We’d like to extend a warm welcome to our new friends from Japan! We’ve just had a quick mention on 100shiki.com, and are having a fair number of beta requests coming in. Thanks for your interest, we’d love to know what you think of PocketSmith!
Check out our article here! http://www.100shiki.com/archives/2009/03/pocketsmith.html
Posted in Press, Ramblings | No Comments » 
Planning session by the Leith River
So we, along with the other startups in The Distiller began the first of our 6 Sprints yesterday. There’s tons to do, but having a pack to run with along with a set of milestones has filled us with a sense of renewed purpose and energy. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a beautiful sunny Dunedin day to work in.
Francois is currently in Wellington making contact with some important people, while James, Arthur and I get to sit by the river and work through our development backlog, watching the ducks (and a massive eel) swim in the river below.
I’ll write what I put on The Distiller website yesterday to explain what we’re doing over the next 12 weeks.
What are The Sprints?
The Sprints are a part of an evolving framework that has been modelled on successful startup and software development methodologies along with some conventional wisdom acquired by the founders of The Distiller. Sprints occur within a 12-week time-boxed period in which the founders of a startup concentrate on developing the business – think Scrum development on a business level. The framework wraps in The Distiller’s philosophies of community development, support and interaction.
Each startup has a set outcome for the end of its Sprints. This will be related to the stage of development the startup is in, so the outcome could be the refinement of a business plan through research; the development of a working prototype; seed stage investment by angels; or commercialising an existing product.
Milestones are set for each two weeks within the 12-week period, at which point the startups at the Lab get together for Business Therapy, in which they discuss the outcomes of the previous fortnight and together, brainstorm solutions to challenges faced.
Why are The Sprints important?
We believe that the likelihood of a startup’s success is defined in part by the company it keeps. It’s not just about dollars and cents: a startup in its earliest stages is like a child, and a good foundation of sound business principles and social responsibility within a supportive family environment is an enriching experience regardless of the outcome.
Furthermore, it is equally important to build an online community through active participation in social networking, knowledge sharing, and outreach. A community however cannot be announced, bought, or declared open. Its very existence requires that we listen to the needs of a demographic, build a framework to serve it, and then actively maintain it.
Historically, we’ve had success in PocketSmith’s early days when we had key milestones to adhere to. The first was the development of the Alpha for our Techcrunch50 interview. Later came self-imposed deadlines for the Beta, and the slight pressure of a growing community and audience kept us on our toes.
We know it’s easy to lose momentum as a startup for whatever reason – lack of planning, the feeling of running around in circles, thinking within the same boundaries. Which is why we hope that working within The Distiller will change this, and give us as well as the other startups at the Lab a live, dynamic environment in which to grow.
Tags: business, development, entrepreneurs, outdoors, startup, The Distiller
Posted in Business structure, Startup tips, The Distiller | No Comments »
One of our users came to us the other day and said that they would prefer to read about our news on our blog. Which made me realise – why aren’t we posting the newsletters on the blog? To be honest I’m not entirely sure – just one of those classic oversights. However we’ll be recitfying this situation as of… now!
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Over the past months we have been extremely busy from both the business and product development standpoints. One piece of news that we’d like to share is the expansion of our team – we have brought on board a new developer, Arthur Gunn, to help us with the advancement of the application. Arthur is a specialist in interactive interfaces, specifically around Adobe Flash and Flex, so this may provide you with a clue as to what is to come. Welcome Arthur!
In terms of the application, below are the major advancements in relation to PocketSmith, which have been released today. There have also been some other minor items that have been adjusted, but none of these are extremely earth-shattering so we’ll concentrate on the larger scale changes.
ACCOUNTS PAGE RE-DESIGN
With the release of multiple accounts at the start of the year, we knew we had a bit more work ahead of us. We have taken on board your feedback and have made interacting with your accounts much easier, from within a new accounts page.
We have put together a range of screenshots and instructions on how to use the new area, which you can see here: http://www.pocketsmith.com/help/ . This is a part of our new, expanding help area – so keep watching!
One thing you need to be aware of is that transactional accounts now have a starting balance and starting balance date associated with them. This allows us to be more specific and accurate with calculations. We have tried to ensure the transition will be as smooth as possible for you, by taking your last uploaded transaction date and applying a starting balance of 0 at this date. This is very easy to correct and edit – as shown in the above help pages.
The reason balances have to be input manually is that your account balances tend not to be included with the file export from your online banking interfaces. We’re working on more seamless integration with financial providers, and hope to have some news for you soon in this area.
If you have any issues with how the transaction totals / account balances etc are being generated, we suggest that you delete your accounts and re-upload your transactions. We don’t imagine there will be too many issues however – we have done everything we can to ensure a smooth transition between the old and new systems.
MANUAL TRANSACTIONS
You can now also record all of your cash transactions, or ones that don’t show up in your statements, through using a new manual transactions feature.
You can create separate ‘manual’ transaction accounts, and you can input all your receipts if you so wish. We are looking at the possibility of having manual transactions intertwined with uploaded transactions, however we have some work to do around the recording the date and transactions of each separate upload before this will be possible. However at this stage you can complement your uploaded transactions with manual, or ‘cash’ transactions.
MATCH TRANSACTIONS / COMPARES
The Match Transactions page has also had a bit of tweaking – not a lot, but based on your feedback we have added the ability to see more details on unassigned transactions. We have also given a few more cues for items that can be dragged and dropped around the interface – check out the page and you will see the new bits and pieces.
THE FUTURE
We are on a major development push for the next two weeks. During this time we will be fixing some bugs that have come through to us recently, as well as pushing forward with the building of a couple of exciting new features that we want to get into the application as soon as possible – we will keep you up to date with how everything is going!
Tags: announcements
Posted in Releases | No Comments »
I’m just going to take a minute out of my Internet-Explorer-wrangling to announce that PocketSmith is now four-strong – Arthur Gunn has joined us to give us a hand on the programming and UI side of things.
With some amazing skills in Flash / Flex and Rails (amongst many, many other nuggets) Arthur is going to allow us to continue pushing the envelope with PocketSmith.
In fact, his first bit of handy work will be seen in our next feature release (scheduled for the next few days – blame IE) – however this is but only a tiny taster of what he has been doing in other areas. But you will all see that stuff soon enough 
So welcome to Arthur, it is wicked-awesome to have you with us!
Tags: announcements
Posted in Business structure | 1 Comment »
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