Monday, 6 February 2012

Jak to sobie w mBanku z botem rozmawiałem

Raz na długi czas zdarza się i mi zdać na wiedzę innych osób. Ponieważ nie lubię czekać na linii telefonicznej przez 30 minut i płacić za to postanowiłem skorzystać z czata na stronie mBanku, którego klientem jestem już tak długo, że aż najstarsi górale nie pamiętają.

Po odczekaniu około półtorej godziny pojawił się radosny napis "Witam, w czym mogę pomóc?". Potem było już tylko gorzej. Z resztą zobaczcie sami.

To już był koniec 'dyskusji'. Raczej nagrody Loebnera by ten bot nie dostał. To nie jest jednak ważne.

Co ważne to fakt, że jako klient czuje się źle z tym, że mój bank uważa mnie za idiotę i każe mi czekać 1,5h na rozmowę z botem. Cały sentyment dla tego banku nagle znikł. Poza tym dlaczego aż 90 minut oczekiwania na bota? Nie mogli uruchomić ich więcej aby równocześnie informowały klientów o numerze telefonu na infolinię mBanku?

No chyba, że to nie był bot... w tym wypadku to już tylko pozostaje załamać ręce...



Kolejne moje spostrzeżenie. Dlaczego banki (generalnie) nie pozwalają dodzwonić się do nich przez Skype? Ja i wielu moich kolegów w pracy zawodowej używamy Skype, zarówno do kontaktów między sobą jak i z klientami. Powiem więcej, jest to podstawowe, powszechne narzędzie w komunikacji (zaraz po mailu) w kontaktach międzynarodowych. Skąd zatem taka niechęć bądź opieszałość w umożliwieniu kontaktu przez Skype banku z jego klientem?



Friday, 27 January 2012

Polish citizens against ACTA

Say NO to ACTA!

Clamours against ACTA in many polish cities.



  ...and yes, I don't have rights to that image. Taken from kwejk.pl

Tuesday, 27 December 2011

Gaining Competitive Advantage from Enterprise Architecture

Presentation by Jeanne W. Ross about EA and its role in modern companies. It's really worth watching even if you have read her book on a subject (Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution). It really makes me happy to see someone so passionate and enthusiastic about enterprise architecture. 


You may fast forward to 8:50 minute skipping rather boring introduction ;-)

Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Security of contact-less cards

Very interesting exercise exposing security issues of RFID technology deployed in our credit and debit cards. PasPass and PayWave utilize that technology.



Looks like there is serious security problem with our cards.

On polish edition of Dragons Den was a guy who wants to do business on protecting cards from identification stealing.



Is mobile payment via NFC enabled phone the solution? Turning on application and providing pin turns on NFC chip, which starts to emit radio waves only for short time. This makes harder for thief to steal our cards credentials when we stay in a queue or sit in cafe. For default NFC chip is turned off and will not respond to RFID/NFC call.

Seems like better solution for me :-)

Friday, 16 December 2011

Brett King - Bank 2.0: Modality Shift

Very interesting presentation about future of banking. Brett is talking about shift to mobile solutions, that are easier and more convenient for customers.


Right now I'm reading his book Bank 2.0 and I must admit that I like his new, fresh view on banking industry. The real customer orientation I'd say. Right now I get a feeling that in Poland banks are introducing mobile banking for wrong reasons. There is big hype about it and no one really want to be the last one to have it. I think they don't believe mobile banking will change the way customers interact with banks. Most of them think it's online banking on smaller screen. Especially for those kind of people this book will be most useful.
I don't think everything Brett writes will happen in future (some of those things already happened ;-) but he's very smart guy. So getting to know his ideas and observations definitely will give you broader view on banking.


I'll share with you more of my thoughts about it when I finish reading it, but I'm pretty sure it's worth reading. Look at customer reviews at Amazon. Here are paper and Kindle versions.

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

TOGAF 9.1 Released

The Open Group has released maintainance update to their architectural framework TOGAF 9. There are no big changes, most of them are minor and aim at clarification.

More information on Open Group Blog, here is a post describing changes.

Tuesday, 29 November 2011

So, it's official

Today I got an email from Google about Wave. The end is near :-(

The message was:

"Dear Wavers,

 More than a year ago, we  announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012. 

 If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012. 

 For more details, please see our help center.

 Yours sincerely,

 The Wave Team"

Any good alternatives to Google Wave? It's opensource maybe someone will run it or already runs it? Please leave a comment if you know something.

UPDATE:
I've found that actually something is working and it has strong number of supporters. On Apache Wave project site http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ there is info about their project "Wave in a Box". This will be easy to run on you Linux version of Wave, that utilizes other Apache's software. Apparently Google Wave was written is such way that it was not compatible with Linux. Right now guys are migrating stuff.

There are even working Wave servers right now. Look at http://waveinabox.net, in my opinion it works pretty good.