Sunday, 19 August 2012

Valve New Employee Handbook

Valve's new employee handbook is a great guide on how to run a completely flat company. Includes description of their internal appraisal process for setting salaries.

http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Monday, 30 July 2012

Q Coin Currency


"QQ Messenger is the most widely used IM system on the planet despite being predominantly Chinese." It has its own currency, Q Coin. This is becoming so popular that the Chinese government considered capital controls on Q Coin to stop them reducing the value of the RMB. But these merely created scarcity and drove up the price.

Source: Brett King, Bank 2.0, p 333. Also mentioned on Wikipedia:

Prototyping a Phone System


Brett King points out that you can prototype and IVR using index cards to lay out the menu. Users can then try to complete a task while someone reads out the prompts.
This can be used to test the 'champion' current system against a 'challenger' new system.

Source: Bank 2.0 book, page 125

Monday, 18 June 2012

Facebook Makes Organ Donors

"In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states."


Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/?a=f

Thursday, 14 June 2012

7-Eleven's Vcom self-service banking


7-Eleven have Vcom ('virtual commerce') self service machines in thousands of stores in the US. These offer cash, paying in cheques and transferring money for many banks, cheques cashing, etc.

7-Eleven first began exploring the idea of expanding its financial services in 1994. It already offered some financial services, including ATMs and money orders. Its original effort, involving manned centers, generated positive results, with an incremental lift in sales at the 25 Texas locations where it was offered. However, it was too expensive to staff the centers.

7-Eleven began working with NCR in 1998 and created a kiosk that offered money orders and money transfers as well as standard ATM transactions. The original kiosks, which were an unwieldy 9 feet long, were installed in 37 stores in Austin, Texas. The two companies refined the kiosks, shrinking them to 5 feet, before adding them to another 57 locations in Texas and Florida. In July of 2001, check cashing was added.

Offered through 7-Eleven partner Certegy, check cashing has become Vcom's "killer app". By 2002, approximately 12,000 checks were cashed each month at the first 94 locations.

The key business drivers are the ATM surcharge and check cashing. The others are opportunities for incremental revenue.

Not clear what the full current range of services are - could investigate further.

Image source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/136346/7-Eleven-s-Vcom-wins-raves-at-RD
Info: Richard Watson's article in Fast Company, here
Interview in article on ATM Market place, here

Monday, 11 June 2012

Stanford's Behaviour Grid and Wizard

BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, has an interesting grid to help analyse behaviour changes you might want:

They also have an online 'Behaviour Wizard' web site to select the behaviour change you want and advise on appropriate strategies:
http://www.behaviorwizard.org

Monday, 7 May 2012

Pouchlink Vending Machine

Interesting 'greener' vending machine fills pouches with water and flavouring on demand before it vends:


Not sure whether the pouches are recyclable, though.

Source: http://www.thegreendrinkscompany.com/

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Chase bank - point, shoot, deposit

Chase bank's app lets you point your camera at a cheque to pay it in. You can tear it up after that.

Several other banks around the world seem to offer this too.

Source: Brett King and my own research on Android market

Octopus Card does banking

Octopus metro card in Hong Kong started to let people paying for purchases other than travel. The banks objected that they didn't have a banking licence. So the regulator instead of shutting them down gave them a banking licence.

Source: Brett King

UBank

Nab in Australia started a spin-off called UBank, which had completely different processes that allowed them to provide a better customer experience. For example they all their ID checks online through real-time integration with national databases (source: video I'd need to search for again). Did very well at launch (not sure how it's doing well).