intuition

Every year, Intuit releases a new version of Quicken. Most years, I interview some honcho at Intuit who's running the personal finance division and we talk about where the category is going. The meetings got a lot more interesting a few years ago, when Mint threw a monkey wrench into the personal finance software market, which led to Intuit acquiring Mint and bringing in its CEO, Aaron Patzer, to re-light the Quicken product line. (You can download Quicken Premier, Quicken Home Business, and Quicken Deluxe from CNET Download.com.)

Patzer came in with grand visions and ideas to make … Read more

Can the merciless resolve of a robot overlord help you shed pounds? A Hong Kong startup is hoping dieters are willing to pony up for a $960 droid instead of just using an app.

Intuitive Automata is accepting orders for Autom, its cute robot weight-loss helper that has long been in development.

The 15-inch talking droid has an LCD touch screen. Users enter data on calories they consume and the exercise they do each day. The robot responds with customized advice and encouragement, and can download new speech patterns from the Internet so the chatter doesn't get too dull.

Developer Cory Kidd says that many dieters have tried phone- or Web-based apps to get rid of excess weight, but there's a "psychological difference" in using a machine with a head, blinking eyes, and body.

Perhaps Autom's face-tracking function and big blue eyes will make users feel guilty about sneaking that pizza slice between meals. Kidd refers to Autom with female pronouns, and says "she" doesn't scold users.

A study by Kidd compared 45 dieters in the Boston area and monitored their calories and exercise by computer, on paper, or with Autom. The results showed the robot helped people stick to their diets for nearly twice as long as the other tracking methods. … Read more

Verizon is now selling Intuit's GoPayment credit card reader for free at its retail stores.

Thanks to a new partnership between Verizon Wireless and Intuit, business customers can get the mobile card reader for free after a $30 rebate and the activation of a GoPayment account. The card reader and its app can be found at all of Verizon's retail stores and as well as its business-to-business outlets.

Intuit's GoPayment system is geared toward small and midsize businesses that need to process credit cards on the go. The reader itself plugs into a smartphone or tablet. After customers swipe their credit or debit card through the reader, the payment is processed automatically and the funds sent to the merchant's bank account within a few days.… Read more

KooBits 4.0 bills itself as "the place to shelve my e-books." This free e-book reader for Windows can store and display electronic book in the most common formats, such as PDF and EPUB, but it offers greater interactivity and enriched multimedia content such as games and video with the proprietary KBJ format. It even offers free books.

Koobits opens with a user interface spread out like the open pages of a book. We clicked the welcome screen, which took us to the My Library page. An animated tool tip quickly demonstrated how to create and add new … Read more

The miracle of life, brought to you by a robot.

An Irish couple who lost their unborn son last year recently welcomed a daughter into the world with help from the da Vinci Surgical System robot.

Anne and Patrick O'Mahony became the parents of 6-pound baby Lucy at Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH) last week.

The robot was used to perform a minimally invasive cervical stitch to treat the mother's weak cervix.

The condition can cause the cervix to not close fully during pregnancy, increasing the likelihood of miscarriage. She lost her son at five months.

Conventional cervical stitches may require weeks or months for recovery. Using the da Vinci robot for the procedure can help get the patient back to her normal routine within a week. … Read more

If you have a grown-up financial life, with money in investment vehicles, Intuit has an up-to-date version of Quicken to help you keep track of it all--on Windows. If you're on a Mac, though, you might think Intuit has abandoned you. There's Quicken 2007 for the Mac, but nothing serious after that. And if you upgraded to OS X Lion, Quicken 2007 will no longer work on your Mac. It's the most infamous of the applications that have been left behind by the latest version of the Mac operating system, which no longer runs apps written for the PowerPC architecture, as Quicken 2007 was. What's worse, if you upgrade to Lion, you won't be able to extricate your data from Quicken at all, as no other app can read its proprietary format.

How did Intuit end up screwing over loyal Mac Quicken users so thoroughly? We can take swipes at Apple for prematurely ceasing support of the Rosetta technology that supported PowerPC apps, but Intuit, along with every other Mac developer, saw the end looming for old PPC apps. The light at the end of the tunnel was a 10-million watt Klieg light on a big, loud train. It appears that Intuit simply chose to neglect a portion of its customer base.

It's not quite that simple, of course, and there is finally new leadership at the company that is at least acknowledging the situation. Whether or not Intuit will ever do right by Mac users, though, is still an open question.

… Read more

With rumor and speculation about Apple's removal of Rosetta support from OS X, one of the communities most concerned is the people who have become accustomed to using Quicken 2007 for Mac. Quicken was developed with PowerPC-specific instructions for core components of the software, which has made it a daunting and practically impossible task for Intuit to get running on the Intel architecture. As a result, when Apple drops PowerPC support altogether, Quicken will no longer run. However, there are some new developments that may shed some light on the problem for Quicken 2007 users.

According to The Mac Observer, … Read more

Intuit wants to give its customers a glimpse of the future of mobile payments through an adaptation of its GoPayment service that eliminates the need for credit cards.

Tapping into the growing field of NFC (near-field communication) technology, Intuit's reimagined GoPayment service would let consumers wirelessly pay for items on the go through just a touch of an NFC-enabled cell phone.

With the necessary NFC hardware and credit card information stored on a mobile phone, consumers could leave their money and credit cards at home and use their phones to buy items and services at stores, restaurants, and other … Read more

A new California lawsuit accuses Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, Intel, and other tech companies of violating antitrust laws by allegedly conspiring to fix employee pay, as well as working out "no solicitation" deals with one another.

The suit (PDF), which seeks class action status, was filed today with the California Superior Court in Alameda County and alleges that because senior executives from Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar "entered into an interconnected web of express agreements to eliminate competition among them for skilled labor," affected employees from those companies are entitled to compensation.

"… Read more