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Online money-saving tool BillShrink launched on Tuesday a new Savings and CDs feature designed to help people find the highest interest rates.

BillShrink, which also offers help on finding cheaper cell phone plans, more advantageous credit cards, and low gas prices, told me in a conference call Monday that it's on track to help users save more than $1 billion by year's end across all three of its money-saving features.

With its Savings and CDs tool, BillShrink now enables people to take the cash they've saved and invest it in a savings account or a certificate of deposit.

BillShrink asks for simple information to get you going.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

To do so, users input basic information about their financial standing, including how much they have saved, how much they would like to put away each month, and the kind of amenities they would like to see from their bank account, like check writing or ATM access. From there, BillShrink delivers a list of recommendations on savings accounts, CDs, or a combination of both, that would deliver the highest return on their money, while still fitting their preferences.

The Savings and CDs tool also allows people to input where they live and what company they work for. With that information factored in, BillShrink can narrow the selections down even further.

According to BillShrink, all the banks in its listings are FDIC insured. The company also said the information contained in the listings is updated weekly. So if a bank has changed interest rates on an account, BillShrink's service will reflect that.

BillShrink features a combo of CDs and savings accounts.

(Credit: BillShrink)

BillShrink's new feature also includes alerts that will send out monthly updates about the best deals based on users' Savings and CDs query. BillShrink's representatives said the alerts account for the choices users have made. They include fees and other applicable charges that might go into a switch to a better savings account or CD. Another alert tells people that rates have changed on their current accounts.

Although BillShrink's tool is decent, it's missing some key features that would make it far more appealing. For example, if a user decides to switch from one savings plan to another based on the alert received from BillShrink, there is no option to inform the site of the change. The company told me that the feature will be coming in less than a month.

Another glaring omission is the ability to transfer all the savings users have tallied from other parts of the BillShrink site to the savings tool to see exactly how to get that money working for them. Right now, users need to input figures themselves.

BillShrink is aware of that shortcoming and plans to deliver a "reporting" feature that will let people track the money they've saved and "transfer" it into other areas of the site. It didn't provide a timetable for that feature.

If you want to try out BillShrink's new Savings and CDs tool, the feature is live on the company's site.

This week, I'm joined by CNET security expert Elinor Mills in a discussion with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer, whose personal finance site is being acquired by Intuit. We grill Patzer on why he sold the company, the future of Quicken, and the security of online financial data.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

I really enjoyed recording this podcast. We had the start-up CEO of the moment in to talk about why he sold his personal finance company, Mint, to Intuit--the company he built Mint to compete with in the first place.

Also, Elinor grills Patzer on the security safeguards in his system. Patzer tells us getting access to Mint data is like initiating self-destruct on the Starship Enterprise: You need three people to give their individual passwords at the same time or no go. Play the podcast for the full content, and for our show notes, including some bonus content from a post-show discussion, keep reading.

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.

Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.

Oh, boy.

Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.

It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.

"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.

Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.

"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.

Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.

"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.

Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.

"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.

Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.

Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."

The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.

"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.

The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.

Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.

"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."

"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."

And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.

Here's a bizarre use of MySpace that I'm actually glad about.

According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice in Columbia, S.C., a man's message on his MySpace page helped authorities arrest him on bank robbery charges.

Joseph Wade Northington, 27, of Roanoke, Va., pleaded guilty Thursday in a Columbia, S.C., federal court to using a firearm during a violent crime.

On January 20, during a visit to North Augusta, S.C. Northington allegedly robbed the Security Federal Bank there of $3,924. After he returned to Virginia, the man with whom he stayed during the visit allegedly recognized Northington in surveillance photos shown on television and notified authorities.

Investigators learned that Northington, who had a gunshot scar on his face, used MySpace, and accessed his page. There they found that he had posted a message mentioning the robbery: "One in the head still ain't dead!!!!!! On tha run for robbin a bank Love all of yall."

Nine days later, Northington was arrested in Virginia.

Northington is now facing a fine of $250,000 and imprisonment for a minimum of seven years and a maximum of life. By Thursday, Northington's MySpace page was still up with the status reading "Wanted."

Considering how he kept his MySpace status up to date, it's going to be very difficult for Northington's attorney to defend him. I just wonder how he's going to survive in a prison where the access to the Internet is limited, if available at all.

When you buy a product online and use either a credit card or Paypal, a significant percentage of your transaction cost--from 2.5 percent to 4 percent when all the fees are considered--goes straight to either the credit card processing company or to PayPal. With so many retailers operating at such slim margins already, this is a material expense. While payment processing will probably never be free, a new company, Noca, is launching today that undercuts payment processing by an order of magnitude: It charges just 0.25 percent for transactions.

Noca, CEO PJ Gupta told me, does not enable credit of any sort. Rather, it's a financial interchange platform that lets consumers pay for goods through direct checking account withdrawals.

Gupta told me he was formerly in charge of Visa's network architecture, and that Noca is built in a more efficient way. "There's no reason to use IBM servers today," as the credit card processing companies do. "There are two to three order of magnitude of inefficiencies there."

He also says that Noca is more secure. Transactions are handled and encrypted by Noca's servers; merchants never see the checking account and bank routing numbers consumers enter (the same is true of PayPal transactions). An additional, adaptive security comes in to play depending on the type and amount of the transaction.

In a live demo where Gupta was buying $10 worth of digital goods from early Noca customer Klatcher, the system asked for a mobile phone number, sent a PIN to it, and required the user to enter that PIN on the transaction form. I didn't see how that added any security at all (the buyer could give out any mobile number), but Gupta told me that if the transaction had been for more money or for physical goods, the verification process might have incorporated Yodlee's system of challenging the buyer to produce personal information from financial records, such as selecting an accurate previous address or amount of the buyer's regular mortgage check.

To pay using Noca, get out your checkbook and copy down some numbers.

Gupta believes that the technology he's built to link into the banks, prevent fraud, and do so cheaply is a competitive barrier. But I am surprised that his customer roster at launch is sparse--only three vendors, and probably not one you've heard of. There are a dozen companies evaluating the system or getting closer to launching with it, Gupta says. There will be major vendors online with Noca, "well before June 30," he promised.

One downside: Noca doesn't offer chargeback or dispute arbitration services. That's between merchants and their customers. But it does give consumers far more detailed transaction statements than credit cards or bank accounts.

Noca is a smart company for the current economy. Credit is tight for everyone, including consumers, some of whom are losing or just throwing out their credit cards. Noca makes online purchasing easy and secure even without credit. And its lower fees could help make goods purchased online less expensive, too.

Investments to the tune of $17 million are a rarity these days, but app-factory RockYou has done just that: the San Francisco-based company has announced that Japanese mobile giant SoftBank and Korean telecom investment company SK Telecom Ventures have invested $17 million to create a new joint venture to build apps for the Asia-Pacific market.

RockYou's Series C venture round, which pulled in $35 million, was in June--with the fresh $17 million, the company has raised $67 million so far.

This marks the entry of RockYou, which is best known for its Facebook and MySpace widgets, into the mobile space. "In Asia, over half the social networking occurs on mobile," CEO Lance Tokuda told CNET News. "It's both Web and mobile, and we think we'll get good penetration. The results on (Chinese social network) Xiaonei so far have been very good." RockYou says it is the first non-Chinese company to build apps on Xiaonei.

There will be a separate team handling RockYou's new Asia-Pacific operations, with operations coming from the new joint-venture investors as well. "In a lot of cases it's more cultural, where they'll take our assets and they'll port them and localize them," Tokuda said.

But there will be synergy as well, with mobile apps likely coming to the U.S. market after they're released in Asia. SoftBank is the Japanese carrier for Apple's iPhone, and iPhone apps created for it may eventually be converted to U.S. versions.

"We have no U.S. iPhone apps, and yes, we will port them back (from Asia)," Tokuda said.

So is the company giving up on Facebook's platform? No, Tokuda said, adding that they plan to keep building for it. Nor is the round specifically designed as recession padding, he added.

"There's still opportunity out there," he explained. "That said, it's good to raise a lot of money and have money in the bank, and this latest strategic round helps."