TurboTax:Important Information About Your 2007 Tax Return

So I have been doing an intermittent series on using technology to improve your life. Here’s a case where relying on technology could seriously mess you up…

I received a free CD from TurboTax in the mail with their latest software. Pretty cool idea: it’s free until I decide to file. I used TT last year, so I figured that I would go ahead and use it as I wanted to get started on my taxes early to do some planning for our finances. So I start working through it and filled in my income, investments, etc. It then takes me to the “Federal Review” and tells me I owe a freaking large amount of money! I am trying to figure out what happened when I realize that I never entered in any of my deductions! We have several big deductions include mortgage interest and charitable giving, so I’m figuring I somehow missed it. After spending an hour or so looking for it I cannot find it! I finally gave up and sent an email to TurboTax support.

Today (a week later) I got the email shown below with the subject line shown at the top of this blog post. I don’t know how widespread this was, but this was a huge blunder by a very well-known company.

Dear David Bourgeois:We have important information about your 2007 tax return.The TurboTax Home & Business software you installed did not include some of the functionality designed to help you with your deductions and credits. We’ve corrected the issue, but you must update the software next time you use it in order to ensure you claim all of the deductions and credits you deserve.If you have not yet finished and filed your Federal return, please update your software and complete the Deductions and Credits section: Step 1. Go to: (specific URL here) Step 2. Follow the instructions for a One-click Update. Step 3. Click on the Deductions and Credits tab: Step 4. Complete the Deductions and Credits section and finish your return. If you have already filed, please call (888) 777-4160 at your earliest convenience. We’ll walk you through the process of amending your return, if necessary, and answer any other questions you may have. We are committed to helping ensure that you receive every deduction to which you’re entitled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Sincerely, The TurboTax Team

Did anyone get caught by this and actually file? This could be a huge black eye for Intuit!

Lifecasting:

Lifecasting is the practice of making your whole life available via the Internet. This used to be done by attaching a camera to your PC and then uploading everything to the Internet as it happens. A somewhat newer trend is using a cellphone video camera. By having the camera on a mobile device, people can now truly take the camera everywhere and broadcast everything that happens. But are people really doing this? Yes: check out qik.com to see what people are showing.

Just as cellphone cameras have made the availability of pictures from any event available (no matter how obscure, unplanned, or accidental), now cellphone video cameras have done the same for video. David Brin wrote of the Transparent Society and I believe that his vision is coming to be. In his book, he envisioned that all parts of public life would be recorded and used to enhance public safety (as well as to allow us to do things like check on our children, preview traffic conditions, etc.). While he didn’t necessarily include the idea of mobile phones and the Internet as part of this, what is happening today is eerily close to what he foresaw.  One of the overarching ideas in his book is that we are much better off in a world where the public has control over the cameras than  where the government has control.

Let’s look at this from a ministry perspective now. How can lifecasting be used to promote Jesus? How can it be used to encourage people to come to our churches or participate in our organizations? I’m not sure. If we live streamed our services and events? If we hooked up our pastors 24/7 to a camera?! I’m not sure if I want to know what anyone is doing all the time; and I sure do not want everyone to know what I am doing all the time! What do you think?

“Your Google account has been suspended”

Can you even imagine seeing those words? They send shivers down my spine. danah boyd over at her blog tells the story of a friend of hers who had this happen: mail, calendar, documents, social network (Orkut)… All because the person accidentally gave out some information to someone they shouldn’t have and had their account hijacked.

A couple of lessons to learn. First, if you (personally) use an online email/calendar/document management tool (such as Google), are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account? Second, if you as a ministry use a vendor-supplied web site or an ISP, are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account?

This gives a whole new meaning to backing up your data! I, myself, have always thought that I was rather smart for using an online email system such as gmail (and on online calendar and document tool) because then I can get to my stuff from wherever I want, as long as I can get a net connection. After all, Google is never going to die, right? But I never thought about the idea of Google canceling my account for a reason outside of my control.

Of course, there are several solutions to this problem: you can set up a mail client to keep a copy of all your mail and sync your calendar with a client package. Or you can even have one mail account forward all messages to another. But it is much more difficult to synchronize all of the customizations you have made (labels, categories, saved searches, etc.). Several interesting solutions to this have been suggested over at Lifehacker, so if you are interested, check them out.

Strategy and the Internet

When I teach my course in E-Business Strategy here at Biola, one of the first readings we do is Michael Porter’s Strategy and the Internet. Michael Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School who has developed a reputation as the guru of “competitive advantage”. This classic of business strategy, published in the Harvard Business Review in March, 2001, is a bit dated but still a great starting point for understanding how businesses should plan their Internet strategy.

This article makes several key points regarding the use of the Internet for strategy, and several are useful for us as we look to develop a strategy for Internet ministry. The first of these points that I want to consider is the idea of having a strategy for Internet use at all. As Porter points out in this paper:

Even well-established, well-run companies have been thrown off track by the Internet. Forgetting what they stand for or what makes them unique, they have rushed to implement hot Internet applications and copy the offerings of dot-coms…And many established companies, reacting to misguided investor enthusiasm, have hastily cobbled together Internet units in a mostly futile effort to boost their value in the stock market.

Porter is very critical of firms who do not consider their overall organizational strategy before determining how to use the Internet. Instead, he says, companies need to understand who they are and then use the powerful tools provided by the Internet to enhance that strategy. He gives six principles of strategy (taken from one of his previous papers), several of which are applicable for ministries, which I summarize here:

1. Know the goals for your organization. This is the starting point. For businesses, the goal is sustained profitability. For your ministry, what is the goal?
2. Understand that there will be trade-offs, you cannot do everything. What are you good at? What shouldn’t you be doing? What makes your ministry distinctive?
3. The activities of your organization should be mutually reinforcing. Does everything “fit”?
4. Have a continuity of direction. Do not continually reinvent yourself or you will only confuse those to whom you minister.

Does your ministry have a strategy for their use of the Internet? Are you using the Internet to enhance what your organization does, or was it quickly put up as a way to just “get on the net”? This is the starting point for effective Internet ministry. I will continue to examine Porter’s paper and how it applies to Internet ministry in future posts.

And now for something completely different…

I have been following LarkNews for a long time. This month’s stories are especially funny.

And it was only a matter time until this.