First, I was shocked when the person helping me didn’t know how to answer my questions immediately. I had gotten so used to solving my problems within a minute of calling Schwab that I was honestly surprised to hear the woman say, “I don’t know. Let me check with someone here.” It didn’t help that she and her colleagues ended up having to wrestle with the system for almost 30 minutes to delete an automatic transfer, disconnecting me twice while I was on hold. That being said, they solved the problem, were very friendly and helpful, and offered me $100 for my ‘troubles’. Now that’s how to ensure customer satisfaction!

So let me tell you, Charles Schwab has incredible customer service. Literally the best phone support out there. It’s a far cry from the Dutch bank teller that told me that I couldn’t deposit a check (in euros, though from the UK) into my account because my account hadn’t been open for at least a year – yes, I’m talking about you, Rabobank. But Rabo has otherwise provided me with very good service (though the nickle-and-dime act I saw in my bank statement today isn’t impressive). One area that it, and European banks in general, are far ahead of American banks is transfers. The original cause of my problems with Schwab was that I wanted to transfer some money to my mother’s account at Wells Fargo (aside: a decent bank with a very nice online interface but their management is retarded and thinks that offering 0.25% interest on savings accounts when every other bank was offering 3%+ was acceptable).

I have a Schwab brokerage account and a Schwab bank account. Which one should I use to transfer the money? It shouldn’t matter, right? Wrong. First, I can make a wire transfer online from my brokerage account but have to send in a paper form to make one from my bank account. I’d rather do an ACH transfer than a wire transfer anyway, since the former is free and the latter is $25 per transfer. But wait! Schwab only let’s me add accounts for ACH transfers by mailing or faxing in a paper form and including a voided check for the target account. And my name has to be on the target account. Jesus, it’s my money, let me send it to whoever I want! In contrast, it’s dead simple (and free) to transfer money to someone here in the Netherlands: just ask them for their bank account number and that’s all you need. No advanced setup involved. I put my account number on all my invoices, and I’ve even seen it in some people’s email signatures.

Obviously the security paradigm must work differently in the two countries (something for Bruce Schneier to look into? =). Basically, in the Netherlands anyone can put money in someone else’s account provided they know the account number, while taking money out of their account requires more authentication, including sending in paper forms. It almost seems like the exact opposite in the US, where it seems to be as hard as they could possibly make it for me to put money in my mother’s account. But wait! Not everyone is created equal. In the US we have something usually called Bill Pay, which lets you do just that. If you’re using this sort of feature from your online banking site you can often just find the company you want to pay and send them the money, but, and this is the kicker for me, from the target site (such as I’ve done for my AMEX card) you just enter the routing code and account number found on all your checks and it’s set up. Why can American Express take money out of my account using ACH after I provide two numbers but I can’t send money from my account using ACH without providing written documentation and a whole stupid voided check!?! If this setup is supposed to be so secure and to prevent someone from draining my bank account, how do they do know that someone hasn’t hacked my AMEX web account (or even is using their own) and is fraudulently charging the credit card bills to my bank account, thanks to the information they can get off any of my checks (and, then, is hardly super secret)?

If the US got its act together then we could have real electronic checks, not the ‘electronic checks’ I got from Jack via his Citibank account a few years ago: he entered my details into his online bank site and I was sent an actual paper check printed out by Citibank North Dakota, NA or something ridiculous like that! If nothing else there’s an economic incentive for US banks to get their act together: they won’t have to pay $0.40 for each ‘electronic check’ they send out. So get with the program!

Though they live in a world class city, San Franciscans have a crippling inferiority complex about New York and even hinting at that will make them very sad or very defensive.Fortunately, there is a fool-proof method for quickly returning the conversation to a positive, trust-building tone. No matter how much you have offended someone from San Francisco, you can always make them feel better by asking them how they feel about Southern California.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Great feature piece in Wired’s latest issue by Chris Anderson on why everything is becoming free. What Anderson says here about the media business model being applied to more and more industries ties in a lot with what Tom Foremski has been saying about Silicon Valley becoming Media Valley.

And walking the walk, Wired is giving away the print version of the issue (to the first 10,000). US addresses only, or otherwise I would have signed up. Though I got a year’s subscription to Wired free once with my $20 subscription to Salon, so I’ve already benefited. =)

Everyone knows that what’s important is people, not distances, and now for the first time we have a map recognizing this.