financing

LONDON-- Britain's normally gray capital was unusually sunny this week. So were the attitudes of Web developers gathered here for a conference while, across the pond, Wall Street was in full panic mode.

A bright-eyed pack of several hundred aspiring Web visionaries descended upon London's Excel conference center for the semi-annual Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference. Eager developers trawled the show floor's booths for stickers that they promptly stamped onto their (overwhelmingly Apple-manufactured) laptops. One pack of young men strolled around in straw sombreros. Another trio passed some time in between lectures by tossing around a … Read more

We all make mistakes. We date the wrong people, we expectorate at unfortunate moments and, sometimes, we make ill-judged investments. In an atmosphere in which many poor investments are being rescued like lost puppies on a Friday night after the bars close, you might expect some bright tech mind to go all Web 2.0 on the issue.

Welcome, therefore, buymyshitpile.com.

I was directed to this most innovative site by one of America's more renowned literary figures, who, I understand, has already put one of her more regrettable purchases there (asking price: more than $250,000). As all … Read more

The crisis rocking the U.S. financial sector is rippling into the clean-energy business, bruising more mature industries like wind while leaving young start-ups relatively untouched so far.

The unraveling of debt-heavy investment banking firms--including the demise this week of Wall Street icons Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch--means that financing for large-scale renewable energy projects will get harder and more expensive, according to analysts.

"This isn't good news for anybody--it's going to have an impact economy-wide," said Ethan Zindler, head of north American research at New Energy Finance.

New Energy Finance's clean-energy stock index is … Read more

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.

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.… Read more

What was the unlikely culprit behind a 75 percent drop in United Airlines' stock on Monday? An erroneous Google News search, that's what.

The problem was that an investor news service, the South Florida-based Income Securities Advisors, found a Chicago Tribune article from 2002 via Google News and consequently included it in that day's news digest--which wound up on Bloomberg's news wire. The content of the story wasn't the sort you want to be publishing if it isn't true: that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. Considering the state of the airline industry today, it … Read more

The online personal finance service Mint is getting a fresh coat of paint today. It's a good update, clean and attractive. I've been a fan and occasional user of this app since it launched a year ago, so I took this opportunity to talk with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer about what's happened to the product and the company in the last 12 months.

Mint, as you may recall, was the audience winner of the TechCrunch50 event in 2007. That honor carried with it a $50,000 prize, which Mint didn't really need; Mint was already well-funded when it showed up at TechCrunch. (Patzer says the money is sitting in a high-yield savings account, earning interest.) The award did generate press coverage for the company, though, which has helped it grow. Patzer says Mint now has about 400,000 users.

That's small number for a consumer service, but it makes Mint the largest online personal finance service so far. While traditional software giant Intuit has more users of its Quicken software, Mint has more users than the Web version of Quicken (review), or any of the other online personal finance tools like Wesabe and Buxfer, Patzer says.

Patzer believes Mint's No. 1 position is an indicator that he's hit on the right formula for the category. "Mint delivers organized finances without a lot of work," he says. You can set it up in a few minutes and do what you need to do in it in five minutes a week, and "put your finances on autopilot." I concur: Mint provides useful insight and requires very little maintenance.

Mint's different design has made it popular with a different set of users than what Quicken has. Mint's users are younger than Quicken's, and 40 percent of its new users are women. Quicken and Microsoft Money are still "85 percent men," Patzer said.

But Mint's user base is, "1/100th its potential size," Patzer says. Patzer has the Quicken app in his sights. The old-school app is vulnerable, he says. "For many years, they viewed success in the wrong metric." He believes Intuit focused on getting users to spend time in the app, and thus layered in more and more features over the years. Mint, by contrast, is being built to get users out of it as quickly as possible. Plus, he says, Intuit abuses its customers with "sunset policies" on Quicken that force paid upgrades onto users.

Quicken, even the online version, never made "the transition to free," which appears to surprise Patzer. "They have all this information," he said. "They should have been able to help people." … Read more

If you see an increase in the number of 20-somethings driving nice cars around Palo Alto any time soon, maybe this is why: VentureBeat reported Monday that Facebook is ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company's internal valuation of $4 billion. It's slated to start this fall. For early employees of the company, which was founded in a Harvard dorm room, this could mean some legit cash.

Facebook's valuation was reported at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last year, but the company has backtracked on … Read more

Solar company Recurrent Energy on Wednesday announced a $75 million partnership, a deal that highlights the financial models being developing to serve the clean energy industry.

Private equity firm Hudson Clean Energy Partners has committed the money to fund expansion of Recurrent Energy's business, where it installs and maintains large solar arrays at corporations and other organizations. The deal was announced at the Intersolar 2008 conference in San Francisco.

Rather than sell the panels, companies like Recurrent Energy install the solar panels on the customer's premises and then sell the electricity to the customer at a preset rate … Read more

The world of finance is sober, serious business, ever more so in a struggling through economy. Bloomberg's freeware application for the iPhone and iPod Touch gives information-seekers a clear view of the moment with financial headlines, a ticker finder, and a fleshed-out index of world markets.

An appealing dark-themed application, Bloomberg contains a read-only newsfeed and statistics on various exchanges in global markets. Highs, lows, and a graph of yearlong performance are displayed for each exchange--further charts and tables are available for industry and stock movers.

To discover individual stock performance, users simply enter the company name into the … Read more