Intuit Labs is a new website that gives users access to new Intuit products and product concepts quickly or early in the development process. This provides Intuit feedback and user involvement and leads to better products and faster delivery. Intuit has long been known for customer-driven innovation and the labs are another example of this approach.
A number of companies have lab sites and as a trends analyst and forecaster I find these sites very useful. In addition to fun new products, they provide excellent insight on product development directions. In Intuit's case, the new lab site features products that mostly fit in one of three categories:
1. Mobile applications - the lab mobile apps include Quicken Beam for checking bank balances and transaction as well as iPhone and Blackberry apps for Quickbooks Online.
2. Social applications - the lab has multiple Facebook applications as well as a new Accountant Work Exchange website to help accountants with too much work find and work with qualified professionals who have capacity. Intuit's successful small business community site Jump Up started in Intuit Labs.
3. Cloud applications - most of the applications in Intuit Labs are delivered as software as service, which is increasingly being called cloud computing. My favorite is Billing Manager, which we are now using at Emergent Research.
Interestingly enough, Google Labs and Microsoft Research also focus on these three areas. This provides a pretty good view of where these three leading tech companies think things are going.
Disclosure: We've done work for Intuit and Google in the last year.
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