Tag Archives: web

Take your site Mobile.

A few months back I met Igor Faletski, founder of Handi Mobility, a Vancouver-based company that develops mobile services and applications.

They launched an extremely impressive service for TransLink, Vancouver’s transit authority, that lets you see the next five arriving buses at any given stop via SMS or iPhone. Impressive guy and company.

We chatted about mobile banking, but as a credit union we get our services from Central1 Credit Union, the credit union central covering BC and Ontario. I have spent the last two days with them and my impressive peers from CUs across Canada in User Group meetings covering the future of online and mobile banking for credit unions. We are in very good hands. Their strategy around mobile banking especially is smart, forward thinking and yet also pragmatic. High marks from me.

When I met with Igor, he mentioned he was developing a service he couldn’t quite talk about yet. And then last month I was at a session about mobile applications here in Vancouver, and Igor was on the panel. He unveiled a glimpse of his new service, and now it has launched.

It’s called Mobify.Me, and it is an amazing application. Their initial blog post sums it up nicely.

It will create a mobile friendly version of your website in a snap. For free. And then if you want extras you can pay for them. It’s a way to test a version of your site optimized for today’s mobile browsers quickly to see what it can do for you. I would think that credit unions who want to experiment optimizing their service for smart phones, but don’t know if it’s worth spending a lot of budget on it would be able to take advantage of this service and gain some excellent knowledge. If you have your web developer spend a couple of hours with the CSS this service spits out, you can make it look even better.

And then it will mirror your main site. When you update content on your main website, the mobile site will automatically optimize that content for mobile browsers.

Pretty amazing stuff.

Internet Marketing Conference agenda is out.

Internet Marketing Conference - Vancouver, September 11-12The Internet Marketing Conference is making its way to Vancouver on September 11-12, 2008 and they have released their full agenda.

It is truly an astonishing lineup, and I’m very pleased to have such a great mixture of international speakers who will be coming to town alongside local speakers who are doing some amazing work. It should be an incredible event, well worth checking out.

You can register for the event here.

See you there!

Canada leads the world in use of Online Banking.

Canada Leads World in Online Banking UsageWell, it’s always nice to be number one (well, maybe not).

Yesterday comScore released their study which shows that “Of the 37 global markets individually-reported by comScore, Canada ranked number one in adoption of online banking, with 67.1 of Canadian Internet users banking online in April 2008.”

It also shows…

RBC Financial group led the category with 4.6 million visitors, followed by TD Bank Financial Group with 4.5 million visitors and Bank of Montreal Sites with 3 million visitors. Among those banks in the top 10, Bank of Montreal Sites experienced the greatest increase in visitation during the past year, growing 22 percent.

I wonder if my friends at BMO are surprised by this.

The study also showed that the heaviest users of online banking are 45-54 year olds. At first this may seem surprising, but in fact, they are also likely the heaviest bankers: “The segment shows both high penetration (73 percent) and the heaviest frequency in usage (12 visits and 157 pages per visitor per month).”

So can we just admit that online banking is just banking. If your financial institution still talks a lot about online but still has its heart firmly in the branch, here’s some ammunition to change the conversation.

Read the press release here.