Webware

Financial software maker Intuit has signed an agreement to acquire personal finance service Mint.com for $170 million.

"With this transaction, Intuit will gain another fast-growing consumer brand and a highly successful Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that helps people save and make money," Intuit CEO Brad Smith said in a statement Monday. "This move will enhance Intuit's position as a leading provider of consumer SaaS offerings that connect customers across desktop, online and mobile."

TechCrunch reported the deal Sunday night, citing unnamed sources.

Mint, a start-up launched two years ago that tracks personal finance data, became a CNET Webware 100 winner in 2008 and again in 2009. It was also the 2007 winner of the TechCrunch50, which kicks off once again Monday in San Francisco.

Mint's features have apparently helped it attract a younger, more diverse demographic than Intuit's Quicken Online. Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer told CNET News last year that 40 percent of his company's users are women. He claimed Quicken's demographic was still "85 percent men." Assuming that's true, it would appear that Intuit can significantly expand its base with the Mint acquisition.

When the deal is made final, Mountain View, Calif.-based Mint will become part of Intuit's Consumer Group, which includes both Quicken and TurboTax. Patzer will become general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance group.

Although Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online are direct competitors, Intuit said it plans to maintain both products. According to Intuit, they serve "separate and equally important purposes."

The acquisition is expected to become final in the fourth quarter, pending regulatory review.

Mint.com is launching a new tool on Tuesday that's makes tracking personal finances more fun. The service now rewards you for things you're doing to keep your "financial fitness" in check in the same way gamers get achievements in Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games.

Each time you save more money than you spend, avoid bank fees, or come in under budget, it nets you a certain number of Mint points that go toward your total financial score. The goal is to realize the things you're doing right or wrong, and use that information to attain the most points possible each month and compete with others on the service. While it won't show you specific user data it will give you a general idea of how you stack up.

Mint.com will be attributing points to user actions and putting them toward monthly goals.

(Credit: Mint.com )

Along with each goal, the service explains the benefits and follow-through of each action, and in some cases the means to get it done. For instance, if it thinks you can save more money by switching to a specific credit card or savings account it will tell you how to do it and let you make that switch right on the site. The service did this before, but now it's tied to an actionable item where the user will receive an immediate benefit. Users are also rewarded for continuing to do certain goals month over month with collectible badges.

Thrive, another competing personal finance site, also does this tracking method and tells you how "healthy" your finances are on a scale of 1-10. However it doesn't have a points system, or a long-term track of your achievements--something Mint is hoping users will get instantly thanks to experiencing the same thing in modern day games.

Each month Mint will break down points by goal and let you see how far along you are.

(Credit: Mint.com)

The new program is a limited, invite-only beta, but we've got 500 invites set aside for CNET readers. If you're a Mint.com user who is interested in trying it out you can send an e-mail to CNET-getfit@mint.com with the e-mail address you have registered with Mint.com in the e-mail's body.

Mint.com released a new and free iPhone application early Monday. Similar to PageOnce's mobile efforts, Mint's lets you monitor your credit card and bank accounts from your phone. It also throws in things like your monthly budget, incoming cash flow and expenses, along with any investment accounts you have synced up to Mint.com.

For security, Mint seems to have taken a page from PageOnce in letting you enable or disable mobile access from Mint.com. If your phone gets lost or stolen, you can simply cut off its access to your account, keeping any would-be identity thieves from taking a look at past purchases, or getting an idea of your net worth. It doesn't show any of your account numbers, or even let you add new accounts from your mobile device (which PageOnce does), but can be a treasure trove of information in the wrong hands.

Another thing worth noting about security is that if you don't have your iPhone passlock-protected, anyone can fire up the application and see the dollar value of each of your accounts. I'm a little surprised Mint hasn't placed its own special passcode security system for those first using this app, or even provided the option to require a password between sessions. The best you can do is simply log off in between use, but that's not a good long-term solution.

Security issues aside, it's a good first start for Mint, and for regular Mint users this is yet another way to get at things like your budget and accounts without having to rely on your bank offering a site that can be accessed on mobile devices. The alerts are also very handy and can tell you if a credit card bill is close to being due, if you're spending more than usual, or if there have been large deposits or withdrawals into your various accounts. For those things alone, it's worth downloading the app, just be sure to flip on your iPhone's built-in security lock feature.

Mint's iPhone app lets you check out bank accounts, credit cards and monthly budgets.

(Credit: Mint.com)

One product that slipped under the radar in the past week is Rudder, an e-mail-based personal finance manager that launched at DemoFall and is a replacement for the now-defunct Spendview (coverage). Unlike a destination site like Mint.com, the idea of Rudder is not to have you continually visit a site to track financial activity. Instead, the idea is to have it delivered to your e-mail in-box.

I met with its creators last week to talk about what would make someone want to get all of this piped into a place where they might already be getting information overload. Rudder founder and CEO Nikhil Roy told me it's more of a utility for trying to cut through all the numbers and get to what's most important--like how much money you can actually use once bills have been paid.

Rudder's name for this magic number is "what's left" and it figures out what you've got for discretionary spending based on when you're getting your next paycheck and what's in your various savings and checking accounts, compared to credit card payments and other bills that need paying off. The entire process is shown to users, something Roy hopes will educate as much as it does take the work out of doing the math yourself.

Rudder delivers personal account balances to your e-mail and figures out what you've actually got left to spend in between now and your next paycheck.

(Credit: Rudder/CNET Networks)

In addition to this core overview of your finances, you can also set-up reminders when it's time to pay bills. The system will automatically figure out what bills you're paying after keeping an eye on your bank account and credit cards for a few months. You can also add them in manually.

The personal finance Web application Mint is adding investment tracking, making it a more well rounded service for people with moderately complex financial situations, as opposed to people who care solely about cash flow.

(See initial review: Mint: Solid but incomplete online personal finance.)

As it does with cash and credit accounts, the investment feature connects to your online accounts and reads in the data from them. You can get historical data only as far back as your brokerage site will provide it. However, there's no capability to enter in your historical data (like purchase date and cost) for stocks you've owned for years.

As soon as you point Mint at your accounts, you'll be able to use it to visualize what's happening in your investments, and in this area, Mint really shines. The Flash-based charting interface shows you either account value or comparative gains and losses by default, instead of stock price charts. It's a more holistic way to look at investments, and appropriate for Mint's mission.

Mint shows you how well (or not) your investments are doing.

(Credit: Mint - demo data)

The service also collects data on fees that show up in your stock accounts--important data that most online trading and retirement fund sites don't go out of their way to highlight.

Silicon Valley denizens waiting to get rich off their prepublic company stocks will find, though, that Mint doesn't track vesting schedules on stock options. It also doesn't yet track loans, although CEO Aaron Patzer says tracking for student loans, car loans, and mortgages will be added around June, when the service official ends its beta period.

My grocery expenses compared with other Mint users in San Francisco, who must not have families or houseguests, ever.

Other new features in Mint include deeper comparative data. You can now see how much other people are spending each month in each spending category (such as "groceries"), compared with you. Patzer says Mint's smart auto-categorizing is a piece of making this work. It doesn't hurt that most of Americans' personal spending is debit- or credit-card-based; cash is not automatically categorizable.

In some cases, Mint can get even more specific than categories, and analyze comparative spending per vendor. Mint has over 225,000 users, Patzer says, which yields enough data that it can tell you, for example, how much people like you spend each month at your favorite fast food restaurant.

Quicken users should take note that Mint does not let you actually transact. You can't pay bills, trade stocks, or do anything else to spend your money. It's just a tracking service. You have to go elsewhere (banks, brokers) to move your money around. However, as a tool for insight it's quite good and getting better.

Mint is, and will remain, free. The new features will be rolled out to public beta on May 6, but Webware readers who use Mint can get priority access by visiting www.mint.com/webware after 9:00 a.m. PDT today.

See also: Wesabe, Expensr (just acquired by Strands).

PageOnce is a very new take on an old idea. Take your standard widget-based feed reader such as Pageflakes or Netvibes and replace its blog and RSS feed widgets with financial tracking tools to let you keep an eye on bank accounts, credit card transactions, and various bills. It promises to offer you all the things you love about accessing your private personal information, while presenting it like you're scoping out your favorite feeds about gadgets and odd news.

One of PageOnce's best features is that it's very fast, and makes it easy to get going. There's a directory of pre-existing services to choose from, and if you come across one that's not listed you can send in a request for it to be added. I very easily found my bank, phone provider, and various credit card accounts. It also let me add things such as my Facebook news feed, Netflix queue, and mileage number from my airline--something I don't really need to check on a daily basis, but why not add it, right?

Besides the usual social stuff and e-mail accounts, you can also keep an eye on financial data from various bank accounts, credit cards, and billing services (not pictured).

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Like the service's namesake would suggest, all this action takes place on one page, but you can also cycle through the six major categories (finance, shopping, e-mail, etc.) as you would using self-created tabs on other customizable start pages. The added benefit of going to each of these specialized pages is that the widgets are larger and contain their entire set of data instead of just a brief overview. This was especially useful for my cellular phone bill, which offered up a forecast of how many minutes I was on track to using by the end of the billing cycle, something my carrier doesn't even offer on its billing pages. On the other hand, you can't reorder what's on any of the pages, which is incredibly useful, and will hopefully be added in later versions.

My one reservation with using services like this, and others that deal with financial data (see Mint and Wesabe) are that they just freak me out. There's just something about giving a third party service so much of my personal financial information, that it doesn't matter how secure it is, or how much the data is anonymized on the way there. That said, PageOnce uses a variety of bank-level security measures to keep your data safe including high-level encryption, SSL, firewalls, and vulnerability tests from third party security consulting agencies.

The service is currently in private beta, although we've got 500 invites that have been made available to Webware readers. You can get yours by going here.

[Thanks to Webware reader Kyle for the tip] ... Read more

Intuit will release the Web version of Quicken on January 8. I just got a demo and spent some hands-on time with the beta of the app. The answers to the two big questions about the app are: Yes, Mint should worry. And No, Quicken Online is not going to cannibalize Quicken's software sales. (See previous news story: Intuit building Quicken Online.)

Easier to use, but does less

Uh-oh.

Like Mint, Quicken Online is targeted at people with "simpler financial needs" than typical Quicken desktop users, Quicken product manager Jim Del Favro told me. By that he means younger users who haven't yet seen their financial picture complicated with mortgages, investment portfolios, and employee stock option plans, financial instruments that Quicken Online does not support. In contrast, Quicken desktop lets you cook your own books a hundred different ways. (See reviews: Mint; Quicken 2008.)

Like Mint, Quicken Online pings your financial institutions on your behalf and always shows you just what your banks and credit card holders know about your accounts. Quicken Online is based on a very strong cashflow management message. The home page is titled, "Am I living within my means?" It shows you, in three big boxes, the money you've earned in the last 30 days, what you've spent, and the difference. If the income is less than the outgo, the very stark third summary box tells you by how much, with the headline, "So, I overspent."

The product does not provide bill payment or presentment services. Rounding out the billing functionality is slated for future updates. However, Quicken Online does try to determine which of your expenses are bills, and it will remind you each month before it expects those bills to come due. It can even send reminders to your mobile phone.

A quick snapshot of your cashflow

(Credit: Intuit)

For tax year 2008, Quicken Online will integrate with TurboTax Online (review), Del Favro told me. That's big.

In the beta I tried, setting up accounts was easier than it was in Mint's early days. The service knows about more than 5,000 banks and credit card issuers, and getting it to download your data is a simple matter of providing user IDs and passwords. As with Mint, you have to trust Intuit to keep your passwords safe. Intuit has the marketing advantage in this regard, since the company has been in the personal finance business for more than 20 years and has earned users' trust.

... Read more

Quicken: Too Buggy.
Mint: Too Simple.

Really, it all comes down to that. Neither product can be considered a serious solution for personal finance. In the software vs. webware battle, neither platform wins. But you lose.

... Read more

Into a sea of online personal financial services wades billQ, a bill management service that promises to store your one-time and scheduled bills and alert you before they're due.

Unlike competitors like Mint, Wesabe, and others, there's no bill pay engine, no money-saving deals, and no hot financial tips. For now, billQ is strictly positioned as information management, and for a lot of folks that's the right load.

Add and manage bills
The site is visually appealing in Google-esque minimalism. Adding and viewing bills is intuitive on billQ's clean, user-friendly interface. Tweaking account options and adding from a noble menu of additional tools are also easily done.... Read more