The Fast Company magazine of Dec 2007 ran a story that combines some of my favourite topics: young generations, technology and personal finance. It was called “Easy Money”. Read the full story here.
Here is a summary:
Americans under 35 spend 16% more than they earn, on average. College graduates leave school with an average of $20,000 in student loans and almost $3,000 in credit-card debt. This demographic, in sum, is sorely in need of an easy-to-use solution to their ample money woes. “There’s this dull throbbing sense of guilt that we should be doing something, but where do we start?” says recent Stanford grad Ramit Sethi, who draws more than 150,000 readers a month to his blog Iwillteachyoutoberich.com.
In the past six months, a slew of free online services has popped up to answer this question, offering widgets for budgeting, automatic bill pay, mobile alerts, and social networking. All are fighting to be the anti-Quicken. Although Intuit’s venerable personal-finance software commands 70% of the market, its $30 to $100 price tag, hundreds of features, and required hour or two a week of data entry are unlikely to appeal to a generation raised on Halo and diagnosed with ADD. Sure enough, Quicken’s 15 million users have an average age of 47. If personal finance for most folks is like personal hygiene–an unpleasant chore motivated by necessity–Quicken is Old Spice.
Meanwhile, the Axe Bodyspray of personal finance–cool, fresh, and even sexy–is an upstart named Mint. Its unique features, wrapped in an exceedingly clean and appealing design, are winning tech-industry plaudits and brisk traffic. …It signed up more than 40,000 users in the two weeks after launch. So has Mint cracked the code on getting Generation Debt to buckle down and take responsibility for its finances?
People band together online to date, discuss politics or lose weight. Now a US website called 
At least, that’s what my favourite Talk Radio station (
Face_it, Beam_it, Blog_it! This is the phrase used to launch Fuji’s latest camera, the Z10fd, which will be focussed on the 13- to 26-year-old demographic - a generation they call “Generation Z”. They have realised that this group uses cameras for social networking, blogging and interactions. 
I heard a comment on the 
This is too good to be true… It was reported in London newspapers last week, and is just unbelievable. It’s an anti-talent story. The story of a young web designer looking for a job in Dubai. He applies by email, and gets a favourable response. And, then… well, its hard to describe, but the guy has a complete mental breakdown.
I’d suggest that 2007 might see that change. News media will be overwhelmed this year by stupid reports, and underwhelmed by serious and usable ones. And they’ll have to do better than 
This question has been around about as long as blogging has. Is blogging just another fad, another fringe happening, and does it have the momentum to make it into the realm of main stream? Of course anecdotes abound to illustrate just how much gravitas it has. Perhaps it’ll be a case of ’slowly slowly catch the monkey’ as these seemingly light-weight anecdotes band together to create the kind of splash blogging enthusiasts have always predicted?
They breaking story around the 1 people arrested in London this morning had me all over 
Joshua Schachter once sent me an email. At the time, I had no idea who he was – his response had come from a request I’d sent to the 
Rumour has it that one of our BOOMER sales people enjoyed the opening music of our newest presentation, PRIME TIME.
To be honest this post is all about beating my colleague 
I recently presented at an SABMiller Management Development Programme. One of the groups on the programme have taken the bull by the horns and are leveraging social software and viral marketing for maximum reach on a pretty exciting project. Their objective is to raise USD $10,000 before June 16th by auctioning off 3 unique beaded artworks.
Mark Cuban
Whoah, what a night. This was certainly (and hopefully) the fringe of blogging. Even as wierd as Mike is, he didn’t even look like he fully fitted in with the ‘interesting’ human beings in the room.
I’ve stumbled across an excellent article at 
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