Which is why I was interested in BankSimple, a web-only banking service that is promising to disrupt banking with a new look, a new approach and a new perspective on what banking should be. The company released the video below to demonstrate their vision for the product.

I have to say I was a little disappointed watching the video, while there are some novel features (safe to spend as a better notion than bank balance for example) I really wanted to see something more truly disruptive. BankSimple seems to me much more of a “lipstick on a pig” approach. Banking is completely broken so a new UI and some added functionality enables BankSimple to differentiate from traditional banks.

BankSimple CEO Joshua Reich nods his head to this fact when he says that they are;

focusing on the basics of User Experience design, typography and making it easy to leverage feedback loops with your purchasing data

That’s a great and noble approach, and one that should be applauded if it was being taken by the internet banking development team internally at an existing bank. But for a service that is setting out from the get go to do things differently, it falls very short of what I’d like to see. Interestingly, in a previous interview Reich said that many of his competitors are thinking about remaking banking only as deep as a thin layer of visual interface, it appears to me that the regulatory and logistic barriers of truly making a fundamental change to banking have proven sufficiently hard that BankSimple has joined the “slap a new UI on it and call it disruptive” approach.

Yes the use of meta data and integration with geolocation is pretty cool and eminently useful, but even cooler would be exposing that data so third party developers could build out magical experiences that do stuff we can only dream about today.

I don’t want to be too harsh, it’s great to see BankSimple going out and rethinking banking user experience, but I’d urge them to really look beyond that to genuinely rethinking the basis for banking – that’s when Banking 2.0 might really happen.

Ganoutsos tells the story of buying a ticket to use the ski area, and being assigned a re-usable plastic pass for not only that skifield, but all the fields owned by NZski.com.

Instead f just  dumb plastic ID card however, this card contained an RFID which works as a gate pass for the various chairlfitf and T-bars around the skifield. So far so good, and nothing hugely revolutionary (although way more efficient than previous systems it must be said). But here is where it gets interesting.

At each ski lift, the lift attendant had an iPad upon which the photo of the person assigned to the particular RFID would come up as they swiped their card. A nice quick way for attendants to ensure there was no scurrilous sharing of passes going on between people.

On top of this there are kiosks positioned in various locations where skiers can buy their own day passes that are added to their cards – no more having to find somewhere to attach a printed day pass on a ski jacket. Skiers can also buy passes online – in the comfort of their own home as they say, resulting in significantly shorter wait times for those needing to use a manual ticket attendant.

Finally, in something of a coupe de grace, and with a nod to the gamification of everything, NZski is utilizing the information that it gleans from skiers wiping their cards to collect ski data for each pass holder. From a web UI, members can see data including the number of meters descended and how many individual runs the skier had done that day. This data is also compared on a “leader board” whereby members can rate themselves against everyone else for the day, week, season etc.

The NZski case study is an awesome look at how mobile devices, ubiquitous internet connectivity and novel data capture methods all tied together in the cloud, is driving changes for real people doing everyday things. Nice.

Nimbula Director abstracts the underlying technology to present a coherent view of a completely automated compute and storage cloud. Providing a one-stop virtual data center management solution, Nimbula Director isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexity associated with deploying a private or public cloud.

It’s fair to say that Nimbula have been a little out of the limelight recently, the high profile acquisition of cloud.com by Citrix diverted much of the attention in this space away from them. Meanwhile Nimbula continues to develop their product, as evidenced by today’s announcement.

First some background to the announcement, while much of the discussion around public/private cloud has been on the rationale for private cloud (concerns about security, data location, control, access), the industry has quietly side stepped the issues around the real world requirement that large enterprises have for geographically distributed infrastructure. For the same reason that Amazon needs data centers in Europe (and, as an aside, they REALLY need more than one), so too do many of the larger users of private cloud need infrastructure in multiple locations.

With the launch of their Nimbula Director v1.5 product, Nimbula is now supporting a geographically dispersed cloud, from within the Director UI, a multi-site cloud can be managed from a single view – this is a logical response to the demands of customers that require infrastructure in more than one location. It’s an interesting play, third party solutions like enStratus or ServiceMesh also allow organizations to manage multiple geographically located clouds (and from multiple vendors to boot), so it’s not like this is entirely uncharted territory. When I put this to Reza Malekzadeh, VP of Marketing at Nimbula, he admitted that there is already the potential to do this but added that;

[with a management solution like enStratus]…it will remain an overlay approach with the overlay product having to log into multiple sites with multiple underlying identities and do some higher level correlation. That is not the most efficient approach and will actually have limitations to how you can place workloads.

While I accept the purist’s perspective as espoused by Reza, it would be interesting to see how often those limitations with a third party management solution like enStratus actually cause functional issues for customers. By way of contrast I asked Citrix’s Chief Cloud Architect, Christian Reilly, what it would take to run geographically distributed clouds with their recently acquired solution Cloud.com. His answer was that it was possible, if a little rudimentary;

Each “zone” is a data center and is managed by the same mgmt server. Each zone contains pods (racks) and pods contain clusters (pools). Not federated at that point – just distributed management, but multiple zones can be geographically dispersed and managed centrally.

In terms of the reasons for building this functionality, Malekzadeh told me that;

[Nimbula is] seeing multi site customer demand, mostly from larger telcos who want to build services across their various sites. Also from larger enterprises that have a couple datacenters.

On top of the big news item, Nimbula has continued to develop the Director product, with this release they also roll out;

• Policy based automation for compute and storage delivering a simple mechanism for requesting resources of particular capabilities while also allowing cloud administrators to manage tiers of service, set asides for particular tenants and the permissions to govern access
• The ability to package up a choice of operating systems, such as RHEL6, along with drivers and management software to create a customized basis for their own cloud

In terms of pricing and availability, Nimbula Director 1.5 will be available in September 2011 as a free update for existing users. For deployments on infrastructure up to 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed free of charge. A paid support option is available for users of the free version. For deployments on infrastructure over 40 cores, Nimbula Director is licensed on an annual subscription basis and includes both maintenance and support services.

Nimbula is in an interesting space with all the attention that OpenStack is getting right now – they’ve got a super smart team though and I’m picking them to do great things going forwards.

I’m not going to load the company up with debt. If I take any form of loan I’d only take what I actually need, not a penny more

Which indicates a strong plan for short term expenditure.

I wasn’t previously aware of the funding round, but conversations I’ve had previously with KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson make much more sense now – Jackson alluded to some pretty herculean development initiatives as well as a significant beefing up of the executive team.

First onto what I know about the engineering. As I wrote about a couple of years ago – KashFlow is built on a relatively aged platform that makes life difficult when it comes to multi-user permissions and integrations. In the years since KashFlow was first built, much has occurred, especially in the world of APIs. KashFlow’s existing UI is a fairly classic approach towards interface’s and their existing API is a SOAP based.

KashFlow are therefore embarking on a significant project that will see the creation of a new REST API that will support XML and JSON, oAuth along with the aforementioned multiuser permissions. This project will occur whilst the old SOAP based API remains active – for the foreseeable future then KashFlow will be forced into supporting the old and the new API. This isn’t a fantastic position to be in and KashFlow intends to “encourage” partners to convert to the new REST based API.

Another part of the project is creating a UI that works entirely via the API. This is the predominant way applications are now being engineered and it means that anything that can be achieved via the UI is also exposed via the API – this gives lots of opportunities for third parties to built add on products (or even standalone UIs for that matter) to create a bigger KashFlow ecosystem. The new UI will be completely client side and created in HTML5 and Javascript – future proofing and enabling a bunch of functionality that HTML5 will introduce along with easy conversion for mobile devices and the like.

I expressed some concern to Jackson about the risk of “re writing” the back end business logic in this project. Jackson told me that most of the KashFlow business logic sits at the SQL server end so the logic remains in place thus de-risking that part of the project.

In terms of how they will progress the re-write, Jackson told me that;

Initially the new UI/API will only support, say, Invoices and Quotes. And once that’s done we can make it available along side the existing app so we have multi-user permissions just for those areas of functionality. Then as we add new areas, they become “permissionable” too. Eventually, when we have all the features in there it replaces the existing UI entirely.

It’s an ambitious project – but one that, once complete, should see KashFlow delivering a highly extensible accounting engine that should see a number of opportunities open up – especially in the ecosystem and white labeling areas.

The second big ticket item that KashFlow is investing in is the executive team. First up is their new COO, Simon Guest. Guest was former Operations Director at large UK based business software house, Iris. Guest exited IRIS after a 15 year history, and directly following a private equity buy-out – this extensive experience will help KashFlow bring a greater degree of maturity to its operations.

I’ve been wondering for awhile how KashFlow would remain relevant in the midst of bigger and better funded competitors. While we don’t know until KashFlow starts delivering the fruits of this work – the two projects here indicate KashFlow really upping the ante.

For the most part, an EUI doesn’t have to win over its users.  An employee is essentially trapped – they need to get their job done, and there is only one system available to execute their work.  So for business systems, we may not see poor UI reflect in adoption statistics, but the problems will show in time-to-task completion, data quality, or lack usage for non-required tasks

Which I agree with – the fact that enterprise solutions are generally decided upon from on high, leads to a degree of entrapment and the acceptance of a poor experience.

Dennis then comments that;

I’m surprised. In the SMB world, users do not tolerate poor UIs. They simply eschew the products

Which is interesting given some previous posts here about UIs and whether they really matter. The fact is that I believe that Dennis is wrong when he says that SMBs are any less trapped than enterprises – the pain to change for an SME is similar to the inability to change in an enterprise – so the bottom line is that while UIs matter, they matter most when getting folks to sign up to your offering – thereafter your UI could look like a cross between the back end of a bus and the awful face of your first grade teacher but you’d still persevere.

Don’t agree? Just have a look at the mass market around you!

The top ten were;

• Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
• CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): content management system.
• FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): photo editor.
• PRISMAprepare by Océ (Netherlands): print shop software.
• Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): hostess stand reservation book for restaurants.
• SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
• SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): synchronizing files across multiple computers.
• SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (Netherlands): creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
• Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
• Xero by Xero (New Zealand): accounting for small businesses.

The entire report can be downloaded here (for the not insignificant sum of $98). It does look like a very comprehensive report so valuable for those in the UI design field out there.