Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

One of my favorite scenes in a film is from the movie “Finding Nemo”. All of the fish have wanted escape so badly, they have all desired their freedom so much and like so many of us they failed to anticipate that their wants might just create more wants. So the fish all hop out of the dentists office, they roll down a hill and into the ocean… and the puffer fish looks at the other fish and says “Now what?”

When we follow the history of how money came to exist it was simply a way to handle trade in a fair and honest manner. I grow corn, you grow beans but I don’t need beans so instead I give you this “money” that we all agree is valued at a certain amount of beans. Everybody wins, we all have the ability to trade even if we don’t need to barter. Yay!

However money has now become the defacto standard, it used to be a way to trade, now it is the ONLY way to trade.

Perhaps this is the kind of post that one only begins when they have been fortunate financially. Research has shown that money really does not make people happy unless it drastically changes your life. 10 dollars to you or me probably does not mean much, but give it to a bum living under a bridge and you’ve just made his week, he feels rich and can now eat! Take somebody who is struggling to pay rent and give them a raise of 15k a year and they are now more secure and more happy accordingly.

Take however somebody who has 30 million dollars (which is the number that defines super-wealthy). Is there anything that this person can’t do? Is there anything they can’t buy or any experience they can’t have? Yes there is the argument about love and I will bow to that argument, but there are very few experiences that one can not purchase with cold hard cash.

Take the average joe, or even a fairly well to do person and look at their lives and goals. For the most part everybody has something or some activity they are really wanting to do, something they are saving for (a new bigger house, a new better car, a trip to Bali, or just simply security and retirement.) People have goals and things they want for, and those wants give them things to talk about, dream about, hope about and an incentive to wake up and work every day.

So take this person with a stock pile of money, real estate, staff, cars, boats, planes… and ask them what interests them. Most of them will tell you that they are pretty bored. All the money in the world bought them one particular thing that they didn’t even intend to buy… a lack of wants.

Wants give us incentives. If you are lonely you want love. If you are poor you want wealth. If you are sick you want health. Some wealthy people find that they can create a game of wealth, they have 50 mil, they want 100mil so they can prove something.

Anyways, there isn’t a huge point to this post except that the truth is that money buys material things. Those things are nice, they are fun to play with for about 30 minutes, but when you turn around and realize you want for nothing I have to imagine that is a lonely and sad place to be.

Rarely do I make a post simply to let readers know that I’m a fan of something, but there is a new new-to-me web site called mint.com that allows you to track your personal finances (investments, credit cards, bank accounts etc..etc..).

The way it works is that you enter your account information and passwords to each of your bank web site’s and their system automatically logs in and downloads all of your spending activity. The analysis is really very accurate and it automatically begins creating budgets for you. As well you enter your assets such as homes, cars and jewlery. The home’s you enter are automatically pulled up by appraised value from a web site called cyberhomes, and I found the accuracy to be good but the database to be missing a lot of homes. One of our homes for example pulled up with a $0.00 suggested value.

I’ve in the past played around with Yodlee.com and Yodlee has even made big gains in getting acceptance from the banking community to the point that several large national banks actually integrate Yodlee into their customer web portals, but the Yodlee interface is a bit clunky and poorly designed.

Mint.com on the other hand is a pleasure to use, the interface is intuitive and unlike Yodlee who’s primary model seems to be licensing their technology to banks, Mint.com makes money by saving you money. If they find that you have a credit card with a high APR they will recommend another credit card that offers you a better interest rate. Really a win/win situation… you save money on fees, they make money on the referral.

The only suggestion I have for Mint is really that they should add a similar auto-valuation for vehicles using a service such as edmunds or kbb.

I highly recommend it, http://www.mint.com

It goes without saying that as the founder of a variety of dot coms and angel investor in other tech companies that I am a hardcore techno-nerd. So when the Palm Pre came out, I had to have one.

iCall was approved as a Pre developer some time ago and without a hands-on experience with the device, we really couldn’t make an educated assessment about the platform.

As an iPhone developer, we have purchased something along the lines of 25 iPhones in the past two years to always make sure that every developer and tester has one of each physical revisions of the devices.

Blackberry has been seductive with their push e-mail and their plans for a killer-app store, so we now own a handful of blackberry bold’s as well.

All told I have something like 45 phone numbers not including my various office numbers, home numbers and iCall phone numbers.

So for three weeks I devoted myself to using only one device per week. Prior to using the device I spent a day or so acquainting myself with the features and setup of each device, so each week with one device was a fair full week of use of combined business and home use.

I thought that since I’ve never written a technology review but read them constantly and had a unique experience that it would be worth sharing.

The setup:

• 1 Blackberry Bold on AT&T
• 1 iPhone 3G on AT&T
• 1 Palm Pre on Sprint

I enjoyed a post today on another Blogger’s site, Darryl Siry.

Choosing to build ideas is hard work and it is not very rewarding most of the time. When people who are skeptical of ideas take every opportunity to put you down it can be harder to continue with a vision without questioning ones own sanity.

Look at the Google guys as an over-discussed example, nobody in their right mind thought in the beginning that they would be as powerful as they are now, did they have a vision of where they would be today? I don’t know but I have to believe they did not pursue their goal of organizing the world’s information just for the good times.

In my best budweiser commercial announcer voice “Here’s to you mister entrepreneur, visionary, idea creating, game changing business man”

Wow, well suprise suprise… after 6 months in limbo suddenly we received a notification that iCall would be available in the App store…. 30 minutes later it was available in the APP store.

Honestly I had given up hope that Apple would ever approve us.

Check it out at http://www.icall.com/iphone/