fast forward to the present: a few month ago First Direct finally allocated resources to make the email work in a slightly more user-friendly way.  Now you get an inbox, an outbox, and you can click more than once on each of your messages  - LO  AND BEHOLD! Web banking in 2010

But wait, check out the grab below, it seems the FD team  decided to use some kind of token in the message body, apparently to help them format message – but it seems its not always getting parsed!

I don’t know about you but when I see things like “Dear {firstname}” I am reminded of only the most incompetent, newbie spammers who learned about the Internet and Email yesterday.  How is it a multi-million pound banking goliath can make the same mistake?