memonicOfficial Blog

Much has been written about the future of newspapers. Here my humble contribution:

1. In a complex world people turn to trusted sources of information for news, analysis and comment, e.g. newspapers.
2. The unique value of a newspaper is its editorial staff (1).
3. The core competence of an editorial team is separating the relevant from the chaff and provide context. Simply put: Making sense of the world afar and close.
4. The result of journalistic work – articles, analysis and comment – is independent of the carrier medium (i.e. print, digital, spoken word, moving images).
5. An editorial team must cover a wide range of subjects to get to the heart of things and be able to provide context. Expert editorial teams on specific subjects complement a broad reporting approach.
6. A reader is interested only in a subset of topics covered; the limiting factors being time and interests. Corollary 1: A reader wants to select her topics of interest. Corollary 2: An ideal news offering is a collection of topics a reader chooses to follow. (2)
7. The reader expects each topic to be a continuously updated feed with factual reporting, analysis and comment.
8. The reader decides through which carrier medium or combination thereof she wants to receive her information.
9. The digital world is not something fundamentally new; the digital world only exacerbates this trend: In the digital world where news is abundant, the key factor is attention (Contrary to the physical world where scarcity is the limiting factor – 3).
10. There will always be people willing to pay for attention. Either pay someone for organizing a limited amount of available attention or someone pays for access to attention.

Obviously we’re working hard to make this vision happen here at Memonic. Stay tuned.

Notes:

(1) It is total nonsense to differentiate between a print and a online editorial team. It’s one news reporting organization regardless of output channel.

(2) A reader’s preferred subset is most likely not corresponding to the traditional sectioning of a newspaper in Politics (World, Home), Business, Arts, etc. Example: Reporting on the Euro crisis could be found in newspapers such as the NZZ, SZ, FAZ, Spiegel, NYT in the politics, business and feuilleton sections. The topic of interest though is euro crisis.  So why not simply offering exactly that: A follow-a-topic function allowing a reader to find everything relevant on say the euro crisis under that heading. And so it goes for every topic.

(3) In a sea of (digital) abundance it’s the attention that counts, as Michael Goldhaberpointed out in 1997. That is, in a sea of abundant ‘information’ on any event, with you having only so much attention to devote, you most likely turn to a trusted source of information for reporting and contextualization.

It’s fascinating to learn where and when our users use Memonic in their lives. Some use it merely in a private environment, e.g. to plan trips or gather new receipts, while others count on Memonic during studies at college or university to research for papers. Lastly, the usage of Memonic in an explicit business context is massively growing – and we want to accommodate to that trend.

Memonic in a business context can help you curate the information flow around your business and keep it stored centrally. It can support you in sales, so you can gather client information and have it at your hand when you need it. Furthermore it integrates in various systems that are being used worldwide, such as Wikis, CRMs and more.

Using Memonic you can easily work in a team. Clip, organize and share your notes among your peers. The dashboard will provide you with an overview of what’s going on at the moment and what’s trending.

Do you think it would enhance your work as well? Do you use Memonic already in your business environment? If so, please let us know!

If you would like to find out more about Memonic for Business, please visit this page: http://www.memonic.com/business

This post has been updated on August 11, 2011, see below.
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On this blog we talk about the tools and services we use and love. Yet sometimes a service fails you. Also our service sometimes has a hiccup. We try to correct the mistake asap and communicate with our users – We love to do customer support – and they seem to love it. This post is about how not do customer support.

If you buy a subscription to our service – thanks if you do – you will be asked to provide your payment details. Credit cards of course but also country specific payment methods such as bank collection in Germany (Bankeinzug). It’s one of those things that you don’t want to do yourself for every country. So we had to choose a payment provider last year. We chose Adyen. Big mistake.

The issue I write here about is not the first issue we had with them but the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Quite over a month ago I noticed that there were suddenly deposit corrections popping up in the settlement statements – Adyen calls the twice weekly reports “Settlement Batch Reports”. Nothing big I thought, so I looked at the batch overview page, the batch detail page and the detailed settlement report, found other inconsistencies and could simply not align the numbers.

For clarity I keep it to the report #113, the same actually holds true for other reports.

As you see in the overview the payout reads CHF 45.99.

Once I click on the batch number and get the detail page it says CHF 48.09.

Okay that’s two bucks to my detriment. Strange… but wait it gets sillier. Once you download the detailed report you are totally lost. It is for somebody outside Adyen completely intransparent how on earth they tabulate these aggregate numbers given what is displayed here.

No problem, I thought, drop support an email and they gladly explain to you how these numbers align. That was in June. The first mail I wrote on June 20th simply asking that someone explains the differences. To this day I have not received an answer.

Well I received lots of email responses by Kevin Lobbezzo and Gavin Stok from their support department explaining to me that I basically need to look elsewhere. As an example an email from Gavin from June 30th

> On 30 Jun 2011, at 3:49 PM, Adyen Support Department wrote:
>> Hi Dorian.
>> As per Kevin’s email this ticket is now very long and we ask that you log one ticket per issue or set of questions. This avoids the chance of confusion and frustration, and allows us to search for tickets in the future easier if required.
>>
>> If I understand correctly, you would like us to explain the correlation between a settlement report and the settlement batch overview tab. If this is true, please provide a batch number and we’ll reply in a new ticket with the explanation.
>>
>> If there are any other questions you’d like answered please let us know in a new ticket, and please feel free to use our knowledgebase at https://support.adyen.com/ as a starting point.
>>
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Gavin Stok
>> (Support Manager)

Sure, at this time I already had provided them the batch reports multiple times. And honestly folks, fix your support tool mess (By now the mail they keep sending me back and forth is 2.1MB big… ) Use a tool like Zendesk. That works nicely even with long threaded issues.

A few more meaningless Adyen support emails later I still do not have an answer. Probably everything is correct, let’s suppose this, but if the other party can’t explain its reports the confidence starts to erode.

By now – a full month later – I thought it’s time to escalate the issue.

At the core it’s a simple question: Would you trust your bank if it sends you a monthly statement that it can’t explain properly? I won’t. Exactly this question I asked Pieter van der Does, the CEO of Adyen, a week ago. No prizes for guessing that I haven’t received any response as of yet.

To be fair, payments ain’t easy. Credit card companies, acquirers, issuers, payment providers, and more are required for something seemingly simply as an online payment. And of course each intermediary wants to earn his living (on your costs, as effectively the consumer is paying for all this with a higher retail price).

Yet this is no excuse to provide the worst ever customer support.

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Update August 10, 2011

Four days after this post Christine Nitsch, Senior Account Manager, from Adyen contact me. We could resolve some of the issues. The difference to which I point in the post was due to exchange rate adjustments, that have not been properly reflected in the reporting frontend. Adyen has corrected this since. She also told me that Adyen works on a number of other improvements in the reporting and reassured me that the actual transaction accounting is 100% correct.

Oh, what fun we had!

On Saturday, the Memonic team turned up to participate in one of the Swiss Internet Community’s coolest events: StartUp Camp. This year, it was hosted in the Basel University of Applied Sciences. The location was excellent – as was the food (special kudos go out to the desserts. Yum!).

The highlight of the event, for us, was the networking – which was superb. We bumped into our old neighbors, Liip – who told us that they miss us (aww. We miss you guys, too!), and into good friends from other startups. We met engineers – and circled the rumor that we are still looking to hire for our excellent StartUp (Pssst: Memonic is a web based note-taking software. Join us!).  In fact, there was a whole job board attracting lots of attention. Check out the funniest post we spotted:

Amidst fantastic speaking sessions, we were honored to be included – with Dorian and Toni’s “24 MORE Hints for Start Ups” talk. It was a smash hit!

For now, of particular interest to the vast crowd was the segment on devising a founding contract when launching your start up. Due to popular demand, we will be launching an exciting new European START UP BLOG SERIES in this space – with an extended blog on founding contracts kicking off the fun. We hope you will follow!

Until the next time, huge congratulations go out to Dania Gerhart of Amazee for a stellar job organizing this. We hope you will invite us next year!

“When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have re-marked to Eve: ‘My dear, we live in an age of transition’.” (Inge 1929)

We started out a couple of months ago with this series on scalable startups with a reflection on organizations as lump of butter in a sea of milk. Organizations are social arrangements. Hence our next focus was the core constituent of any organization: Its people. A well-crafted strategy is worthless without a committed crew. The focus on people is core to what we do. Nonetheless, an organization is no end in itself. The fuel that drives the engine forward is customer needs. We cherish users like nothing else: They come first.

We argued forcefully for smaller organizations. Instead of large anonymous corporate monsters we made a case for smaller and nimbler units. We also outlined how to maximize involvement and reduce the useless part of management: Let people decide. To put these decisions into action we rely on a project methodology – Scrum – that finely aligns overall goals, immediate tasks, people and resources.

A particular issue we dealt with is how to get work done. Instead of word wilderness and excel wasteland we draw on the advantages of Wikis for documentation and a powerful task tracking tool. Both tool sets are completely web-based and accessible from everywhere.

In terms of actual setup and operation of an online platform we learned a lesson or two from our previous engagement at local.ch. A must is a shared nothing architecture plus automated building of the software application. To ensure consistency and reliability we made testing a daily priority.

The virtualization options available today are essential for a startup. We can cut down very considerably on our asset investment in servers and other bulky infrastructure items.

The outlined setup of a scalable startup is very much the realization of what Peter Drucker sketched out in his essay on The coming of the new organization over twenty years ago:

“The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the typical business will be knowledge-based, an organization composed largely of specialists. … For this reason, it will be what I call an information-based organization.”

A little over two decades later, the startling development of the Internet has driven much of the transformation from an industry-based economy to an information-based economy. Multilevel hierarchies have given way to clusters of business units coordinated by market mechanisms rather than by layers of middle management. The large enterprise structures designed for the business environment of the 1950s and 1960s – firms that typically sought economies of scale through central planning and control mechanisms – are quite likely not the most adroit forms at meeting the current competitive environment that demands both efficiency and effectiveness. Companies track opportunities and resources on a global scale. In an attempt to maximize return on assets, firms perform only those functions for which they possess or can develop expert skills. Activities that can be performed quicker, more effectively or at lower cost by others are outsourced. An intricate network of formal and informal relations ties the firm together. The momentum is paced by information technology.

Back in 1978 Hiltz and Turoff summarized this phenomenon as follows:

“We will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and socio-emotional communications with colleagues, friends, and ‘strangers’ who share similar interests. … we will become a ‘global village.’ … An individual will, literally, be able to work, shop, or be educated by or with persons anywhere in the nation or in the world.”

True.

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Series Overview

• Organizations – A lump of butter
• Focus on people – They are the one
• Rule #1 – Customer First
• Smaller organizations: The sum of the parts
• Project management: Skip management
• Turn the waterfall upside down: Scrum
• Abolish (MS) Office: Wiki will do
• Process & control: Do a Jira
• Shared nothing architecture: A solo performance
• Automation: No one around
• Virtualization: Really no one around
• Testing: To err is human
• Conclusions – The Network Nation

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Drucker P.F., “The Coming of the New Organization”, Harvard Business Review, January – February 1988, pp. 45-53.

Hiltz S.R. and Turoff M., The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, London: Addison-Wesley, 1978.

Inge W.R., Dean of St.Paul’s London, Assessments and Anticipations, London, 1929.