Technology

Online Banking

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There was a brief mention on Marketplace today of the increasing numbers of folks using various online banking services. I frequently check my account balances and move funds between accounts. It is very handy.
There are some things I do not do. For instance, I do not use the online bill payer service. Sure, it is very easy to use. Certainly much easier then the telephone based bill paying service that I tried out 20 years ago and much easier than a version on online bill paying I tried 10 or so years ago.
The reason I do not use it is simple. It is not as reliable and timely at getting my payment posted to the account of my creditor as putting a check in the mail. That is to say that the banks, at least my bank, are not making use of the technology at hand to provide the service. It should be trivial to mail the check or, best, post to my creditor’s account within one day.
My bank offers approximately 4-5 day service which includes the possibility that they won’t even mail a check for 4-5 days. Until they fix this I’ll keep buying stamps.

It’s Already There!

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I suspect that SK Bubba doesn’t really mean this post title: To Much Technology. Here’s the post:

I was just wondering where the heck a package was that was supposed to be delivered today. I called the company and got a tracking number and looked it up on the Internet. The carrier said it had been delivered to my door. I looked on the porch and sure enough, there it was. How pathetic is that?
I had a similar experience this morning. Vendor sends email that says the package they sent yesterday has been delivered. A couple minutes later the shipping clerk is carrying the package through my door.
What a wonderful example of a productivity improvement brought on by enough technology.
Not that many years ago when I purchased (business or personal) or shipped something (business) there was no such thing as a tracking number. Some of you will remember the numerous phone calls that would go back and forth between folks that went something like:
Buyer: My #$%$ package isn’t here yet!
Seller: But we shipped it yesterday….
Repeated many times.
Today tracking numbers are common. Business use is nearly universal and most online retailers include a tracking number in an email as part of their service process. And today’s conversation is most often with a computer database that tells one exactly where the package is…right now. It’s easier, less confrontational and I even have a sense that deliveries are on time more often as well.
There is a lot of people time that had been involved with tracking packages that has now been outsourced to technology and not to India or China.
Seems a good thing to me. And likely to get even better as the related technology becomes more pervasive.

Baseball Blogging

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Every baseball team owner in the country should jump on the idea of adding WiFi access to their stadiums like the Giants:

SBC asked what technology initiatives we were looking at, and a natural confluence was the Wi-Fi. It was a no-brainer, because the ROI issue went out the window — our major sponsor wanted to install this for us.

Yea, their sponsor paid for it but it seems like this would provide great marketing opportunities and reinvigorate the weekday afternoon game.
If you are a wired worker who spends most of your time writing, researching and exchanging email just maybe a connected afternoon at the ballpark will bring you back to the game. I’d certainly be more likely to go to more games though I’d have to give up the 2-3 magazines I usually read in the course of a baseball game (the 1/year I currently go to).
This probably won’t catch on at football games as there are so few of them at a particular venue though there are plenty of breaks in the action. The idea probably wouldn’t work that well for soccer or basketball where the action is fairly constant. Well, except for the televised basketball games (especially the NCAAs) that are ruined by the repeated long commercial time outs.
Via Ernie the Attorney.

Office Alternative

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Zombyboy has been using OpenOffice and finds it to be a good alternative to M$ Office. From his review:

If you are a hardcore user of all of Office’s applications and functionality, it’s probably worth the money. For the rest of us, the low cost should make OpenOffice an obvious choice, even given the large download.

I do not currently use OpenOffice but have in the past and concur with Zombyboy’s review. If I were getting a new home PC I think it would be a good fit and it would be just fine for my small business as well.
Update (3/29): I should probably have rechecked at least the spreadsheet module before joining in the above recommendation. Please read Jim Henley’s comment.