Bank of America – Aggregated Small Business Dashboard Concept (2001)
Back in early 2001, my developed a product called Glue™. What I’ve always loved about the now-patented Glue framework is its ability to aggregate information from disparate third-party Website. We put Glue to good use in this sample Web application for small business owners.
The basic idea is to marry online banking with payroll services and services that vary depending on your industry. Landscapers might get a calendar and weather widget that lets them plan their crew deployments. Restaurants would get an alert widget that showed them whenever someone reviewed them, or a competitor online. Heady stuff for 2001 – pre-Yelp, re-online payroll and pre-widget.
All users would get greatly enhanced graphical cashflow and credit management tools similar to what Mint.com offers today. The project never launched because Bank of America was de-emphasizing small business to focus on integrating investment services (inspired by Merill Lynch) into the bank and ramping-up their mortgage division.
“Hmmm…” we say, with the benefit of hindsight.