You can access your bank account online, and your credit cards, student loans, mortgage payments, etc. In fact, you can pretty much handle all of your financial transactions online these days, which is great. There's just one problem. You have to visit approximately 21,874 websites in order to do it. And that makes it difficult to get a good picture of where your money is really going.

Mint wants to be the one-stop shop for all your online financial needs. You can access all your accounts from one page, and Mint can send you e-mail and SMS reminders when bills are due, and Mint claims it can save you thousands of dollars by offering financial advice. For example if you've got a high interest credit card when you qualify for a lower interest one, Mint will tell you. The basic service is free, the financial advice comes with the paid version.

It's sort of like an online version of Quicken, without the Quicken name. So why should you give your bank and credit account numbers to Mint? We're not quite sure yet. The company's been in beta for a few months now, but it really doesn't have a track record yet that would make us comfortable giving it all of our personal information. We know, it's kind of a catch-22. They won't get a strong privacy record until lots of people reliably use their service without getting ripped off. But people might be reluctant to sign up until the company's been around a little longer.

That said, Mint claims that it found an average of $1000 in savings for each user during the initial beta period. And that might be reason enough for some people to try out the new product.

Netvibes and Pageflakes might be the best start pages for the everyday user, but what about those that have to keep in tune with the financial world 24/7? That's InfoNgens job.

InfoNgen is a start page much like Netvibes, or even iGoogle, but highly targets the financial industry. Sections that are pre set on the start page include:

In The News
Economics News
Commodities News
Key Results
Deal News
Product News
IPO News

InfoNgen pulls in articles from such sites as Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch, PR Newswire, Forbes, and top industry locations. To get started and add more content, users are required to sign up for a free account. After that is done, RSS feeds can be added, information can be organized as best suited, and users can discuss content and ideas with colleagues.

[via VentureBeat]

Banking online is a touchy subject. Many old-timers still don't want to touch it with a 20 foot pole due to a ton of privacy concerns, but many of us gravitate towards doing banking on our own time, and at our own convenience.

Wesabe, a company that helps its members by sharing information about where they spend their money and linking to a dedicated community where they can help each other make smarter financial decisions has released an interesting new Firefox extension. This open source extension available for Firefox browsers lets its members automate the secure uploading of bank data to Wesabe accounts, keeping them up to date. Sometimes banks do not provide an automatic method for data downloads like American Express, Chase and USAA. Wasabe now provides this automatically through the extension. Members would then enter a username and password and the extension would auto record the login and download sessions from their bank.

The Wesabe Firefox uploader should allow for automatic uploads from any financial institution. Wesabe says it does not store or have access to any of your banking records.

Everyone knows that Microsoft makes a lot of money off of MS Office, and you know, that operating system that's installed on the vast majority of computers in the US and many other countries. But ever wonder just how much?

Turns out Microsoft made $51.12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year that ended June 30th. That's up 15% from the previous year. During the second quarter of 2007. Microsoft brought in $13.37 billion in revenue, up 13% from the same period last year.

But lest you think Bill Gates is swimming in a pool of $100 bills, Microsoft's profit for the quarter was just $3.07 billion. Umm, yeah, that'd still pay for a lot of swimming pools.

Google, on the other hand, reported $3.87 billion in earnings for the quarter, with a net profit of $925 million. While that exceeded sales expectations, the earnings figure was a bit lower than shareholders had expected, which sent stock prices down.

Dying to know what Google's business was like the past while? With the search monsters track record we know to expect some goodness, that said, Google will be holding their quarterly conference call to discuss the pile of cash they've made.

How has the news of the Postini security acquisition affected things? Or the finalization of the GrandCentral buyout? YouTube hooking with LG? FeedBurners paying options open to all users? The DoubleClick deal? Mobile Picasa Web? Google News Images? Google handing the reigns of its hardware over to Dell? And a handful of other juicy Google news has impacted their bottom line, and this call will clarify how the company was impacted.

The call is on scheduled for July 19th, at 1:30pm Pacific Time. There is also a webcast at http://investor.google.com/webcast.

Microsoft is tapping the social network phenomenon by starting up one of their own. This financial social network will focus on finance professionals, and be targeted towards career roles. By the sounds of things, this financial site could be based of the current Microsoft Live pages idea where users get their own personal blog area with the addition of forums, and on Microsoft Dynamics Live.

I know what you're saying. Oh no, not another social network started by a big tech company, and that's exactly what our thoughts are. With Reuters having announced their financial network set to berecently, we could see a full on financial social network war. However, companies like Microsoft do have built in following already, so the potential impact this network could have in a short amount of time could be quite high.

Could Microsoft announce new communities for sales, marketing, operations, HR, and IT fields later this year?

Earlier this week Yahoo! announced changes that would roll out soon to upgrade aspects of the Yahoo! Finance property. One of these changes, and probably the most significant for daily users, is the completely overhauled Stock Charts.

When Google rolled out Google Finance property, most of the hubbub around their offering was the dynamic charts. These hadn't been seen before anywhere and had a lot of "kewl" factor in them. Even without the kewl charts, Yahoo! continued to be the most comprehensive and most visited financial resource on the web. And now, Y! is rolling out their version of dynamic stock charts with lots of "kewl" factor. Read on for an overview of the new features and my thoughts.