I was very excited about the concept behind this the moment I heard it. Over the past 18 months we’ve been working with VaultStreet to help the brand, design, and develop their application. After consulting with Metavante on their Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment platform for a great deal of time I knew the ins and outs of the electronic bill payment, presentation and presentment. Receiving and paying bills electronically is great, however, having a multi-state, small conglomerate of companies with several bank accounts made it difficult during tax time. What I really needed was a way to access all of my financial documents in a central place. Enter VaultStreet.

From their press release:

VaultStreet supports the collection of documents from leading
online brokerages, including Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Fidelity
Investments and Scottrade - which cover more than 90 percent of the US
online brokerage market - as well as leading banking institutions,
including Bank of America, Citibank, City National Bank, ING Direct,
US Bank, Wachovia, Washington Mutual and Wells Fargo, which serve 75
percent of all bank account holders nationwide. VaultStreet also
supports document collection from utilities including Verizon
Telephone and Verizon Broadband, and will add additional institutions
in the future.

Check out their press release here.

VaultStreet is offering a free 30 day trial and the first 500 registered users get a free year of service.

You can find them at http://vaultstreet.com

On March 14, Microsoft announced their plans to acquire Rapt Inc., the leading provider of advertising yield management solutions for digital media publishers.  We worked with Rapt on two of their applications to create satisfying user experiences through effective user interface design. Read more in the case study.

We’re extremely excited to see that Seero has been released to a limited beta. Mashable readers are being offered 200 invites.

We’re happy to announce that Scenechronize by CleverMachine has launched. We’ve worked with the talented team at CleverMachine over the past year and hope to have a long relationship designing this breakthrough application.

Introducing 21st Century Production

scenechronize is bringing a new level of efficiency and peace of mind to film and television production. It combines the script, breakdown elements and scheduling into a single web application. For the first time, information is available from all departments - anytime, anywhere. Producers and their entire production team can use scenechronize from development through shoot, and beyond. scenechronize coordinates the expected and allows the crew to deal efficiently with the unexpected – ensuring that everyone and everything is ready on the set.

We’re always happy to see our customers doing well. This is no different. SuccessFactors, the leading provider of on-demand employee performance and talent management solutions, filed for an IPO and went public on November 20, 2007 successfully raising $108 million. We worked with SuccessFactors to redesign an application that achieved all of its projected goals, with the user interface design and interaction designs significantly streamlining all business processes. Read more in the case study.

Without these products and services we’d have a hard time being us.

1. Paycycle for employees
2. Basecamp for project management
3. Quickbooks for books
4. Blinksale for invoicing
5. Google Analytics for tracking success
6. Fireworks for designing
7. Dreamweaver for development
8. Google Apps for communication
9. Comcast for bandwidth
10. Mediatemple for hosting

I like reflect from time to time on some of the projects and challenges we’ve come across during the year. We’ve had plenty of interesting projects to work on thus far and I’d like to share some of the more notable ones.

Openwave® Mobile Widgets - Visual User Interface Design

Widgets have gained the attention of subscribers and content providers in the PC environment. The challenge for the mobile industry is to leverage this momentum to drive adoption of their mobile data services.

Opposing Views - Skinning and UI Tuneup Project

“Inside Opposing Views you will find rich information on important issues — presented by the most respected authorities on the issue, whatever it is. Organizations and experts from around the world use Opposing Views to present their views and respond to each other’s challenges. If something changes in the news today, you’ll know what the experts think about it — today.”

Barnes and Noble - Top Secret

Complete nuts to bolts refresh of an application.

SuccessMetrics - Visual User Interface Design - Coming Soon

“Success Metrics is the first provider of Intelligent Business Applications™ for sales organizations. By actually linking actions to outcomes, Success Metrics empowers sales forces with insight into the drivers of success and specific actions they can take to exploit them - enabling firms to drive revenue, wallet share and sales effectiveness.”

Tript from Big Internet - Branding and Visual User Interface Design - Coming Summer 2007

Your Travel, Reloaded

Scenechronize from CleverMachine - Visual and User Interface Design - Coming Fall 2007

“Online production management system for film & television. Scenechronize gets your entire production team on the same page, with access to the information they need. Think of it as your online production office staffed 24×7.”

Adeptra, Adeptra Portfolio Manager - Visual and User Interface Design

Adeptra provides automated contact and resolution services to companies engaged in Consumer Credit and Risk Management.

Rapouts - Visual and User Interface Design - Coming Summer 2007

“RapOuts is the social messaging platform for marketers. We make it easy to build your audience by letting your most enthusiastic fans drive the creation and spread of your message “

iKnow! from Cerego - User Interface Design - Coming Soon

“At the core of Cerego’s new product offering is a patented learning engine designed by teams of scientists, technologists, and learning experts. The system is optimized to help you build lasting memory for any type of fact-based information.”

theWebtop from Atlantis Computing - Visual User Interface Design - Currently in Open Beta

“theWebtop is our on demand service that provides Rich full fledged applications:

• OpenOffice
• The Gimp (Excellent Photoshop alternative)
• Xara ( llustration/vector art)
• Scribus (page layout/publishing)
• Evolution (Calendaring /Email)

all via a web browser. All of this with 2GB of online storage and neat collaboration features for sharing files and applications with your buddies.”

SuccessFactors - Version 10 Environment Skins for T-Mobile, Amdocs, and Lehman Brothers.

“The SuccessFactors story begins with a complete suite of intuitive web-based software that meets the Performance & Talent Management demands of companies of all sizes. But we’re about much more than software, we’re about your success.”

NeoClarus - Visual User Interface Design

“The NeoClarus suite of applications is the only self-contained financial reporting solution to harness the power of XBRL for your organization. It’s the first Web-based, collaborative solution to let you create complete, accurate financial reports on-demand, no matter where the data is held, what it’s called, or where it’s needed.”

On April 11th CMP announced the 2007 25 Innovation Showcase Winners selected by Sand Hill Group.

We’re excited to hear the news here at Momentum. Personally I was involved with the SuccessFactors platform prior and during its early explosion as the sole contract UI designer and we’ve continued to work with them in various capacities since. I had the pleasure to work with them for two years to design some revolutionary pieces of technology and I’m very proud to see them where they are today. One of the only publicly available pieces of technologies from SuccessFactors, Managers Edition, was probably my favorite of all projects as it used Flex, my favorite technology, and allowed us to break from the HTML mold we were at the time constrained to. SuccessFactors Manager’s Edition, was nominated for Best New Product or Service category in The 2006 American Business Awards.

Take a Free Trial to experience the easiest way to write a performance review.

Atlantis Computing, another Momentum customer, also made the list. I can’t exactly disclose what these guys are up to, however, this indeed is the best technology we’ve ever seen. I wish Chetan and his group the best and hope to hear some more great news out of them soon.

A designer here got randomly drawn to participate in the new Search results. The rest of us still get the old 1990s version. Google is finally Web 2.0ing it’s self. New Gradient breaking out the header from the results. They additionally added the additional search options from above the search box to the left of the results which makes it much easier to find those options. Currently they are partially buried under the “more” link popup menu which makes it two clicks to get to something that is much easier to find under this new model.

I’m obsessed with traffic metrics so I frequently find myself on Alexa, Google Analytics, and my Mint installation. I found this interesting bug for Macromedia.com on Alexa’s homepage. Either Adobe’s Macromedia.com domain has been purchased by Barry M Cosmetics, or something is very wrong at Alexa.