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As a full-time student I don’t have much money coming in, however I seem to constantly be spending it. Recently I was tracking my expenses and attempting to determine a reasonable budget with an app called Cha-Ching (iPhone and Mac). However this solution was imperfect. I religiously entered every single transaction into the app on my iPhone, but something was missing – I was not able to easily visualize my financial standing over time.

Watch your money

As part of Telfer’s Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge that I am competing in, I have received some really interesting financial advice. Eugène Tassé said:

“You have to work and you have to save… I can assure you today, I never spent more than $0.50 of every $1 I made. It is impossible, unless you want to throw your money away”

As a student this may not be possible, however I am going to see what I can do. In the third workshop, successful entrepreneur, and uOttawa grad, Renaud Brault said:

“I always lived below my means” .. and… “produce a financial statement for your personal finances to see where you stand throughout the year”

Although I could create a financial statement manually from what I have learned in Accounting/Finance classes, I would rather find a better solution for this. Luckily the exact financial software I need is out there.

Dough

Dough is a web app for tracking your personal/family finances. It is the perfect solution for what I am looking to do, allowing you to easily:

• enter in every transaction you make
• track all bank accounts, credit cards, and investments
• visualize your finances over time in a financial statement format

It has been perfect for my requirements, and would definitely be a good application for any student looking to watch their money. It is simple to use and maintain, yet provides a thorough output on the Summary page.

As a web app, Dough accessible from anywhere you are connected and keeps all of your data online. My only wish is for either an iPhone app or iPhone optimized web interface for using the transaction entry function on the go.

Check out Dough here: http://yourdough.com/

UPDATE: ReMail was acquired by Google and the app was removed from the App Store!

Apparently I have over 26,500 e-mail messages in my willw.net account!

I’ve been using this address for three years, which works out to roughly 8,833.33 e-mails/year.

A neat application for the iPhone called reMail is what brought this random fact to my attention. reMail provides full-text search for any IMAP capable e-mail account, something Apple’s Mail app sorely lacks (it searches headers only). It does this by downloading every e-mail message in your account to your iPhone, all 26,500 in my case.

If you are used to the great search in Gmail or Google Apps, like I am, there is a free version of reMail available on the App Store. If you are using any other IMAP capable service there is the regular version for $4.99 (which also includes support for multiple accounts).

By the way, if you have thousands of e-mails like I do, you may want to start downloading your messages in reMail as you are going to bed, and leave it running overnight, as it takes awhile to download!

Recently I was selected as one of 16 students at the Telfer School of Management to participate in the Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge. The school describes this event as:

“The Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge (ECC) is a one year competition through which Telfer School of Management students create and implement an action plan to develop the culture of success from Eugène Tassé. This culture of success or “entrepreneurial culture”, helped Eugène Tassé become one of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs.”

The competition includes four workshops with business experts, mentoring, and the refinement/use of an action plan to work toward your goals. Following the program, three finalists will be selected to make a presentation on their progress and goals for the chance to win $7,500.

As part of the application process I had to write a definition of what I think it means to “live with an Entrepreneurial Culture”:

To me, living with an Entrepreneurial Culture means three things. First, setting a goal and doing everything possible to work toward it. Second, facing situations of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity head on, and taking actions to overcome those situations. And finally, doing something you believe in, something that makes you want to work, rather than feeling like you have to work.

Entrepreneurs identify the actions required to achieve their business goals. This same approach can be used to tackle life’s goals, anything that you strive to achieve can be viewed as an entrepreneurial pursuit.

This competition should be an excellent opportunity to develop a strategy for achieving my personal, academic, and professional goals, as well as work with some very interesting people!

Reading the StartupNorth blog, a specific post caught my eye: “Hire a co-op!”

From that post:

For each co-op student hired, your organization can take advantage of the Co-operative Education Tax Credit.  The Ontario Government recently increased the credit to 25 per cent of salaries or wages and benefits (30 per cent for small businesses) to a maximum of $3,000 per student, per term. For more

Sounds like a great deal to me. I know of one student looking for a CO-OP placement for January-April or January to August.. if interested, contact me!

While working on campus I found a few promotional flyers for the University of Ottawa’s new mobile version of their website, “coming this fall.” It will be called uoMobile, similarly named to the also coming soon uoZone.

Based on this flyer, I am hoping this uoMobile proves to be useful and work well on my iPhone. It would be nice if it were comparable to the mobile website MIT has for their school.

Here are the cool flyers:

As the VP Marketing/Creative for the MISA Club at the Telfer School of Management, I managed the project of building a new website for MISA. After a lot of design revisions and scrapping various drafts throughout the summer, the new website is now live.

The design combines my own designs with fantastic graphics by Mark Dunkley, former VP Creative of MISA, and graphic work by Sian Davies. Since I was starting from scratch on the website, I took the opportunity to base the website on a CMS that will remain useful to MISA many years down the road. I chose WordPress for this because of the great plugins and rapid advancement of the platform. Another benefit to WordPress is the excellent iPhone apps that are available for site management on the go.

Right now the website is pretty bare, but I hope to be flushing out the many event pages soon. Have a look and let me know what you think in the comments! While you are at it, check out TelferBooks.com too (Blog post on that coming soon.)

MISA Homepage

Montreal Trip

Since I got my iPhone two years ago, I can’t remember the last time I was bored. Time that was once wasted — waiting on line at the DMV, riding the subway, even waiting out a rain delay at a ball game — is now once again usable.

- Steven Rubel on AdAge

This quote sums up one of the greatest benefits of owning an iPhone, or most smartphones for that matter. Anytime I am stuck in a situation waiting on something, such as the bus to/from work, my iPhone makes that wasted time into something productive or entertaining.

I just read on CrackBerry that RIM has acquired Torch Mobile, a company that develops a WebKit browser for mobile devices.

This browser, Iris, sounds interesting. Here is Torch Mobile’s description of it:

The Iris Browser is an advanced, high-performance and versatile application that is specifically designed to function in resource-constrained environments. It brings the full Web experience to mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, portable media players, Ultra-Mobile PCs and other embedded devices – in a fast and user-friendly manner.

If RIM is planning to replace the current BlackBerry brower with this WebKit browser, it would be a major benefit to BlackBerry users. Apple, Google, and Nokia have all embraced WebKit as the backbone for the browser’s of their smartphone operating systems, and many mobile web applications have been optimized to work well with WebKit. This move would give BlackBerry users a much enhanced web browsing experience and open up many more websites and web apps to them. Hopefully this is RIM’s plan for Torch Mobile’s technology.

With RIM onboard with WebKit, this leaves Windows Mobile and the Zune pretty lonely with their Internet Explorer based built-in browsers.

Here is a video of Torch Mobile’s current version of the Iris browser for Windows Mobile:

I recently got to play with the two Android phones that Rogers is currently selling, HTC’s Dream and Magic. From my experience with them, I would say they were far from being a “dream” or “magic” or anything close to usable. Cheap hardware in addition to confusing and inconsistent controls has left me severely disappointed with Android. They were nowhere close to as good as the iPhone, and pale in comparrison to the current BlackBerry models out right now.

Today John Gruber wrote that the iPhone needs a strong competitor:

I’ve said it before and will say it again, the best thing that could happen for Apple and iPhone owners would be for at least one strong rival to appear. Two [Palm] would be even better. A monoculture benefits no one in the long run, because it’s competition that drives innovation.

A “monoculture” this is not. He points to Android and Palm as the iPhone’s potential competition. He overlooks that fact that Apple’s real competition is RIM and the BlackBerry. In May, the BlackBerry Curve outsold the iPhone in NPD’s analysis of Smartphone Sales. The Curve is only one of RIM’s phones. In that same list, RIM occupied three of the top four spots:

1. RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
2. Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
3. RIM BlackBerry Storm
4. RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)

I do not have the specific numbers, but I would bet all of RIM’s phones together would equal many times the number of Apple’s phones sold in a given month.

Overlooking RIM as Apple’s real competition in the Smartphone market is a mistake. Even though the BlackBerry is the established giant, it has not stopped them from innovating. With the Storm 2 coming out, and RIM releasing a new BlackBerry at a rate of what feels like every month, I expect the BlackBerry will continue to dominate the market in North America – and continue growing overseas.

My next phone is doubtful to be anything but the next iPhone, but that is definitely is not the same for most people.

Google Reader added a way to share posts in a number of other services, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, they offer a way to build your own custom links right into Google Reader. Upon seeing this, I immediately thought of making an Instapaper link so I can read posts later on my iPhone.

Here is how I did it:

• In Google Reader, go to Settings and click to the Send To tab
• Hit “Create Custom Link”
• Enter a name, I used “Instapaper”
• For the URL enter this, but replace YOURUSERNAME with your username:

https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username=YOURUSERNAME&url=${url}&title=${title}

• If you have a password, put this instead (Replace with your password):

https://www.instapaper.com/api/add?username=YOURUSERNAME&password=YOURPASSWORD&url=${url}&title=${title}

• You don’t have to use an image, but if you would like to, feel free to use mine:

http://www.willw.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/instapaper.png

• If it is working, a new tab will pop up with “201″ each time to send an item to Instapaper.

There are many other services that this could work for too.