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Have you ever met anyone who loves their bank? Have you ever had a conversation with someone who said, “Hey, you got to try my bank.” Banking is one of those things we just have to deal with. I know I made accounts in the same places that my parents had their accounts so many years ago.

Lately, there have been a number of startups that have helped push some of the lackluster banking forward. There have been startup checking and savings accounts that have popped up and have really helped with different feature sets and usability issues that have plagued some services.

My financial system involves multiple accounts with different banks. Over the years, I have been able to experience a number of different systems and processes in managing money.

I want to propose some new features and additions to the experience that I think can make our banking lives easier. I will skip over things like fees and random charges because I want to focus in on things that can work for most types of accounts and setups. Smart Debits

We all have those certain charges that come out of our account every month and our paychecks that come in at certain times as well. I would love to see a smart mode that would allow me to see the upcoming debits and credits before they occur. It could be a custom mode or even just a small box in a sidebar of the website. I think it would be nice to see what is coming and prepare for certain weeks and months with some upcoming bills.

mini notification Better Notifications

Google Wallet had this amazing feature that sent you an email every time you used their debit card. This was nice for a few reasons. You were able to see all purchases and able to easily spot anything suspicious. Plus, it would certainly curtail some weird spending because who wants to get an email explaining they spent $50 on in-app purchases.

It would be nice if the notification of these transactions could be more robust, combining this with the predictive debit technology. How cool would it be to get a warning, “If you have no credits in this account in a week, you will overdraft.” Savings/Goals/Budgeting

Simple is a bank that is part of the new wave of banking. They have a feature that is unreal called Goals. This is just like an enhanced savings account that allows you set dates and amounts for each goal to save for. They will transfer X amount into the goal from your main checking to make sure you get the desired amount. It has changed how I approach my banking and totally helps me save for long term purchases.

I would love to be able to take this concept and just add a few features, like the ability to stash money away for monthly bills. Certain things like a student loan or a car payment are debited monthly, but the goal concept would be amazing to have for these items. Imagine setting that you need 300 dollars on the 27th of each month for a car payment. It would take a certain amount per day out of your checking and put it into this goal, which would empty out the amount on the 27th and restart. Automation

My goal is to try to streamline and automate all of my finances. I don’t want to ever think about it. I want to put a system in place and just check in every so often to make sure things are working.

There are some banks that are doing some interesting things like Simple, Chime, and, if you are eligible to use the product, USAA is one of the best banks in terms of its features. The one thing that I must say about these banks is that they have some many features that it is almost hard to use all of them.

Today, I spent an hour walking around my neighbor looking for Pokémon. Pokémon GO is the thing everyone is talking about. Never has an app affected human behavior at such scale. If you go outside right now, you see people walking around neighborhoods and stores on the hunt for Pokémon.

I have been reading countless articles about how sales are down for Macs. Also, how this fall’s iPhone is going to be a boring release and not crazy like they usually are every two years. We also can’t forget about how we were all heartbroken by the rumor about the headphone jack on the latest iPhone.

Lately, we have seen smartwatches and VR as some of the biggest disruptions in consumer products. Most people have been priced out of VR until the fall with the ps4 will become somewhat affordable. Smartwatches you can only get some excited about.

Pokémon GO came out around the 20th anniversary of the original games. It is the first AR product to hit the mainstream. The company behind Pokémon GO had a similar type of real world game that never got above the niche factor.

Last night I found this GIF

For any of the people who have been playing the Pokémon game, doesn’t that concept look amazing? I think we have done a lot of thinking about some concepts and applications of VR, but what about AR?

Pokémon GO is going to start a wave of some other apps borrowing a similar philosophy. There has been a lot talked about the future of VR and the products in the pipeline. But, what other applications are available for AR? The video has got the vibe of a Black Mirror episode. What would be a good way to toggle gaming on and off? Imagine if we had glasses and could check for Pokémon unprovoked without warning.

There were some questions raised when Google Glass had some buzz. It is going to be interesting to see if the HoloLens can become a product that we can have these types of experiences with. The HoloLens dev kits are slowly started to ship; you can apply now and get one for $3000. I hope that a consumer product would be considerably cheaper, but I am sure that is a few years away.

Have you ever consumed a piece of art that was so transformative that you wanted to tell the world about it?

This show showed up in my podcast feed and I had no idea what this was. I thought it was some new form of meditative podcast. The show is based off telling a story that is hidden inside some sort of mediation audio. When I first started listening to it, I was confused for the first few minutes. But, as I listened, there was something different going on. The lead vocal performance is stunning. I felt like I was transformed into another world. The vocalist manages to raise her voice at certain moments. It makes me uncomfortable and tense as hell, but the same time, the narrative feels like this is some sort of a manipulation.

Was I listening to some subliminal messages hidden within the music? Who is this person talking? Why is she telling me these things?

Within the wires is a podcast by the Welcome to Night Vale crew. I haven’t listened to many fiction podcasts, but this was one of those has made me a convert.

I spend most of my time listening to nonfiction podcasts, but this was something special. This was a true audio journey as I listened and tried to solve the puzzle and figure out the journey that we were going on.

As I wait for the next episodes, I am glad that I found this, as this was a truly inspirational piece of audio. I can’t remember the last piece of fiction that has moved me and inspired me so much. I have so many questions and I can’t wait to go on this journey.

This week’s goal was to find a company to invest in. The new law passed recently allows non-accredited investors to invest in startups through this thing called equity-based crowdfunding. There has been a couple new marketplaces that opened and a couple of new channels for this to go through because of a handful of companies that signed up to do this right away, the biggest being a music startup called 8tracks.They opened up their latest round to this equity-based formula. I also heard about a theater in San Francisco that has been using this new platform with a lot of success.

Investing in companies at this level this is something that I have always wanted to do. I would love to have some level of investment in the company. I wouldn’t want to put a lot of money into at the start. I’d like to just dip my toes in. I think that this is going to open up some really interesting possibilities in the future for people raising money and for a different level of kind of connection to the product.

I think opening up this level of investment, people think you’re going to have this kind of kinship with the product. You have early adopters that already had this bond to the products. They are the naturally the next best well to tap. They are already brand ambassadors.

8tracks is a good example because they have a solid user base. I’m willing to drop a small amount, $500-$2,000 on a product that I believe in and want to support. We do it for things on kickstarter at least this gives you more in the game.

There’s definitely products that I have used in the past that I would love to have invested in. Plus, in a way it ties you into the success about the product or services.

If you were a customer and an investor, wouldn’t you tell everyone about it and try to recruit more people.

If you are looking for some companies that are opened up to this type of funding, you can find them at [https://www.seedinvest.com/] and [https://wefunder.com/].

Next time, you are at a restaurant, I want you notice how long it takes you from finishing your meal and everyone deciding it’s time to go to actually leaving the restaurant. It might not seem like a ton of time. But, make an observation about it. You don’t have to get your stop watch out, just watch the process. The Problem

I was just at a restaurant last week. The service was lovely and the whole experience was great. But, then we went to leave. We had to flag down a member of the staff because we wanted the check. Then we had to wait to get our credit card back. We left a tip on the little slip and we were good to go.

This is a process that has irked me. We have many card-free transactions now with Android and Apple Pay. We even have the Starbucks app, which is one of the largest active mobile payment systems.

I have been thinking of ways we could solve this problem. This is one of those things that is so highly inefficient, but is still something that people haven’t come close to solving.

Now, we have a ton of payment options. I can send friends money in a number of ways using PayPal, Google Wallet, Square Cash, and Vimeo just to name a few. Payment Options

But, in the real world, this is a much less common practice. Square Cash does have business accounts, but I don’t know where they are being used. Also, PayPal has business setup in Home Depot, but those things haven’t taken off as much as they could.

These systems could plug into existing POS systems. But, this is a topic that I know nothing about. What Can We Do?

Just image for a moment that you are sitting in a restaurant and you get your bill on the Square app. You can pay with using an Apple ID and, with just a simple button, add a tip and a note.

A lot of restaurants are very small business and hardware costs are going to be the problem. The solution will have to be something that they can integrate quickly and cheaply.

A long time ago, I read a news article about a startup, Circle, that was handing out some money for to sign up for their bitcoin wallet. Then, almost year later, I started to really get into bitcoin and the technology behind it.

There are some companies that are doing some interesting things in the space to make using and buying bitcoins really easy. The technology is becoming easier to use as more people start to use it, so software companies start forming to streamline this process.

Coinbase, Bitpay, and Circle have all done amazing jobs at making really easy to use consumer products. They are three apps that I have now used for multiple different reasons. Bitpay has a wonderful new debit card product which you can load with your bitcoins. Coinbase is an exchange service and wallet where you can store or trade your bitcoin. Circle is a cool way to send money between people. As I started to get going in the world of bitcoin, there were a few things that worried me and a few things that I learned along the way. Security

First thing you should do if you sign up for any app that involves money is use two factor authentication. You should really use it for any app that supports it. But, with any of these bitcoin apps, just turn it on. It will be worth it for the peace of mind.

When I signed up for Coinbase, I didn’t add much money into my account and I kind of forgot about it. But, when I started to really get into and start using it, I noticed something. Coinbase has a nice account page that lets you see what apps are authorized on the account. I had about 15 attempts on my account from European countries. It did spook me a little, but I was glad that I made sure that I had two step on for every type of transaction. Different Exchange Rates

The three apps that I used for my bitcoin experiments all value bitcoin at a different amount. Say I buy bitcoin and use the wallet to load my Bitpay debit card. There could be a change in that value and the wallet might have to debt more. It was something that was confusing at first until I understood that they have different values.

I even made an Android app to get the value of a bitcoin. The value is different than what Coinbase and the other use. It is something to keep in mind when you have to send money between apps and wallets.

This is going to be a short post. I’m trying to write with Google Now voice dictation. I wanted to test voice accuracy of this and to see if this would be a viable option to try to get some things down.

In the future, I think we will move more and more towards voice driving a lot of our actions and computing. Our voices allow us to have a different kind of interaction with devices and the real world.

I wanted to see if I could use my voice to dictate my thoughts and see if there was anything that I noticed about the quality of the words and how much we have to edit.

I really like the kind of concept of having something that is so easy to dictate to. It might be a cool tool to help bridge the gap for some new writers or help break through an idea you are stuck on.

I think it’s an interesting concept to be able to have something in your car that could take voicemails and texts differently, but I think with these devices coming into our homes with Alexa and Google Now, Google Assistant, whatever they’re calling it, now you have the technology.

I can’t see myself Starbucks talking to my phone, but I think it’s kind of a nice thing even just sitting in your car.

John Siwicki

I’m trying to figure out what I’m good at, what the things I should be working on, what things can I do to help me build a business, and what things should I be spending all of my time on. It gets tiring after a while

I think that the best advice that I’ve ever received was to just start doing anything. In the beginning, experiment because after a while you know all this soul-searching, all the books, all the courses, and all of the different tools are out there are trying to help you find your passion. You won’t really know unless you start doing something.

I started to get depressed because I was failing. I wasn’t doing the things other people were doing. My blog posts last week got six views. I was following all these people that were doing these incredible things, people that were achieving more, people that were doing more. These were people I admired, people that I strove to be like, and their general advice was just to work hard.

“You’ll find your passion and do what you love and that’s going to take time.”

We should have a culture that allows people to experiment more and be willing to try new things.

If you want to be a photographer, there’s a $10 book on how to take a good photo. If you want to learn about 100 years ago, there’s a 10-minute course. You already know how to draw a stick figure.

If you go by the things people put on Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, you’re just going these people and you want that freedom you, that chance to have that. It’s going to be different for everyone. I was looking for that silver bullet for so long and became really depressed for a while.

Some might think, “Oh, well, I need to be the world’s greatest coder before I can make an app.” But the best thing is to start doing it. If there’s people like that who you see and follow, people that you’ve read, unsubscribe. Stop reading them.

I always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always tried to write and enjoyed writing, but I’m never going to be the best writer. I know that. I know my shortcomings, but this is something that I enjoy doing. Am I going to make a living off it? Maybe not, but I’m okay with that. It’s going to be something that I keep as part of my life and something that I’m going to keep trying to work on. Maybe that’s as far as that goes and maybe I just keep writing code for most of my life. Maybe I am never going to have that start-up that allows me to have employees and allows me to have the mastiff in a company that I dreamed about. That’s okay. But, you need some goals. You need something special.

We need to share more and talk about the failures we have all experienced. Be honest about it.

After LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft last week, I, like many others, was wondering how this would fit into their core product line. I literally use zero Microsoft products now except for Outlook at work.

Lately, Microsoft has been doing some interesting things. They have been acquiring top notch startups like Sunrise and Wunderlist. They also have a division called “The Garage,” which releases neat experimental apps for both iOS and Android.

Microsoft is starting to get cool again. There was a time when I just didn’t want to use their products. Now that they have given up on making Windows Mobile work and are becoming a cloud services company. Microsoft is making a lot of interesting moves.

I kept thinking about interesting ways to bring LinkedIn into their productivity suite. Outlook

There is a chrome extension called Rapportive (http://rapportive.com/) that would be a natural way to extend LinkedIn inside Outlook. You can pull the LinkedIn data into your calendar app and emails to help you remember who you are meeting with and who you are talking to.
Cortona

I spent some time using Cortona over the last few days on a Windows 10 machine. I hadn’t used it for more than a few seconds before. I live in the Google ecosystem, but I wanted to see if there were any major differences between Cortona and Google Now.

It is sometimes really awkward to talk to your computer unless you are alone. But, it would be cool to be able to post an update to LinkedIn directly from Cortona or make a draft of a post from some voice notes. It would also be nice to incorporate some data for upcoming calendar events. “You are meeting with Jane Smith, CEO of Intense, Inc.” 26 Billion

LinkedIn is a huge acquisition and Microsoft must have some big strategic moves ready. I just hope that they do some upgrades to the product because lately it has been a pain in the ass to use. The notifications never end.

I have found that I must love the tools I am working with in order to really become great at anything. Once I started writing all my code in Sublime Text, it took my code to the next level.

I think the same can be said for writing. There are a number of different ways to write. Some people still like to use pen and paper, and there are about 45 different web, desktop, and mobile apps that you can use to complete your projects.

The key with writing is all about habit and setup. If you don’t like the workspace and the tools, it will be hard to work with.

I wanted to make sure that I found that zone where I did work that I was proud of and was worth sharing. I went on a search for my perfect writing solution. P/P

For a while, I experimented with writing with just a pen and a paper. It seems like an almost silly sentence to type out, but there was something great about sitting with a notebook and just writing. There was no way to get distracted or start noticing other things. It’s the ultimate moment of singularity because you can’t just go to the next tab and start looking at Twitter. I even tried to use an app to OCR my text, but that didn’t turn out well. But, the thing about writing longhand was it was always hard for me to go back and look at the old text. Handwriting was just too hard to consume and keep in a safe space. Google Docs

Google Docs is something that I have used for a number of years. It is the default word processor that I know how to use. There are a number of great features and if you are collaborating with someone to help you edit or work on a document, the experience is second to none. But, the thing about Google Docs was that it is browser based and everything was too close to me. I was distracted and I kept switching tabs. There was something about it that never really stuck with me during the process. Google Docs was the best for storage, sharing, and editing, but I need something else for crafting. Markdown

Markdown is a plain text syntax that can easily be compiled into HTML. I have played around with Markdown at my job because I had to compile a ton of Word docs into HTML. I was able to convert them really quickly by converting them into Markdown and then bringing them back into HTML. This allowed me to get up to speed with the syntax very quickly. There is something about the syntax that just clicked with me. I found myself starting to write most of my text in this manner, even emails. Apps

Ulysses was one of those Mac apps that always seems to get featured and written about. The app was pricey, but I loved the look of it as it reminded of a Sublime Text for writing. I bit the bullet and I immediately fell in love with it. The layout is a three panel system where you can expand and collapse what you need. There is also iCloud sync built in, which is something that I never trust, but you can open a folder on your dropbox and work in there. There are also plenty of syntax highlight options for your markdown and plain text. Getting Comfortable

I found a tool that made me comfortable and that worked well for my style. That is the key for me. Some people can kill it in Google Docs, but I like the options offered in Markdown and being able to make an app full screen. Workflows and tools need to be tested and discovered. If you are trying to develop a writing habit and can’t seem to get it off the ground, play around with some different tools.