memonicOfficial Blog

We’ve recently been asked if you can add a Memonic folder to your iGoogle dashboard. Thanks to Memonic’s RSS capabilities and iGoogle’s capability to add any RSS feed as a gadget to your dashboard, that’s not going to be a huge issue. We just need to get around two little obstacles first.

In your Memonic account, select the folder you want to mirror in iGoogle. You can easily generate an RSS feed out of any folder in Memonic by adding “.atom” to the end of the URL displayed in your address bar. However, since some notes might be privat they won’t appear in iGoogle. To get around this, instead of just appending “.atom”, add “.atom?secure=oauth” and hit enter. You will be given a very long URL for the RSS feed that includes all your notes, regardless of scope (private, friends, public). This also implies a privacy issue – make sure you don’t give away this URL, otherwise anybody would be able to watch your notes. Now, this URL theoretically could be added to iGoogle. However, it seems that there’s an issue with such long URLs. Thus, we need to shorten it first.

Reach out to your favourite link shortening service and shorten the long URL. Now copy the short URL, open iGoogle, click “Add Gadget” on the left-hand side, scroll down to and click “Add Feed or Gadget” and paste the short URL in the field appearing. Click “Add” and return to your dashboard. Enjoy!

This morning we came across this comment from Sasha Kovaliov:

“Guys, awesome work! Keep it up – stable and simple. Screw evernote and alike ;) Is there any way to search your notes via a custom google search or incorporate it into chrome like diigo has done? Ty!”

Thanks Sasha for the compliment. And yes, Sasha  - and all other Memonic users – their is: Check out this small video for a how to:

In text:

1. Go the the Google Chrome preferences menu
2. Go to the menu Basics / Manage Search engines
3. Add a new search engine in the last row – in the last field enter this string: https://www.memonic.com/user/me?search=%s

That’s it & have all a great Monday!

click.to is a handy utility application for Windows and Macs hooking into the ubiquitous cut/copy function of the OS. Whenever and wherever you copy something, a row of icons pop up, allowing you to send that piece of information to one of a plethora of preconfigured services like Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail.

Today we’re happy to announce the addition of Memonic to the list of supported services.
With click.to running you may create notes from every application you’re using, be it a word processor, a spreadsheet application, your email client – you name it.

We’re sure you hit that point in the past when you though ‘If I could just put that info into a note quickly…’ – with the click.to application you can do this now with ease.

Go ahead and get click.to – it’s free to download and use!

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.

That’s right:  By popular demand and following your requests, we have just released a great and easy way to import all your Evernote notes into Memonic – so you can turn those into a collaborative living digital collection. As with the Delicious importer, we hope this too will serve you well.

Now, you can use your Evernote notes on Memonic, and use them on your favorite note taking platform. Share them with friends, collect them with friends, and see what’s trending via the dashboard by connecting to friends and colleagues on our platform. We hope you like it.

How It Works

Evernote allows you to export all your bookmarks into a file. Please select all notes into the file before exporting, and then export. Upload that file on this page, and we’ll do the rest. Important disclaimer: if your Evernote collection is huge, contact us first.

• All your links, tags and descriptions will be imported.
• Private bookmarks and items will stay private, and public links will stay public.
• You will be notified by mail as soon as the import is done.

For more, go to: http://www.memonic.com/tools/import/evernote

We look forward to your comments!