intuitive

Is your phone the wallet of the future?

Imagine walking into your favorite cafe and instead of waiting in line to place your order for a large iced nonfat latte and handing over your debit card, you submitted your order and authorized payment from your bank account via an application on your phone.

You can't do that now. But it's very possible that some day you will. It will be a big leap forward getting banks, credit card companies, retailers, and cell phone makers--not to mention consumers--on board with this idea. But a few companies are beginning to provide digital stepping stones to what someday could be a wallet-less future.

On Thursday, Intuit and Mophie (maker of the JuicePack battery for iPhone) will introduce the Complete Credit Card Solution, which fits over the iPhone 3G and 3GS like the JuicePack and has a credit-card reader that uses Intuit's 18-month-old GoPayment mobile payment software. It will be available as an iPhone accessory in Apple Stores.

The idea is to allow small businesses or anyone who needs to process payments that doesn't have a permanent place to plug in a cash register to be able to accept something other than cash on a device many people already have. The hope is consumers would find this more convenient than keeping cash on hand when they want to make a purchase, even from a nontraditional retailer.

While plastic and cash are still the way the vast majority of retailers do business, that could change over the next few years as smartphone usage continues to skyrocket, and more personal finance details are being taken care of online and on the phone. Hardware makers, banks, and payment processors are at least dipping a toe into the water by participating in trials or offering new ways to pay people without using plastic or cash. … Read more

Time and project manager

Advanced Time Reports is a project management tool combined with time-tracking and reporting features in a single, multiuser solution optimized for managing small teams across departmental lines. It has the expected scheduling, reporting, client and contacts, and time sheet functions critical to project and team management. Xpress offers two desktop and two Web-based editions of ATR; the Premier Edition for Windows PCs offers all the functionality of the Professional Edition, with the addition of expense tracking and more team and project management options, but it lacks a few of the Web Premier version's features, such as mileage tracking and … Read more

Intuit Web sites come back online

Intuit's several Web sites, including Quicken Online and QuickBooks Online, are back online following a major power outage that took the sites down Tuesday evening.

In a statement released Thursday morning, Intuit said that after working throughout the night on Wednesday it had restored service to the customer sites that were down since 7 p.m. PDT Tuesday as a result of the outage. Those sites include Intuit's core Web site, QuickBooks Online, Quicken, QuickBase, and TurboTax Online. Intuit advises that in some cases customers may need to refresh their browsers to reconnect to the affected sites and … Read more

Basic budgeting

The market for personal finance software has exploded in recent years, and the quality of these programs varies widely. We're happy to report that Simple Home Budget is one of the better budgeting programs we've come across; the program didn't blow us away, but it's easy to use, and we couldn't find any major faults with it.

The program's interface is well-organized and intuitive, with a helpful calendar in the upper left corner and its major features--transactions, recurring transactions, categories, and overview--arranged in tabs. Simple Home Budget easily passed our primary financial software litmus … Read more

Intuit's Web sites hit by major outage

Intuit's core Web site and its QuickBooks and Quicken online sites have suffered a major outage, rendering them offline and unavailable since 7 p.m. PDT on Tuesday.

In a statement on its QuickBooks support page, Intuit acknowledged the outage but provided no details on the cause or estimated recovery time.

"Service Interruption to Intuit Websites and Applications: Intuit continues working to restore full service to a number of websites and applications that became unavailable at about 7pm Tuesday, Pacific time," read the statement. "Our first priority is to give customers full and complete access to … Read more

Microsoft releases 'sunset edition' of Money

Microsoft Money may be headed off into the sunset, but Redmond has one last version to offer those who are still using the personal finance product.

The so-called "sunset edition" of Microsoft Money was released earlier this month. Although it has fewer features--stripping out all of the online capabilities--this new version of Microsoft Money doesn't require activation, meaning that users who need to install it on a new PC or who lose their product code won't be stuck without their data.

"The Microsoft Money Plus Sunset versions are replacements for expired versions of Microsoft Money … Read more

Mint to give its users long-term goals

Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer on Tuesday is giving attendees of the Finovate spring conference in San Francisco a sneak peek at its next major enhancement. The financial planning and tracking service, which was snapped up by Intuit back in September, is getting long-term goals--a feature its software cousin Quicken has had for years, but that could be overly complicated and disjointed.

Patzer, who spoke with CNET about the upcoming service update on Monday, said the new system has been designed with the same kind of simplicity as the rest of Mint.com, and the goals themselves were decided … Read more

Intuit to buy health care firm Medfusion

Best known for its Quicken software, Intuit is moving further into the health care market through a new acquisition.

Intuit announced Tuesday that it will pay $91 million in cash to buy Medfusion, a privately-held company that sells online services to let patients and doctors' offices interact with each other electronically.

Based in Cary, N.C., MedFusion's services fill a niche in the area of patient-to-provider communications, according to the company. Its online services let patients set up appointments, fill out forms, pay bills, refill prescriptions, and receive lab results electronically. People can contact office staff or ask the … Read more

Monitor money matters on Android with Mint

Article updated 5/3/2010 at 1:28 pm with new details about operating system compatibility.

About a year and a half after releasing a mobile version of its personal-finance service for the iPhone, Mint.com is bringing its free credit-card and budget tracker to Android phones.

As with the iPhone app, passcode-protected Mint.com on Android has you monitoring credit card, bank, and investment accounts; your budget; and your cash ebb and flow. The app presents your money matters in summary form, with the ability to drill down to the item level of a purchase. Follow the trail to … Read more

Can't stick to that diet? Get a robot coach

You say you've tried every diet fad but still can't lose the flab. Maybe your will is as soft as your one-pack. Perhaps only the merciless resolve of an inhuman coach can whip you into shape.

Lucky for you, a Hong Kong-based start-up is preparing to release Autom, a robot diet mentor with a deceptively pleasant demeanor.

Users can talk with the 15-inch-tall Autom and, by using its LCD touch screen, indicate what they've had to eat and how long they've exercised on a given day. The machine, which is linked to the Internet, is designed … Read more