financing

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?

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

A decline in Microsoft's stock in the days since its Yahoo bid was announced could make doing the deal more expensive, Wall Street analyst-turned blogger Henry Blodget noted Wednesday.

When Microsoft announced the bid on Friday, it offered $31 a share in cash or stock. Specifically, it offered Yahoo shareholders 0.9509 Microsoft shares for each Yahoo share they own.

Right now, both the exchange ratio and the cash price are fixed, meaning Microsoft is offering $31 in cash or roughly $27 in stock. Obviously, all the shareholders would want cash, but Microsoft has already specified that the deal … Read more

Microsoft has more money in the bank than most software companies will make in their entire corporate existences.

Microsoft has more money than many countries.

Microsoft has enough money to buy every open-source software company with cash...several times over. (OK, that last one might not have been saying much.)

And yet Microsoft expects to borrow money for the first time in its history to fund its deal for Yahoo.

This is a testament to just how big this deal is for Microsoft, which has roughly $19 billion on the bank and no debt--both of which are hugely impressive numbers.… Read more

Want to be an international financier, but don't have deep pockets? Kiva.org, founded by ex-PayPal product manager Premal Shah and others, enables you to lend as little as $25 to individual entrepreneurs around the world.

Enter the world of online microfinance. You log in, you choose a loan recipient, you lend $25 or more with your credit card or PayPal account, you get your loan back later. According to the Stanford alumni mag's write-up, 99.67 percent of these small loans are repaid in full. Recipients are small-time business owners--like cobblers, painters, or mobile phone sellers--in developing … 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.)

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.

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

Money is boring, unless you're spending it on something like an iPhone or a cute new pair of shoes.

Or unless you make investment cool, which is what a new company called Thrasher Funds is trying to do. It's a new mutual fund that's targeting the under-35 crowd with a bunch of youth-oriented and tech-focused holdings (Apple, Uniqlo, Diageo, American Apparel, Volkswagen, Google, and Garmin), "investment parties," and a Web site that looks like a Good Charlotte album cover.

"Commercials from financial behemoths only implore Baby Boomers to start planning and saving for their … Read more

Remember, right after Microsoft's $240 million stake in Facebook was announced, when a Forbes blogger reported that two New York hedge funds were also contributing $500 million? And how funny was it that Fake Steve Jobs (also known as Dan Lyons, also on the Forbes payroll) proceeded to post the same news, except that he infused it with hilarious FSJ neologisms like "hedgetard?"

At the time, most people seemed to take it as the truth. After all, the $15 billion valuation for Facebook turned out to be true, so Facebook observers were likely in a state where … 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