‘SuperCard’: Credit Card Wallet June 29, 2008
Posted by Anurag Gaggar in Credit Cards.Tags: credit card, supercard, wallet
1 comment so far
I have a new product idea.
There are many folks who carry more than one credit card in their wallet and use one over the other depending on the offers available on each card – for example, you may use one card to buy gas, another for groceries and yet another when you go to a pub/restaurant. You make this decision based on your spending habits, different structure for reward points on different cards and the promotional offers launched by credit card issuers from time to time. Some people find it difficult to remember what each card has to offer and how the offers change from time to time, and hence stick to one card. However, this decision making is not so complicated that it can’t be automated.
How about a new product that acts as your credit card wallet, stores the information for all your credit cards and does all the number crunching for you to always get you the best offer. To explain further, let’s say I replace all the cards in your wallet with just one card – let’s call it the “SuperCard” – that has information about all the individual cards you have. So, the next time you are there at the gas station, you swipe your SuperCard and it automatically bills the card that gives you more reward points on gas purchases. You go to a restaurant in the city where you’d have normally used your restaurant card to pay off the bill, but your SuperCard knows that another card has a promotional tie-up with that particular restaurant and it can save you money by billing the purchase to a different card. Similar thing for payments – you can just feed in the amount you want to pay towards your credit card dues and the SuperCard automatically spreads the payment to different cards in a way that minimizes your interest burden. It can transfer balance from one card to another if a promotional balance transfer offer is available.
Of course, this may not be in the best interests of credit card issuers and can severely hamper the profitability of these issuers in the long run, forcing them to cut down on all the promotional offers and bonus point schemes. But, I think the idea is still worth sharing!
New on Yahoo Mail June 29, 2008
Posted by Anurag Gaggar in Internet.Tags: domain, email, Internet, rocketmail, subject, technology, yahoo, ymail
1 comment so far
Yahoo has announced some new features on its webmail service, two of which I would like to mention here:
New email domains: You can now choose between the domains of ‘@yahoo.com’, ‘@ymail.com’ or ‘@rocketmail.com’ when you sign up for a new email address at Yahoo. Yahoo, being one of the oldest providers of webmail services, has a large number of registered users and the chance that you can get an email id of your choice on yahoo.com are bleak even if you had a not-so-common name. This is a simple and effective solution to avoid signing up for email ids like ‘yourname1973@yahoomail.com’, you can probably get ‘yourname@ymail.com’. Though given the simplicity of the solution, I am surprised this came so late.
Random Subject Generator: It happens to me quite often that after having written a long email to a friend, I have to pause and think over an appropriate subject line. What I key in the subject line is not terribly important, but I don’t like to send and receive emails with the subject field as empty and hence, most of these times, I for lack of something better or more creative, use a ‘hi’, ‘hello’ or ‘greetings’ as the subject of my email. Yahoo mail now enables its users to fill in a random subject in the subject line by clicking on ‘Subject’ while composing the email. If you don’t like one, click again. Not all of them are usable, but some are definitely a good replacement for a plain ‘hello’. Some samples of what it threw up for me – “ He who laughs last always has the last laugh”, “Read it now”, “My train of thought has derailed”.
