Scott Cook demos new TurboTax for Mac at MacWorld.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CBS Interactive)I spied Scott Cook, a founder and former CEO of Intuit, which makes Quicken and Quickbooks, at his company's Macworld booth, giving demos just like any booth worker.
That's curious--you don't see big company billionaires mingling with consumers in a frenzied trade show environment too often (although you should). So I snared him for a quick interview about his booth duty and the plans for Intuit overall.
Regarding hanging out with The People, Cook simply said that it's a great way to get customers to talk to him for free (versus paid surveys, I assume) and that it's good to hear what you are doing wrong (as a Quicken for Windows user, I could give have given him an earful, but time was short). He also likes to see how his team presents to customers.
On Intuit's overall strategy, Cook says Intuit is pursuing a strategy based around online and mobile access to financial data. U.S. consumers spend $7 billion a year in overdraft fees, he says, and there's no excuse for that when your phone could alert you when you're about to overextend yourself. Thus: Quicken Beam, Quicken Online (which recently got a refresh), and an online version of the small business app Quickbooks. There's also an online version of TurboTax, which will compute and file your federal taxes for free. State returns are extra, though.
Quicken Mobile gives you quick visibility in your basic financial position.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CBS Interactive)At the same time, Intuit seems to be renewing its commitment to standalone apps, or at least to the Mac.
Quicken for Mac is being retired in favor of a newly built financial management app called Financial Life, now in a very early public beta. It looks, at first glance, like a nicely designed version of Quicken, simpler to get in to than the company's traditional software. (On Windows, Quicken 2009 looks like a typical upgrade for Intuit from Quicken 2008: a few new features, but according to user reviews, lacking needed reliability improvements.)
Yet despite Cook's mission to offer holistic financial suites for its users, Intuit is not yet delivering on integration between its products. For example, if you use Quicken Mobile to update your Quicken Online account, that data won't make it into your Quicken software installation on your personal computer. And data files cannot be shared between Mac and Windows installations.
CoverItLive is a new hosted service for blogging events in real time, or "liveblogging." It's a useful tool for people covering major industry events, speeches, sports, and the like. I first saw the product in use when I was watching the CrunchGear team cover the Bill Gates keynote at CES.
I've liveblogged several events myself in the past, but I've used tools not designed for the job. My hack has been to set up a unique Twitter account for each event and embed a widget from that account into my blog (example: YouTube's Steve Chen interviewed at the NewTeeVee Live conference). It works, but only barely, and the feature set is not ideal. In contrast, CoverItLive's design and features are, basically, awesome. There are some issues that might give big publishers slight pause, but the product is off to a great start.
The CoverItLive authoring window is an awful lot like an IM client.
Setting up a CoverItLive account is fast and free, and once you've done so you can either jump straight into liveblogging or schedule upcoming events. Liveblog content is all hosted on CoverItLive, and you put it on your blog by pasting in a small snippet of HTML code.
Features you get as publisher, in addition to really easy-to-use IM-like text-entry window, include the capability to take comments from readers and post the ones you like in your stream; live polls; and the option to post either canned or new pictures and videos. CoverItLive also provides publishers with statistics on their live viewership, which is very useful.
Once a writer tells the system that the event is over, CoverItLive converts the blog into a static block of text, which users can read in a scrolling window. Pictures and polls that were pop-ups during the live event are inserted at the correct locations in the timeline.
The service is free to use and carries no advertising. CoverItLive's Keith McSpurren told me he'll look at monetization strategies in the future, including advertising and possibly paid "pro" or downloadable versions, but for at least the next 12 months, the entire system is free.
Once an event is over, viewers can replay the liveblog in a CoverItLive window that's embedded in a blog.
(Credit: CrunchGear)McSpurren also told me that because of the the way the system is built, it scales to supporting far more users than chat-only products like UserPlane. He said it can easily handle "hundreds of thousands" of simultaneous viewers. I was not able to verify this.
I like this system a lot, even though there are some small issues with it. For example, all content published in a CoverItLive liveblog is hosted on the CoverItLive servers, not on the blog it's embedded in, which means that it's not searchable on the blog site. That could be fixed by having CoverItLive convert liveblogs to ordinary blog posts after the event, but McSpurren has yet to launch that feature. And again, because the content is hosted elsewhere, any context-sensitive advertising that appears on a host blog's page won't pick up the content in the liveblog, potentially hurting ad revenues a little bit.
For publishers who want to host all content on their own servers, there may be a downloadable version of the software at some later date.
But this is a great system and I expect to see it used a lot. I expect several outlets will be liveblogging the MacWorld Steve Jobs keynote on Tuesday with it, although at the moment the only confirmed site I know of is the GeekBriefTV site.
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