Scott Hanselman

One of the reasons I want Wrist.NET to succeed is my belief that the only jewelry (stuff you wear all the time) that will be worn all the time in my lifetime is watches, rings and to some degree, necklaces.   Perhaps will see some displays in glasses but that's 10 years+ out and iffy at best.  A watch is a perfect size to provide me with more than just the time, and I don't carry my phone with me everywhere. 

However, a comment in my last post about the watch said that it was too much of a 'gadget' and possibly too large. He said:

"That's why I'm more interested in the smartphones or maybe even some wearables."

I'm not sure about this whole vagueness of wearables.  I'm not sure there's as much of a market for a "Flava Flav" style SPOT device, do you? 

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Some news for me and the three other dorks ;) that will be buying one of these watches.  Fossil just sent out their opt-in email to announce the availability of their watches on the Wrist.NET MSN Direct Platform.  Here's the Microsoft Press Release and the MSN Direct Site.

There's a great PDF from the CeBIT conference here.

Here's some interesting details about the hardware:

• 28 MHz ARM7 Baseband processor
• 512 Kb ROM, 384 Kb RAM
• FM Radio Receiver: 12 Kb/s data rate
• Cool internal hardware diagram from National Semiconductor:
  

Of course, I'm having MINE overnighted.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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John Lam talks about the troubles he has had with Quicken vs. Money and their interactions with the browser.  He wonders: 'It will be very interesting to see what a personal finance application circa 2006 will look like. On Windows, it will most likely sport a XAML front end that calls via Indigo against Web Services provided by the various financial institutions.'

I totally agree that is a cool future, and I look forward to it, but since work for the nations leading e-Finance server provider (Corillian) to wanted to chime in.

John says the he has to log into his Bank's website to download his financial statements and wonders when this interaction will happen via Web Services.  I don't know who John banks with, but this unfortunate interaction is actually a limitation of the bank and the decisions they've made, and not a technology limitation. 

Arguably, before SOAP, before XML-RPC, the first public 'Web Service' was OFX.  Microsoft Money and Intuit's Quicken products all support connecting directly to an OFX Server at the bank over a secure connection using this XML/SGML-based protocol.

When I connect to my Financial Institutions with Money 2004 I don't have to visit any of the 8 different websites that my FI's have. All transactions are downloaded in the background and when I sit down each night to review the days transactions they've already been entered and reconciled.

Soon OFX 3.0 will include WS-I support and join the world of Web Services, but OFX has been around and in use on the web doing real work since 1997. That's 2 years before XML-RPC.

Whenever I look into a new bank or Financial Institution, I always make sure they support OFX Direct Connect - not just OFX download, which forces you to go throw the whole dance between the browser and Internet Application that John suffers with.

(By the way, this entire post was written with handwriting recognition on my tablet PC!)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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