financing

Viigo has certainly matured since its early days. While it now grabs weather, financial news, flight status, and sports scores in addition to your news and blog feeds, it's still, at its core, the fastest, most complete RSS reader for BlackBerry. To users' eternal benefit, Viigo makes finding, subscribing to, and adding your own newsfeeds extremely simple with a long list of presets, browsable categories, and a way to add favorite RSS URLs, even from aggregators.

The extra channels to track the weather, flights, and stocks are bonuses, and a testament to the extensibility of Viigo's original engine. … Read more

For a good six months now, Mint has been the go-to app for managing finances on your iPhone. Today, Quicken debuted its own money manager: Quicken Online Mobile. Like Mint, it's free. Unlike Mint, it's passcode-protected.

That protection addresses a long-standing concern: if someone makes off with your iPhone, they can fire up the Mint app and see how much money's sitting in each of your accounts.

Quicken Online Mobile, on the other hand, won't let you in without first entering your four-digit PIN.

To get started, you'll need to create a free Quicken Online account (… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--At the FinovateStartup conference, one thing is clear: a lackluster economy can be the best time for financial start-ups to get new users.

Apps that help people track and manage funds outside of their bank or investment service's site are in high demand, and many of the services presenting at the conference are trying to get those financial companies on board.

Why? Because those companies are still the gate keepers of trust. People are more willing to hand over their account credentials and detailed personal information to larger institutions over some hot, new Silicon Valley start-up. That, and … Read more

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 … Read more

If you are a college student, you should know you now have a much higher chance of ending up with student loans, than if you graduated 15 years ago. And even if you are one of the lucky few who don't, every American is carrying a burden of about $184,000 in government debt and unfunded obligations.

In short, it's important to learn how to be financially responsible. This is the message that mtvU, MTV's 24-hour college network, wants you get via an online flash game called "DebtSki". The game is is part of mtvU's and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's Indebted campaign, an ongoing effort to encourage students to help stop the fiscal crisis in the United States.

It's a very simple Mario-like kind of game, where you maneuver the game character Piggy Banks through a series of obstacles, while trying to collect coins and then making decisions to spend those coins on items.

There are things you need to collect to win the game; other items are discretionary, which could bring you happiness but could potentially put you in debt. You are challenged to create a balance among happiness, debt, and responsibilities. … Read more

It took awhile, but the recession has definitely sunk its teeth into Google's financial performance.

"No company is recession-proof. Google is absolutely feeling the impact," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a conference call Thursday after reporting first-quarter financial results.

The company, as is customary, reported results that most business only dream of, recession or not. Its net income grew 8 percent to $1.42 billion and its revenue, excluding commissions paid to advertising partners, grew 10 percent to $4.07 billion. It generated free cash flow of $2 billion for the quarter, the vast majority of … Read more

Buoyed by continued growth in search and by cost cuts, Google reported better-than-expected profitability for the first quarter of 2009.

Google's net income increased 8 percent annually to $1.42 billion for the quarter ended March 31, the company reported Thursday. Revenue increased 6 percent to $5.51 billion, but excluding commissions paid to advertisers (called traffic acquisition costs), revenue increased 10 percent to $4.07 billion.

On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected revenue excluding commissions of $4.085 billion, a bit more than what Google reported. However, the company cleared the earnings forecast as it … Read more

Google has withstood the current economic troubles better than other advertising-dependent companies, but on Thursday, investors will get to see how well the company's belt-tightening is offsetting the recession's deepening effects.

The search giant, which makes the vast majority of its revenue when people click on ads next to search results, reports first-quarter financial results Thursday after the market closes. So far, though, financial analysts are mixed on whether Google's glass is half full or half empty.

On average, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect revenue excluding commissions to increase 11 percent to $4.085 billion and … Read more

While the Obama administration is working on making government data available on sites like Data.gov for citizens to mash up, a government watchdog group is doing the same for campaign financing information.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics is making 200 million data records from its archive free for anyone to download for noncommercial purposes on its site OpenSecrets.org.

The organization expects regular citizens to use the information, available in CSV (comma-separated values) format, to analyze funding for political campaigns through projects like charts, maps, and mobile applications. The following data sets are available on the OpenSecrets … Read more