BillShrink is a web service that helps you find the best deals on cellphone service, credit card accounts, and even the best gas prices. Since launching a year and a half ago as a wireless comparison engine, the BillShrink team has steadily continued adding new services. Now BillShrink has added bank accounts to its lineup.

In order to find the best savings accounts and CDs, you enter the amount of cash you have saved, an estimate of how much you expect to set aside each month, and where you live. You can also choose additional details like the services you need from a bank including online bill payment check writing, nearby ATM access and direct deposit.

Once you enter all that info, BillShrink will spit out a list of options for your area that should help you save money. For instance, BillShrink may recommend opening a new bank account or a bank account at one institution plus a CD at another.

[via TechCrunch]

Piryx is payments for the social web, but with a host of intelligence and data mining features only available to huge companies and campaigns in the past. With roots in political fundraising, Piryx has a track record that's somewhat impressive, having recently rolled out a site to accept donations for Rep. Joe "You Lie!" Wilson, and claiming another 150 payment taking users nationwide.

The social media element comes to play as users track their incoming payments. By using custom generated urls, users can track where, who and why their customers and contributors took action and slapped down the credit card. Was it that Twitter retweet campaign, a sympathetic blogger or just another happy customer referral? Piryx helps you track the success of the efforts within your campaign.

Piryx is launching publicly with a better payments experience than the common payment sites, but they're looking to own much of the upstream marketing that funnels and fuels eventual payments, as well as providing backend analytics, compliance, and reporting functions which until now necessitated another piece of software and a larger commitment of effort. .

The fee structure of Piryx is higher than that of Paypal, but creating the same tracking and analytics with Paypal would cost far more in effort and time. At 4.5% for first $100k, and a sliding scale running down to 4% for intake of over $1 Million.

Of course, it's 2009 and "there's an app for that". Piryx's DEMOfall presentation includes a developer market, allowing third parties to build and market integration of Piryx with other services and tools. Currently available at launch are apps for Linked-In, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, with more to come.

Also launching with Piryx is a campaign for the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation, raising money with the platform to combat homelessness and poverty in our nation's inner-cities.

There are plenty of Mozilla add-ons already say "Brother, can you spare a dime (if you like me)?" Mozilla is looking to take things one step further with a new Add-ons Contributions Program.

Donations will be accepted through Paypal, who offer reduced fees on micropayments under $12. Developers wanting to push the contributions button can do so using the new options in their Developer Tools for their add-ons.

What's the motivation for Mozilla here? Why, to help developers out, of course. Though if you read the blog post, it's fairly clear that at some point they'll start asking for a "handling fee:"

For this pilot, Mozilla will not earn a percentage of any contributions made by users. Developers will receive all the proceeds from contributions minus the PayPal transaction fee. (emphasis added)

Contributions are, of course, completely optional and the project is totally experimental right now. How things shake out if this evolves beyond a pilot program remains to be seen.

What are your feelings about this? Share 'em in the comments!

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.

OK, so it's really just a chance to win $10,000 (Australian), but would you?

You'll have to do a few things to get in the action. First, of course, you'll have to become a legal resident of Australia. The DIAC website can help you with the process. Once you've checked that off, you also have to follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter to get the daily clues and then put on your Columbo trench coat and use IE8 to uncover the road to riches.

Gotta love the tagline they used: "But you'll never find it using old Firefox (So get rid of it, or get lost.)"

Oh, you crazy Aussies!

I know it's a contest to promote their own browser and it makes sense to use proprietary features to ensure people are actually using IE8, but how Microsoft is that? "This is the most compliant Internet Explorer yet, but we're running our least compliant contest ever using it! Yeeeeeeeeeehaw!"

Wouldn't we all love it if the winner used Firefox and IETab to pull off a win? To quote Bart Simpson, "The ironing is delicious."

[via NeoWin]

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.

$timator is a site that purports to estimate the true monetary value of your website. Simply enter a URL, and $timator goes to work, analyzing things like search engine placings, back-links, and site structure to come up with an ultimate dollar value.

When I tried it for my 5 year-old personal blog, it came up with a relatively modest $1979, which to be honest feels a little generous (but I'll take it). However, Download Squad is apparently worth well over $31 million, which seems more than slightly absurd, particularly considering that based on this screenshot google.fr is valued at just over $18 million.

These "your website is worth x amount of money" have to be taken for what they're worth: a fun tool to play with and dream about how you could buy a few extra cases of beer if you were to sell your site. If Download Squad were for sale, can you imagine the party we could throw if we sold it based on $timator's valuation? You're all invited.

While it's not any great benefit to someone living in the middle of nowhere like me, TaxiMe offers a nice service for city dwellers.

By querying Google Maps for distance information TaxiMe will quickly provide you with an estimated cab fare. It's a great concept, but I ran into a rather bothersome issue. While Google Maps will handle input like "Polo Park Winnipeg mb" without a hitch and automatically find the street address, TaxiMe won't.

While the TaxiMe form does ask you to "please make sure the address is typed in the following format," most of us probably don't know the street address of our shops or restaurants. That means you've got to go to Google Maps first to locate the address, then head back to TaxiMe and execute your query.

Still, the estimation is pretty slick, its rates are adjustable, and you'll also be given phone listings for relevant taxi companies. For anyone that needs to cab it to an unknown destination, TaxiMe is a nice way to figure out how much cash you're going to need to get there.

[via Listio]

Check this out y'all:

A NYT article says that Americans waste $650 BILLION dollars over-checking their email obsessively. BILLION. Not Millions. Not Thousands. BILLIONS. Crazier? We waste $650 BILLION dollars trying to get back into the groove of work after checking our email obsessively.

Why do we do it? Are we that afraid of missing something?

Some of us here can say that we too check our email obsessively. Even going so far as to click on the Gmail logo over and over to refresh the page. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you're apparently not alone.

How do we stop? How do we combat this problem? Do we love email that much? We hear people complaining all of the time about information and email overload, so maybe we're trying to get a jump on controlling it before it controls us?

Many questions and not a lot of answers, but if these numbers from the NYT are true, oh boy do we have to change some things.

First things first.

Stop. Look, and Listen.

• Stop checking your email so often
• Look and notice that Gmail already refreshes itself
• Listen for emails to come in automatically via POP or IMAP
  

You won't miss something.

What's your favorite way to catch email? We find that checking email on the mobile slows us down a bit. Unless you get too obsessed with that...can you say Crackberry?

Lets hear your thoughts in the comments.

[via silicon valley insider]

Want to save up for a new house, car, or computer, but don't have the self discipline to set aside a bit of your paycheck every month? SmartyPig is an online banking service designed to help.

Here's how it works. You set up an account, tell SmartyPig how much you want to save, and when you want to save it by, and the service will tell you how much you need to set aside each month. You can then set up an online savings account with a pretty decent interest rate to start saving. Like ING Direct, HSBC Direct, and other online bank accounts, SmartyPig offers higher interest rates than your typical neighborhood bank because the company doesn't have the same administrative overhead costs as a bricks and mortar operation. SmartyPig also partners with a real bank (West Bank), and the accounts are FDIC insured.

In addition to helping you setup a savings account to reach your goal, SmartyPig offers one more feature. Other users can pitch in to help you save. Say your friends, relatives, or coworkers really want you to have that big screen TV so that your football parties aren't as dull as your charades shindigs. They can transfer money from their accounts to yours for free, or make contributions with a credit card, which will be subject to a 2.9% processing fee.

[via Somewhat Frank]

Time is money. And every time you have to sit down with your boss, coworkers, and some random consultant thinking what a big waste of time this meeting is, you could also argue that it's a waste of money.

Meeting Miser helps you figure out just how much money. The little web app works by pulling in average salaries for various job types and determining what their time is worth. So next time you sit down at a meeting, just open your laptop and pop in the job titles of all the attendees. Click the start button and watch the dollars rack up.

Somehow we doubt you'll actually show the total to your boss as proof that you should be allowed to skip the next meeting. But at least you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that your boring meeting has been scientifically shown to be a complete and utter waste.

[via New York Times Bits Blog]

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.

The world of video advertising has only just begun. Google announced AdSense units using YouTube videos, and now Blinkx will be rewarding users for sharing video online.

Google offers AdSense customers a chance to provide exclusive content by placing ads over the top of online videos. But these flash ads can be distracting if you're watching a video. Blinkx takes a different approach by putting ads at the top of the video window so that there's never an ad covering the video display.

Blinkx is a video search engine with over 14 million hours of video online. Their technology uses both speech recognition and video analysis software to accurately find videos online from all major sources and now they are integrating this into targeted ad placement.

The Blinkx text ads will get placed together with embedded videos from such popular video sharing sites as YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Veoh, CollegeHumor and Daily Motion. This will work with any video, be it copyrighted or not. It works by simply dropping the embed code from a video site into a form that will spit out the new Blinkx embed code complete with additional ad codes. This will then allow users to place the videos on social networks, websites and blogs to earn revenue per click. Users must have an account on Blinkx Adhoc as well as a PayPal account which they will get paid through when the ads are clicked on.

Blinkx pays you for embedding videos from YouTube, Daily Motion and other sites on your website. It doesn't matter if you created the original video or not. And it doesn't look like there's anything to prevent you from making money on copyrighted content like clips from movies and TV shows.

We assume that copyright holders might get a little uptight about that. But since Blinkx inserts an ad above the video window and not inside of it, you could argue that this is kind of the same as adding a Google AdSense unit to a webpage above content.

Think you have a hot startup idea? Write it down and you could net a little funding.

Bang Ventures from New York is offering $15,000 U.S. for startup CEOs to get their ideas off the ground. "You Be The VC" Candidates start by submitting applications outlining their plans for a new internet startup. These will be judged by handpicked professionals in the startup field to guarantee unbiased results and ensure that funding goes to best idea seen in the public's eye. There are no limits as to the number of ideas that CEO's can submit, just as long as they are in by the deadline of December 2007.

Voting begins March 2008, with the $15,000 prize money, temporary relocation expenses to Cambridge, MA, and living expenses being handed out upon final vote submissions. Winners of the "You Be The VC" campaign will also be able to utilize Bang Venture's support network, resources and materials.

[via killerstartups]