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Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services

Intuit buys Mint.com, sends users running

Intuit, the company behind financial management app Quicken, has purchased Mint.com, a web-based personal finance tracker, for $170 million. Quicken already has a web version that plugs into its desktop software, and Mint apparently isn't going to replace it. Meanwhile, Intuit doesn't have plans to change the way Mint works, and the CEO of Mint is joining the company to direct its online operations.

That's not enough to reassure some Mint users, though, who are fleeing the site in fear of Intuit's awful user experience and propensity to milk its customers for fees.

Felix Salmon, a blogger at Reuters, describes Intuit as "The Borg," and plans to deactivate his Mint account (although he admits he doesn't use it often). Users in Mint's forums are also not convinced that Mint will be helping to improve Intuit, rather than being swallowed and ruined by it.

What do you think? Is the Intuit Borg going to assimilate Mint, or will it stay as it is? Will you be keeping your account, or canceling it? Take the poll after the break!

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Filed under: Finance, Productivity, Web services, Mobile, Web

Track your spending online with TextHog


There's a lot of great financial tracking software out there now. Sites like Mint and Rudder that link up to your bank account and track your spending automatically are great, but what if you don't want to give your account information to a finance site? Texthog is a lot like old-school DIY checkbook balancing, except replacing pen and paper with SMS, email and Twitter.

You can send a transaction to Texthog through one of the aforementioned mobile methods, or just log into the site and add one later. Logging in is also good for changing dates and such if you text a transaction to Texthog after the fact. You can also tag and organize your expenses, and generate spending reports. It might be more work than letting some automated service track your account, but it's also more accurate, because you're recording expenses as you charge them, rather than when they eventually clear your account.

Filed under: Finance, Windows, Microsoft, Commercial

Quicken offers coupons to attract abandoned Microsoft Money users

Quicken discountLast week Microsoft announced that it would be discontinuing Microsoft Money, the company's personal finance application. Download Squad readers came up with a number of great suggestions for anyone looking for a replacement. But the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Quicken. And now Intuit, the company behind Quicken are reaching out to Microsoft Money customers by offering tools to import Money data to Quicken. The company is also offering discounts of up to $50 on Quicken software.

Those coupons start at $20 off the price of Quicken Deluxe, bringing the price down to $39.99. You can also get $30 off the price of Quicken Premier or Home& Business, or $50 off the price of Rental Property Manager. Or if your finances aren't that complicated, you could just try Quicken Online for free.

The coupons are good through July 31st. Microsoft will stop selling Money at the end of June, although support will be available through January, 2011.

Filed under: Finance, Security, Web services, Op-Ed

Is Rudder's security breach really serious or is the web overreacting?

Early morning Tuesday a software malfunction caused a security breach at Rudder, a web based financial management service Download Squad has covered in the past.

It seems a number of Rudder users received email intended for a ton of other users, and in some cases one user received hundreds of emails intended for other users of the service.

Soon after, Twitter went crazy with tweets and retweets about Rudder's security breach, and before you know it a mishap affecting hundreds of users was being widely commented on by thousands of people.

So how serious is it, really?

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Filed under: Finance, Mobile Minute, iPhone

DailyFinance for iPhone


For a while now the top contender in iPhone finance apps was Bloomberg Mobile. Enter DailyFinance's iPhone app [iTunes link], featuring real-time quotes, portfolios and watchlists and some rather impressive charting tools. Mike Rose has a nice write-up over on TUAW, and the DailyFinance site has a good summary of features and a demo video. It's a free download, so try it and let us know what you think in the comments.

Editor's Note: DownloadSquad's parent company Weblogs, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Filed under: Business, News

Newssift: business-oriented news trend browser

Newssift is a way to gauge the media buzz around various business topics, companies and people. It analyzes qualitative data from a whole bunch of news sources, and lets you browse stories on a subject and see if the overall media vibe is positive or negative. It strikes me as a sort of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes for the business world.

Newssift has a search feature, and also a list of popular topics to browse from the front page. You can combine more than one topic into a single search, and save searches if you want to keep up to date on them. Newssift also shows a breakdown of the sources on a specific topic, so you know how many stories are coming from newspapers, TV or blogs. I'm not in the financial field, so I'm not sure how useful a tool Newssift is, but it's definitely an interesting experiment.

Filed under: Business, Finance, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Social networking with your money

Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the concepts are pretty much the same. You follow someone with interests that intrigues you, see what their doing, what their saying and sometimes you do what they say. Now what if they told you where to spend your money, would you? Covestor thinks so.

Covestor takes the social networking formula and applies it to the stock market in a 2 part system. The first requires members with some sort of investment background (we'll call them experts) to build portfolios. The second has average users reviewing these members and if they like what they see, they follow them.

If these experts buy or sell a certain stocks, users get to see that and choose if they would like to buy or sell along side their experts. Covestor is currently working on a fully automated system as well. You'll just be able to put down a bunch of cash and the system will invest your money as your experts invest. Of course as an expert you get a percentage of the action, since people are following your advise.

So is this the next step in social networking? We already take advice on what to wear, where to go and what to eat. Why not take it a step further with having strangers tell you what to do with your money?

Filed under: Finance, Office, Productivity

Show your work with Project Calculator


Are you a freelancer, a student, or someone who just really likes to bill people by the hour? You might get some use out of Project Calculator, an OS X app that helps you keep track of how much time you put into each of your projects. It lets you run a timer or enter your hours manually, and then does all the calculation you need to send someone a bill. You can output your Project Calculator in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML and plain text, so your clients will never give you the old "I couldn't open the file" excuse.

We almost balked at the $20 pricetag for Project Calculator, but after trying it out, we realized that this app can save you a lot of time for the money. Keeping a spreadsheet from scratch is ok, but having everything set up for you and organized by customer and by client is a lot easier and less fiddly. Appropriately, Project Calculator frees up some time for you to actually work on projects.

Filed under: Finance, Internet, Features, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

How to make, borrow, or lose money with P2P lending

Prosper

As you may have noticed, now might not exactly be the best time to get involved in the stock market. Sure, year over year, chances are you'll make money. But there's a good chance that if you throw a few thousand dollars into a mutual fund right now it might be worth less in 3 months than it is today. Fortunately, there's more than one way to turn your savings into more savings. And thanks to the internet, a couple of new opportunities have developed over the last few years.

First up, you might want to take a look at online savings accounts and CDs. Since banks like ING Direct don't have to spend a lot of money on bricks and mortar operations, they can offer higher interest rates than many traditional banks. And even many old school banks offer online accounts with higher interest rates than their traditional offerings.

But thanks to the recent economic downturn, many of these banks are lowering their interest rates. While you could easily open an account with a 5% interest rate a few months ago, you'll be lucky to find one over 3% now. If you're looking for another opportunity, albeit a riskier one, you might want to check out a new breed of financial transactions: social lending services like Prosper, Lending Club, or Zopa.

Read more →

Filed under: Finance, Internet, Google

Google Finance launches in the UK

Google Finance to the UKFor those of you that have been itching to get a pulse on more European company information and UK mutual fund data, Google Finance has just opened Google Finance UK.

Following in the footsteps of Google Finance Canada, the Google Finance Blog states that this is another implementation of a series of sites that will aim to bring localized financial information to users.

Although there aren't any hints of which country will be graced with the next Google Finance localization, 2008 will supposedly see some new features. Hopefully, the people that have been having issues with Google Finance's lack of dividend information will have their wish fulfilled.

[via Googlified]

Filed under: Audio, Business, Design, Developer, Finance, Internet, Video, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Yahoo!, Beta

Yahoo! starts up Internet Program for Investors

Yahoo! starts up Internet Program for InvestorsYahoo! is getting ready to take the wrapper off TechTicker, an online program aimed at technology investors.

TechTicker specifically targets technology stocks in a portal type environment. The new program will offer streaming video, blog posts and breaking news targeting the technology investment sector. The portal and show which are said to be launching in January 2008, pick up where Yahoo! Finance Vision left off in 2002. Thankfully high speed connections are far more common in 2007 and better video compression tools are available to make internet based shows a feasible reality, rather than a pipe dream (no, we're not poking fun at Yahoo! Pipes, ok, maybe just a little). As for the other financial information that will be displayed, we assume it will resemble what Yahoo! Finance already does, but targeting technology specific companies.

With Yahoo! Finance high on the list of financial sites, TechTicker could be headed for great things. Of course, track records aside, we will have to wait for the roll out in order to really decide.

Check out what Yahoo! Finance Vision looked like back in the day.

Filed under: Business, Finance, Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Spendview lets you track your spending in a beautiful way

Spendview lets you track your spending in a beautiful way

The key to saving money is knowing what you're spending it on. If you can keep track of every cent, you can discover exactly where your money is going and act accordingly.

Spendview is an online application that enables users to track and visualize balances and expense data in one place. This is done through an engine that tags and categorizes spending in order to make your finances somewhat exciting. Spendview also uses tag clouds and a dynamic chart instead of old fashioned pie charts and bar graphs. This way you can see all of your data at a quick glance instead of mulling over numerous columns and categories.

Users start out by registering for a free account and adding bank, credit card information and tagging transactions with keywords. How secure is the data you enter? Spendview says that its 'secure', and they do use 128 bit SSL Security. However, you should always be cautious when entering private financial data online.

Other comparable online financial tracking software options include Mint, Quicken, Freshbooks and Gastus.

Filed under: Business, Finance, Internet, Web services

Quicken to go Online

quicken online web based applicationThe leader in personal finance is getting set to launch a strong presence online. All startup finance applications start shaking in their winter boots.

Intuit is getting ready for their winter launch of Quicken Online, a web based version of their personal finance application. If you have worried about security in the past with the recent slew of online financial software, Quicken should ease your mind. Intuit has a strong following due to their consumer trust for desktop applications, and they have been working hard to build that same trust for their web based application. So far it is known that this application will hold basic balance charts, reports, and bill payment services.

Quicken Online is currently in closed testing modes, with beta set to open the middle of September. Look out for further discoveries closer to September.

[via webware]

Filed under: Business, Finance, Office, Productivity, Beta

Keeping track of daily expenses with Gastus

Keeping track of daily expenses with Gastus

Spend, spend, spend.... track, spend. Spending is easy, but tracking expenses and spends is not only time consuming, but tends to slip the mind every once and a while. Once you have a proper tool to aid in daily expenses you are on your way to some healthy financial data.

Gastus is a free online tool that helps people track daily expenses. Expenses can be categorized each month by type and concept, and display charts and graphs for a quick analyzation.

Will Gastus help generate more money or help you to spend less? No. But it will give you a breakdown of where all of your expenses are.

Filed under: Business, Finance, Internet, Web services, Google

Google Finance goes local for Canada

google finance launches in canadaGoogle Finance got a little localization for Canada yesterday. The news was accidentally leaked last week, but its now official.

Canadian investors now have another site to rejoice over and check out relevant market information. With Canadian users being the second largest user group for Google Finance, they thought it was best to build out a localized version. The site provides users with top financial news from Canadian sources, perform Canadian searches, Bank data from the Bank of Canada on the home page, and equity data from the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, and Canadian mutual funds.

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