Krishna's Weblog

With Mint being bought by Intuit, and Intuit expressing interest in entering the Indian market and the plethora of personal finance software startups, personal finance solutions are becoming interesting area to watch out for in India. There are a whole bunch of online solutions available for consumers in US and Europe, but for India, the choices are very minimal. Mint, in particular has a pretty nice user interface, which is pretty much unmatched by the competition. Buxfer, even though it supports personal finance requirements, has way to go in making its UI better. In the indian space, TrackEveryCoin seems promising, but not launched yet. Personally, I have been searching for a personal finance solution which can suit my needs well. Here is a list of features which will get me to use one of the solutions.

Must have features:

• Automatically syncing all my bank and credit card account information
• Excellent portfolio support. A quick and intuitive way to show my net worth at a glance.
• Support for India stocks, mutual funds and insurance - Automatically fetch latest stock and NAV data and update my portfolio
• Provide ways to enter and track expenses
• Provide a desktop app for offline processing - But keep it in sync when online
• Provide a mobile client to enter expenses on the go
• Support for storing receipts - Click a snap from mobile and have it OCR-ed. Need a way to organize/browse through receipts as well
• Support for shared expenses
• Support for Income tax filing
• Allow me to work in multiple currencies
• Allow import/export of *all* data.

Nice to have features:

• Geo-tagging and analysis support
• Projecting expenses/incomes in intelligent ways

Irrespective of the number of features, usability will be the key here. Its easier said than done, though!

Ten Sports has recently announced live webcasts of cricket matches. Its nice to see Ten Sports doing this for free rather putting this behind some kind of pay-per-view walled gardens. Tomorrow's India-NZ match seems to be their first live webcast featuring India. Hope they survive the traffic tomorrow, especially it being a work day in India. :)

One of the easiest ways to get free books for your kindle is to keep track of the Amazon Kindle Best Sellers list. Typically books that are atleast worth downloading rise to the top of this list pretty quickly. Also there are a number of occasions when a promotion offer runs and some popular books are available for download for a short period of time (Like, Chris Anderson's Free). The nice thing is that free books normally rise to the top of this list and you can use the best seller RSS feeds to keep track of it in your RSS reader. Any change in ratings gets reflected here and so you are always on top of any new free books being released.

Having owned this domain for a long time, never quite managed to do something with it. Recently have gotten a lot of motivation to do stuff other than just work alone. This has inspired me to restart my blogging, which has been stagnant due to my new-found love for twitter. I would still continue to be active on twitter, but would occasionally post stuff that interests me enough to write about it. This would certainly not be a purely technical blog, and I might write about personal stuff as well as my thoughts on politics as well. Hoping that posting here turns about to be a regular habit. To get a preview of what stuff has interested me for the last few years, head over to my old blog.