Being a Citibank customer and an occasional user of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, I am glad to see that the bank has launched a Citibank app for the Kindle. The app is available for iPad as well. While I prefer the iPad, and since I am waiting for the new one, I downloaded and tried the app. It does all the basic things I want it to do.

I have seen quite a few mainstream apps starting to show up on the Kindle Fire. It is a sign that in the somewhat confusing Android world, Kindle Fire is a attractive option for app developers and mainstream brands such as banks. The sales of Kindle Fire have been growing at a decent clip so I’d expect even more developers to start gravitating to the platform soon.

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I took matters in my own hands by installing Google Wallet myself. I first had to root my phone and install a custom recovery application. But after that, it took me all of five minutes to install Wallet by following the steps here on the XDA-Developers site. It’s not something I’d recommend to casual smartphone users, but if you’re one of those that root your phone or install custom software, it’s a simple process.

Google provides a $10 credit for all new Wallet users, which I received upon signing in to the software with my Google account. You can also link a Citibank MasterCard to the Wallet app, so I did that too. Citi will initially limit your spending to $100, but you can request an activation code to enter in the Wallet app for access to your full credit line. I didn’t do that until after my first purchase.

Here’s an admittedly bad video of my first Wallet use at a gas station; I was juggling two phones while trying to keep my personal information off-camera (and trying not to cause an explosion by using a smartphone at the pump!), so this didn’t work out the way I had planned. And of course, doing multiple takes would cost more money, so bear with me. I’ll do a better video soon; promise!

I routinely pay for goods and services with a PayPass-enabled credit card, so the experience was very similar. Google Wallet requires a four-digit PIN to be unlocked and then, instead of holding a credit card near a wireless terminal, you simply hold the phone near it instead. My phone vibrated, and the gas pump made a small acknowledgement sound once the NFC chip was recognized. I was able to immediately pump my gas, and the transaction appeared on my smartphone’s display.

There’s an area in Google Wallet to make notes on each transaction, which is nice. You can also have the location automatically recorded. I tend not to get paper receipts for electronic transactions, but I know some people do. It would be nice if Wallet let you take a picture of the receipt and attach the image to the specific transaction.

From a safety perspective, I have no real concerns. I’ve already been making purchases at wireless terminals with my credit cards for at least two years. This is no different. In fact, it’s probably more secure. Anyone can find my credit card and use it to buy things. But on my phone, someone would have to unlock my device to gain access to it, then also know the PIN for Google Wallet.

Overall, I find Google Wallet to be simple and effective. I used it again today at a McDonald’s; it should work at any of the PayPass terminals in the U.S. As a result, I plan to keep using it as often as possible. After all, I always have my phone with me.

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Google has already put $55 million into that 1.5 GW wind farm, dubbed the Alta Wind Energy Center, which is being built by Terra-Gen Power. Google is structuring the deal in the same way as its previous investment in Alta Wind, and is again working with Citibank to create a leveraged lease, where Google and Citibank purchase part of the project, then lease it back to Terra-Gen, who will manage and operate it. Google now has invested $157 million into 270 MW of wind generation at Alta Wind.

Google says it’s not buying the electricity directly from the project, and says the returns are reason enough for the investment. The wind power will be sold to utility Southern California Edison under a power purchase agreement that was signed in 2006. But as I’ve written before (GigaOM Pro subscription required), giving Google more control over the energy it needs for its data centers could be a smart investment in the long run.

However, the amount of money that Google is investing in clean power is truly awe-inspiring (or maybe terribly shocking if you are a Google shareholder). Just earlier this month Google created a $280 million fund for solar installer SolarCity, its largest clean power investment to date, and its first in residential solar rooftops. Here’s a run down of what Google has backed in the clean power space:

• SolarCity rooftop solar fund. Google has created a $280 million fund with home solar installer SolarCity. This is Google’s largest investment in clean power to date, and its first in home rooftop solar.
• The world’s largest wind farm — in Oregon. Google is investing $100 million in the world’s largest wind farm, the 845 MW Shepherds Flat project under construction in Oregon.
• North Dakota wind farm. Google is investing $38.8 million into 169.5 MW worth of wind projects developed by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.
• East Coast wind farm backbone. Google has invested part of the fund for an East Coast transmission line that is meant to link offshore wind farms, and which recently got an approved rate of return for the project at 12.59 percent.
• Wind power from Iowa wind farm. Google’s first deal for its subsidiary Google Energy — which can buy and sell power on the wholesale electricity markets — plans to buy wind power from 114 MW of wind energy via a wind farm in Iowa owned by NextEra Energy Resources.
• Wind power from Oklahoma wind farm. Google’s second deal via its subsidiary Google Energy is to buy 100 MW of power from a wind farm that’s under construction in Oklahoma by NextEra Energy Resources.
• BrightSource’s solar thermal project. Google plans to invest $168 million into a solar thermal project being built by startup BrightSource Energy in California’s Mojave Desert.
• German solar project. Google is investing €3.5 million ($5 million USD) into a solar photovoltaic farm in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, which is near Berlin.
• Greentech startups (these are small investments). Google (through a combo of Google Ventures and Google.org) has invested in at least nine “greentech” startups, including battery maker ActaCell, electric vehicle maker Aptera, efficient car maker Next Autoworks, geothermal company Alta Rock, neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing company RelayRides, weather insurance company WeatherBill, smart grid company Silver Spring Networks, biofuel maker Cool Planet Biofuels, and efficient power gear conversion tech startup Transphorm.

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Google says it’s not buying the electricity directly from the project, and the returns are reason enough for the investment. Google and Citibank are using what they call a leveraged lease, and are purchasing part of the project, then leasing it back to Terra-Gen, who will manage and operate the project.

With this investment, Google has now invested over $400 million in clean power projects, an area outside of its core competency. But as I’ve written before (GigaOM Pro subscription required), giving Google more control over the energy it needs for its data centers could be a smart investment in the long run. Here’s a run down of what Google has backed in the clean power space:

• World’s Largest Oregon Wind Farm. Google is investing $100 million in the world’s largest wind farm, the 845 MW Shepherds Flat project under construction in Oregon.
• North Dakota Wind Farm. Google is investing $38.8 million into 169.5 megawatts worth of wind projects developed by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.
• East Coast Wind Farm Backbone. Google has invested part of the fund for an East Coast transmission line that is meant to link offshore wind farms, and which recently got an approved rate of return for the project at 12.59 percent.
• Wind Power from Iowa Wind Farm. Google’s first deal for its subsidiary Google Energy — which can buy and sell power on the wholesale electricity markets — plans to buy wind power from 114 MW of wind energy via a wind farm in Iowa owned by NextEra Energy Resources.
• Wind Power from Oklahoma Wind Farm: Google’s second deal via its subsidiary Google Energy is to buy 100 MW of power from a wind farm that’s under construction in Oklahoma by NextEra Energy Resources.
• BrightSource’s Solar Thermal Project. Google plans to invest $168 million into a solar thermal project being built by startup BrightSource Energy in California’s Mojave Desert.
• Solar German Project. Google is investing €3.5 million ($5 million USD) into a solar photovoltaic farm in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, which is near Berlin.
• Greentech Startups (these are small investments). Google (through a combo of Google Ventures and Google.org) has invested in at least nine “greentech” startups, including battery maker ActaCell, electric vehicle maker Aptera, efficient car maker Next Autoworks, geothermal company Alta Rock, neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing company RelayRides, weather insurance company WeatherBill, smart grid company Silver Spring Networks, biofuel maker Cool Planet Biofuels, and efficient power gear conversion tech startup Transphorm.

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It was clearly a mistake on the bank’s part — one which highlights the prevailing subtle forms of homophobia and/or lack of understanding we see periodically from some big corporations. Someone there made a misguided decision in reviewing our content and the systems and policies of the bank allowed it to go through.

According to a statement released by Citibank, the institution conducts regular “due diligence” on its business accounts, and says it reserves the right to “decline or suspend an account if we find illegal or discriminatory content, or if the site involves gambling or pornography.” However, it adds that as a result of certain (unnamed) incidents, “we have made it clearer to our bankers what the due diligence process entails [and] beyond that specific due diligence…we do not monitor or evaluate our customers’ web content.”

As far as I’m concerned, the part of the Fabulis incident that makes Citibank look the worst isn’t the blocking or threatened termination of the startup’s account, although that is pretty bad — it’s the repeated attempts to sweep the issue under the carpet and/or change the bank’s story as it was happening. At first, the bank tried to pretend that the affair was simply a “misunderstanding,” and blamed it on some missing documentation. Only after Goldberg refused the initial apology and continued to blog and post to Twitter about it did the bank finally admit that it had made a mistake and apologize.

Here’s a quick tip, guys: When something like this breaks loose in the blogosphere or on Twitter, your best option is to get out in front of it, not to pretend it didn’t happen.

Post and thumnail photos courtesy of Flickr user autumn_bliss

Updated: Fabulis, a new venture-backed startup from Jason Goldberg — founder of socialmedian.com and Jobster — says that its bank account was recently blocked by Citibank, without any notice from the bank. According to a phone conversation with someone from the bank, the block occurred because of “objectionable content” on the startup’s blog. There were no details on what the content was, but could it have something to do with the fact that Fabulis is a social network and lifestyle service that is aimed at gay men? Goldberg describes it in a blog post (hat tip to TechCrunch for noticing this first, along with Feedjit CEO Mark Maunder):

In a bit of strange and disturbing news, fabulis discovered today that someone(s) at Citibank had decided arbitrarily to block fabulis’ bank account due to what was described to us on the phone as “objectionable content” on our blog. In fact, the account — it turns out — was blocked a few days ago without anyone letting us know about it by phone or email.

As Goldberg notes, there are at least two issues here, and possibly three: one is that Citibank appears to be blocking or putting a hold on bank accounts because of content on a company’s blog — and doing so apparently without providing any notice to the company itself. Since when do banks review the blogs of companies that have accounts with them, and determine whether to give them access to their funds based on what they find there? The other issue is that the bank appears to have done this solely because there was gay content on the Fabulis blog (which doesn’t seem to have anything else on it that might fit under the term “objectionable content”).

In a comment on a post at Hacker News, Goldberg says that he spent three hours on the phone trying to sort the issue out, and that while he doesn’t think Citibank is a homophobic institution, he does think that “some compliance officer is a moron who made a really stupid decision.” The Fabulis founder also points out in his blog post that Fabulis isn’t exactly some shady red-light web site, but a well-funded startup backed by the Washington Post, Mayfield Fund’s Allen Morgan and Burson-Marsteller’s Don Baer. Goldberg, who was a co-founder of Jobster, also started and ran socialmedian.com, which was sold to Xing in 2008. For more on Fabulis, check out the site’s Q&A with Goldberg here.

The Fabulis founder says that a Citibank employee promised to review the site today, and that “if we do not get a good response to this on Thursday we are moving our bank account to a bank that respects and appreciates our business.” Goldberg is right to be upset if Citibank has in fact blocked his company’s account because of some unspecified content on the Fabulis blog. Could it be some kind of “cataloguing error,” as Amazon explained when gay-themed books all of a sudden disappeared from its index last year?

Update:

In a new blog post, Goldberg says that he spoke with a Citibank employee about the issue, and was told that the bank had decided to terminate the startup’s account because the “content was not in compliance with Citibank’s standard policies.” The Fabulis founder says that the bank’s management promised to review the situation today, but added that “regardless of Citi’s response we have decided we’re taking our banking elsewhere.”

We’ve contacted Citibank and will let you know if and when we get a response.

Update 2:

A new update on the Fabulis blog says a Citibank representative has called and apologized. According to Goldberg, the bank spokesperson said that “all 3 of the citibank individuals who over the past 24 hours each individually claimed that fabulis’ account was to be terminated for compliance issues around the content of our site, were all wrong to have said what they said.”

Update 3:

Citibank emailed this statement:

Citibank sincerely apologizes to Mr. Goldberg for this misunderstanding. This situation had nothing to do with the content of his web site and any comments by our staff to the contrary were incorrect; we are reviewing what happened. This was a technical issue about missing documentation that is required for new business accounts. Once we resolved the situation, we unblocked the account immediately. Mr. Goldberg is a valued customer and we appreciate his business. Also, Citi is strongly committed to diversity, including support for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, and other organizations promoting diversity. In fact, this week Citi has announced the financing for the True Colors Residence, a housing facility for homeless GLBT youth in New York City.

Update 4:

Citibank may have thought that an apology would make its Fabulis problem go away, but they were mistaken. Jason Goldberg wrote a follow-up blog post called “Inside the Citi circus,” about how unsatisfactory Citibank’s apology was, and giving even more details about how various employees of the bank had referred to objectionable content on the site — at one point even suggesting that he actually come down to the branch to view the specific content — and how this clearly was not just some kind of “misunderstanding” over some missing documentation. In response, he got a further apology from the bank, which he also posted, saying it was much more sincere and that he had accepted it in good faith.

A couple of things seem fairly clear from this whole episode: 1) Citibank got a substantial amount of bad publicity, which it will probably get over, and 2) there are probably a lot of people at the bank who will wish that they had never heard of Jason Goldberg or his website before this week ends.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Bob.Fornal

But what’s really is shocking is the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that are being spent to prop up this enterprise. Why are we trying to save a company that Cody Willard, an outstanding blogger (and a TV show host) correctly identifies as criminal?

“These guys should be in prison for criminal incompetence if not for accounting fraud and lying to investors and lenders and regulators,” he says, pointing to lies, lies and more lies from Citibank CEO Vikram Pandit and his stooges. As Michael Lewis so eloquently writes in his obituary of Wall Street, “These people, whose job it was to allocate capital, apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.”

How can an institution, which spends tens of billions of dollars on technology infrastructure, not know that all the risk associated with toxic financial products and bad loads were like TNT sticks strapped around its thighs? Technology is supposed to help keep tabs on when risk gets totally out of hand. In this era of Google, where instant information and its analysis are becoming strategic assets, how does a company as large as Citibank fail to read the tea leaves?

There can be two explanations — they are either dumb or lying. Saul Hansell, in a brilliant piece published earlier this fall pointed out that

… most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of the complex mortgage securities, they said… The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough…. Top bankers couldn’t simply ignore the computer models, because after the last round of big financial losses, regulators now require them to monitor their risk positions. Indeed, if the models say a firm’s risk has increased, the firm must either reduce its bets or set aside more capital as a cushion in case things go wrong…. Wall Street executives had lots of incentives to make sure their risk systems didn’t see much risk.

In other words, they were straight up lying. Pandit practically admitted as much last night in an interview with Charlie Rose last night. He blamed the previous management for not knowing what they were doing and taking on too much risk. What really was shocking was that Charlie didn’t wrestle this guy — who essentially got paid $165 million to just show up at work — to the moral mat.

Citibank, at the very core, is big, fat, greedy and incompetent. When I look at this bank, which has held my money for more than 20 years, I see an obese Roman Senator at a drunken orgy, waiting for Darwin to ring his number.

P.S.: Sorry for going off topic, but I can’t help it and I am angry about incompetence being bailed out in name of looking out for the little guy. Amidst this global economic meltdown it is hard for me to get excited about a new video portal or some mythical deal.

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