Fashion’s got a new face, and it’s Mike! Check it out and be inspired for Christmas! (Yeah yeah, I know it’s in Swedish, but you can still enjoy the styles.

Money is important to us. Control over our life situation is too. But then, how can we possibly accept Internet banks as they are today. How can we possibly think that it’s okay to, say, not be able to get a visual overview analysis of our expenses and incomes? How can we possibly put up with the long and complicated OCR-numbers or basic search functionality? And how is it possible that we have such user hostile login procedures?

I can’t present all my ideas for my perfect Internet banking experience in just one post, but I can show you three examples of what Internet banking would look like if I had my say, and also what I think it will look like in just a couple of years. Here we go!

Facebook Secure Connect

Logging in to your Internet bank today is more or less of a hassle depending on your particular bank, but it’s nevertheless a hassle. Banks have been lagging behind the times here, focusing on security, but not on usability. The market forces will inevitably push us closer to an optimal trade off between security and usability. We see people leaving their bank today, simply because the login security solution is too complex (using USB-hardware for example).

To creatively solve this problem outside identification providers will step in. On of those will be Facebook. Our online identity is contained in our Facebook accounts, our Google Profiles, Twitter accounts and other services that we haven’t even learned the names of yet. We have come to trust them for logging in to other services now, and since more advanced transactions are taking place using this login by the minute (buying major chunks of advertising for example), a need for more secure identification procedures will arise. A second version of Facebook Connect called Facebook Secure Connect will be launched using secure authorization technology and will eventually be adopted by the banks. One bank will lead this evolution and the others will be both inspired and forced to follow.

Facebook will lead the way in this development, but Google will be quick to follow. To compete with Facebook, Google will go on a marketing rampage for secure OpenID and couple with Google Budget Analytics:

Google Budget Analytics

The amount of control you have over your budget and cash flow today at your ordinary Internet bank is really a joke. You get a list of your transactions and not much else. Besides that, it’s also really messy to go back and check out your history. My own bank has recently made it possible to export to Excel XLS-format, but give me a break – XLS? In 2010?

Instead, when you log in to your bank using secure OpenID all transactions will automatically be indexed, fully searchable and categorized. You will be able to analyze your economy at all levels from the very basic (cigarettes, food, rent) to the very advanced with cluster analysis, seasonal trends, forecasts and goal tracking.

In step two, Google will also launch Google Budget Analytics For Business where you can do your books and account distributions more or less automatically. This will kick ass for small businesses.

Facebook’s reply to this will be to enable sharing services where you can share selected transactions and events in your feed, much like what Blippy does today. Come to think of it, Facebook will probably buy Blippy.

Open Banking API

Finally, banks will realize that they are best at doing what banks do, and will hand over interface design and function to the experts. Banks will release secure API-sets to allow third party specialized internet bank companies to connect to their systems. This will in turn open up the market for hardcore competition. Google will be way ahead already and will release Google Bank which will be an big expansion of Google Budget Analytics. Here, they will also have tight integration with Google Spreadsheets, and will also allow for seamless integration with Google Chat, Google Voice and Gmail for interacting with your bank’s customer service.

And what about Apple – the self proclaimed customer experience rulers of the universe? They won’t remain on the sidelines for long.

Man, I wish I had the cash to go into this one myself. Call me if you know any investors who would like to change the world with me on this one.

Update: Interesting link about the poor quality of internet banking (in Swedish).

[EDIT: Sorry. My bad. Was a bit quick there. The true result for this post is position 4, not 3. Thank you Simon Sundén for your correct result].

Correct results from Simon Sundén.

Didn’t mean to return to the Lowe Brindfors case, but since I got a few comments in defense of ignoring SEO, saying that Lowe Brindfors don’t need an optimized site “because people will simply search for lowebrindfors” I just wanted to show you a demonstration of why you still need it. Here is a screen shot from Google on exactly that search.

Did I say that WordPress and Thesis are fairly well optimized?

This is the English language search where my site ranks higher because it is in the English language, but it’s working it’s way up in the Swedish results as well and is now on page two. You can imagine what would have happened if my site would have been in Swedish, right?

And if you think that I should have searched for Lowe Brindfors or “Lowe Brindfors” instead in my experiment above, you can click the links to see those screen shots intstead. Basically the same result.

Simply put – poor SEO puts you at the mercy of pain-in-the-ass-people like myself.

Now do you believe me?

I often refer from my private Swedish blog to this one, but rarely do it the other way around. Today, I will make an exception because of extraordinary and dangerous events that have taken place in Swedish politics and courtrooms recently. So if you read Swedish and intend to vote in this Sunday’s elections, please read this.

I really think that the Pirate Bay trials are a big waste of money. Possibly worse. What is the music industry hoping to achieve? Will people start buying records again? Buying DRM-sabotaged (yes, that is what DRM is) digital files? Hosting them on their own hard drives? It’s the worst of two worlds.

In the unlikely event of a Pirate Bay defeat, things will just move underground. Technically, this is just a matter of time (not so much time). All of a sudden we’ll have a whole movement (huge because everybody loves music) creating great technology for anyone wanting to avoid detection, including terrorists and criminals. Stealth file sharing technology development will explode. In the long term not a smart move for our democratic world.

Instead there should be focus on development of the music industry. If the commercial product is better than the stolen one there is a real value that people will be willing to pay for. I think this is the case with Spotify for example. With Spotify I don’t have to host and structure a huge music library and sharing music is suddenly a breeze. That is real value.

Read more about the trials (in Swedish) here, here, here, and here.

For those of you who speak swedish, here’s an interview with me and my favorite monkey from yesterday about the kind of communication I believe in.

I have now left Verymuchlogo to move on to the next big adventure. Stay tuned for more details on monday.

Happy Valentine’s!

Haha, I love it when I get attributed with stuff like “rockstar entrepreneur” or ending every party blog post with a “mijau”. Never realized I did.

I generally love the rockstar attribute. I’ve gotten it once before by the excellent swedish copywriter Johan Fredrikzon:

“Walter is one of those rare individuals who combine the analytics of an engineer with the spirits of a rock star”. I still buy him drinks for writing that about me.

Anyway, there are som interesting observations in this post. You might want to check it out. (In Swedish).

My mind just went blank. I couldnt’ for the life of me remember wether Michael Dahlén’s new book Nextopia was in Swedish or in English. I just couldn’t.

But before I ended up in this situation, the following happened.

Last night I went down to the new magazine Distill’s launch party on Strandvägen. I flipped through the pages, realizing that this is truly a magazine of our time. It sums up the best of the fashion press and presents it in a slick format. Because, really, who has the time to plow through all the glossies anyway?

So, Distill is perfect. Or at least the idea is. Because as much as I love the concept, I do think that this issue falls a bit short on selection. It didn’t quite seem to be the best of the best. To me anyway. But that said, it’s a wonderful concept with great potential. It’s the perfect mag for me, and I hope that they will expand the concept into more fields. There should be Distills for more genres than fashion.

For anyone of you who have read Michael Dahlén’s Nextopia, you’re familiar with the concept of minisodes, where short versions of shows are distributed by Sony, because we simply don’t have time for the original intended durations. Distill is a concept along these lines, and that’s why I ended up in an animated discussion on the topic with Distill’s managing director Christopher Lockwood. I issued my warmest recommendations for him to read the book, only to realize that perhaps the book was in Swedish after all. Turns out it was. Sorry Christopher. You’ll just have to wait for the English translation. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the Nextopia blog.

Thanks for a great party!

I usually try to keep my private stuff to my other blog ‘Walterlicious’ to keep it out of your face, but there have been some complaints that this blog is too ‘dry’, so if you think so, come on down to Walterlicious and it’s underworld of ludeness and ridicule. It’s in Swedish.

Veckans Affärer wrote today (in Swedish) about Greenwashing, the phenomenon that I posted about last week. This is a becoming a big problem. The brand of green is losing attractiveness.