Webware

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.

Financial software maker Intuit has signed an agreement to acquire personal finance service Mint.com for $170 million.

"With this transaction, Intuit will gain another fast-growing consumer brand and a highly successful Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that helps people save and make money," Intuit CEO Brad Smith said in a statement Monday. "This move will enhance Intuit's position as a leading provider of consumer SaaS offerings that connect customers across desktop, online and mobile."

TechCrunch reported the deal Sunday night, citing unnamed sources.

Mint, a start-up launched two years ago that tracks personal finance data, became a CNET Webware 100 winner in 2008 and again in 2009. It was also the 2007 winner of the TechCrunch50, which kicks off once again Monday in San Francisco.

Mint's features have apparently helped it attract a younger, more diverse demographic than Intuit's Quicken Online. Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer told CNET News last year that 40 percent of his company's users are women. He claimed Quicken's demographic was still "85 percent men." Assuming that's true, it would appear that Intuit can significantly expand its base with the Mint acquisition.

When the deal is made final, Mountain View, Calif.-based Mint will become part of Intuit's Consumer Group, which includes both Quicken and TurboTax. Patzer will become general manager of Intuit's Personal Finance group.

Although Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online are direct competitors, Intuit said it plans to maintain both products. According to Intuit, they serve "separate and equally important purposes."

The acquisition is expected to become final in the fourth quarter, pending regulatory review.

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 to attain the most points possible each month and compete with others on the service. While it won't show you specific user data it will give you a general idea of how you stack up.

Mint.com will be attributing points to user actions and putting them toward monthly goals.

(Credit: Mint.com )

Along with each goal, the service explains the benefits and follow-through of each action, and in some cases the means to get it done. For instance, if it thinks you can save more money by switching to a specific credit card or savings account it will tell you how to do it and let you make that switch right on the site. The service did this before, but now it's tied to an actionable item where the user will receive an immediate benefit. Users are also rewarded for continuing to do certain goals month over month with collectible badges.

Thrive, another competing personal finance site, also does this tracking method and tells you how "healthy" your finances are on a scale of 1-10. However it doesn't have a points system, or a long-term track of your achievements--something Mint is hoping users will get instantly thanks to experiencing the same thing in modern day games.

Each month Mint will break down points by goal and let you see how far along you are.

(Credit: Mint.com)

The new program is a limited, invite-only beta, but we've got 500 invites set aside for CNET readers. If you're a Mint.com user who is interested in trying it out you can send an e-mail to CNET-getfit@mint.com with the e-mail address you have registered with Mint.com in the e-mail's body.

One of the better ways to get Google Chrome or Internet Explorer-style compacted menus in Firefox is Personal Menu. The add-on comes loaded with options, so for a one-trick wonder it's pretty slick.

Personal Menu compacts your menu bar behind an icon.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

It adds an icon to your toolbar customization window which you can then drag-and-drop onto the toolbar of your choice. I stuck it on the Menus Toolbar next to my navigation and refresh button, because Personal Menu comes with the option to hide the menu bar. By getting rid of the Stop Loading button, because I use that even less than I use the forward button, and the search bar, which is functionally duplicated by the search features in the location bar, I'm able to clear up a significant amount of screen real estate.

The reason to go with Personal Menu, though, is that it lets you heavily configure the menus that it hides. From Personal Menu's Options menu, you can configure which menus appear behind the button, and in which order they're listed. These choices aren't limited to the standard File, Bookmarks, or Tools--any sub-menu from the main menus can be pulled out and added to the drop-down.

For example, if you need to access the Extensions Options menu often, you might want to put that in the drop-down to save time by having to navigate to it through the Tools menu. You can also save menu drop-down configurations, a useful feature for computers running multiple Firefox profiles.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Mouse actions can be configured to alter menu behavior, too. From the Miscellaneous tab in the Personal Menu extension options, users can adjust actions when middle-clicking or right-clicking on the Bookmarks or History buttons, as well as alter the number of pages that appear in the History. Advanced options include adjusting in which direction the menu opens, forcing the menu bar to appear via a hot key, and "emergency response measures" to bring up the menu bar if the toolbar icon accidentally gets disabled.

On rare occasion the extension has grayed-out its menus. It's a frustrating flaw that I fixed by restarting Firefox. Some of the descriptions for advanced features could be written more clearly. I still only have a vague idea of what "Position in where menu of this button shows" actually means. Still, Firefox fans looking to make the most of their screens or make menus more useful will find this to be a must-have add-on.

The redesigned look of Britney Spears' fan page on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

I'm not going to lie: Wednesday's announcement from Facebook wasn't a huge one. The social network unveiled a moderately redesigned home page that puts the news feed even more front-and-center, and has tweaked the "fan pages" that it encourages brands to create to tap into Facebook's 175-million-strong membership.

The "streaming" nature of the revamped news feed is an obvious answer to Web users' seemingly endless thirst for instant news and opinions--I'm looking at you, Twitter. That's a pretty understandable step. So are the easier filtering controls, which make a lot of sense as Facebook members chalk up higher friends-list counts. The update that merits a bit more exploration is Facebook's decision to make its fan pages resemble, both visually and functionally, standard Facebook profiles.

Fan pages, until this point, have been a bit isolated from the rest of the site, with a disparate design and fewer ways to tap into Facebook's notorious viral-buzz machine. Now they'll have more prominence in news feeds, appearing alongside friends-list updates. That's important: Many brands are still wary of their involvement in social-media properties like Facebook, because results are still based largely on anecdotal evidence. There obviously isn't yet a way for Facebook to prove that making brand pages look more like member profiles can boost a company's profit margin, but it's a start.

The redesigned fan pages are also going to be more palatable to public figures, celebrities, and other individuals who, for one reason or another, want their presence on Facebook to be one part social and one part promotional. Among the launch partners for the new Facebook Pages are Olympic champion Michael Phelps and actor-turned-entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, for example. It effectively provides a way for them to network with more fans while skirting the 5,000-profile limit on a friends list proper.

They'll probably like it. Indeed, in the audience of Facebook's presentation, excited uber-blogger Robert Scoble raised the question of when he'd be able to take the 5,000 friend requests that he can't approve (because he's famously hit the friends-list limit) and turn them into fans. (Patience, Scoble, patience.)

More speculatively, the revamped news feed in conjunction with more news-feed-friendly brand pages makes it possible for the site's home page to display a whole lot more than just status messages and photo albums. This is another step toward Facebook wanting to be the ultimate personal home page: if the brand pages work out the way they're supposed to, my news feed could show me not only my friends' St. Patrick's Day party photos but also headlines from news outlets I read, concert dates from my favorite bands, and ski condition reports from my destinations of choice. Theoretically, it can already do that, but the redesign will make it an easier sell to on-the-fence brands.

With The New York Times and CNN among Facebook's flagship partners for the new fan pages, expect news consumption to be front and center very soon. The issue down the road: when it comes to an everything-in-one-place "stream," how much will be too much?

I spent a good part of the last week searching for a simple, free, and safe place to store my contacts online. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

The last time I synched my iPhone, iTunes offered to sync my contacts as well. I clicked OK without thinking. Before I knew it, I had lost about half of my phone's contact entries.

Backup? What backup? The entries in my Outlook and Gmail contacts were woefully outdated, compared to the contact information I stored in my iPhone. I had no choice but to reassemble the lost data phone number by phone number, address by address.

That was a good two weeks ago, and I'm still restoring the lost data. I vowed that this wouldn't happen again. What I needed was the online version of an old-fashioned paper address book.

What I didn't need was a full-blown customer relationship management (CRM) application, but those were all I found at first. I tried WebAsyst, Keepm, and BigContacts, but all three were overkill for my meager needs. (None of the three was able to manage the simple trick of importing my Gmail or Outlook contacts with anything approaching accuracy, either.)

I was about to bail on the whole project when I decided to try Flexadex, a Web-based application that gets your contact information online in a blink. The only fly in the ointment is that the service doesn't use Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, so all those addresses and phone numbers are flying over the Net unencrypted.

What really bugs me is that I wouldn't need a separate online address book if either Gmail or Outlook offered the meager contact management features I need. Have you ever tried editing your contacts in Gmail? Whenever I try, clicking the Edit button opens some entry other than the one I'm trying to change. Just getting all the names in "lastname, firstname" format is impossible.

Editing Outlook contacts is more straightforward, but the entries in your Outlook address book don't travel well. Outlook doesn't let you export to a file in the VCard format (.vcf). And none of the three full-size online contact managers I tried was able to import Outlook contacts without skipping or screwing up much of the information.

I followed the steps described in this Worker's Edge post from last August to move my contacts from Outlook to Gmail. Then I used Gmail's contact export function to create a VCard file I could import to Flexadex. As you can imagine, the result was less than perfect.

Fortunately, editing the entries in Flexadex is quick and simple. Just double-click a name to open its record, which consists of two text fields: Title and Contents. You can also send e-mail from the service, or e-mail a record using your own e-mail client.

Flexadex address book entries are comprised of two text fields: Title and Contents.

(Credit: Flexadex)

There's a big, big problem for anyone hoping to use this service for business. Your data isn't encrypted, so don't even think about uploading any information you wouldn't want to share with your competitors. In fact, I'm not comfortable storing the addresses and phone numbers of family and friends on the service until it adds SSL support.

If you're looking for an easy-to-use, free online address book--and you don't mind the lack of encryption--Flexadex might fit the bill.

It's going to get easier for Google to keep tabs on your health.

The ubiquitous tech conglomerate has signed on to a new software product created by IBM with help from the Continua Health Alliance, an organization that promotes interoperability of medical devices. It'll take data from personal health monitoring devices, like blood sugar meters for diabetics, and share that directly with the patient in question's Google Health file (and the patient's physician, if he or she uses Google Health as well).

Other personal health record (PHR) services will also be able to use the IBM software, which was built partially on open-source standards.

"Our partnership with IBM will help both providers and users gain access to their device data in a highly simplified and automated fashion," Google Health director Sameer Samat said in a release. "IBM has taken an important step in providing software that enables device manufacturers and hospitals to easily upload recorded data into a PHR platform, such as Google Health."

Google Health, dedicated to the digitization of health records, launched in May. Microsoft has also planned a medical records service called HealthVault. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has made it clear that he plans to make digital health records part of his health care reform agenda.

If you're fed up with having to choose from other people's iGoogle themes, you'll soon be able to create your own.

A new tool, which should be available to all iGoogle users in the next few hours, lets you upload photos from your desktop into an editor that lets you crop them down to fit inside iGoogle's header space. There's also a color picker to change each individual color of your iGoogle page.

All in all it looks quite similar to Blogger's theme editor. The added benefit in this case is that you're able to publish and share your theme when you're done, and it will go out into Google's public directory for others to use on their own iGoogle pages.

A similar tool is expected to hit Gmail at some point this year, but may make its way into Google's RSS reader product first considering it and iGoogle now share many design similarities.

Previously, users were only able to create iGoogle themes using Google's API and submitting their work to the design gallery. This tool also replaces third-party online tools such as igThemer, which let non-tech savvy folks create iGoogle-compliant themes from inside the browser.

Update 9:11 a.m. PST: The tool is still not up, and all mentions of it have been removed from the iGoogle site. I've contacted Google for comment and will update with any further information.

Uploaded shots go up into the top header. Meanwhile, you can pick out what colors you want for the header text and for the tops of the theme widgets.

(Credit: Google)

Mint.com released a new and free iPhone application early Monday. Similar to PageOnce's mobile efforts, Mint's lets you monitor your credit card and bank accounts from your phone. It also throws in things like your monthly budget, incoming cash flow and expenses, along with any investment accounts you have synced up to Mint.com.

For security, Mint seems to have taken a page from PageOnce in letting you enable or disable mobile access from Mint.com. If your phone gets lost or stolen, you can simply cut off its access to your account, keeping any would-be identity thieves from taking a look at past purchases, or getting an idea of your net worth. It doesn't show any of your account numbers, or even let you add new accounts from your mobile device (which PageOnce does), but can be a treasure trove of information in the wrong hands.

Another thing worth noting about security is that if you don't have your iPhone passlock-protected, anyone can fire up the application and see the dollar value of each of your accounts. I'm a little surprised Mint hasn't placed its own special passcode security system for those first using this app, or even provided the option to require a password between sessions. The best you can do is simply log off in between use, but that's not a good long-term solution.

Security issues aside, it's a good first start for Mint, and for regular Mint users this is yet another way to get at things like your budget and accounts without having to rely on your bank offering a site that can be accessed on mobile devices. The alerts are also very handy and can tell you if a credit card bill is close to being due, if you're spending more than usual, or if there have been large deposits or withdrawals into your various accounts. For those things alone, it's worth downloading the app, just be sure to flip on your iPhone's built-in security lock feature.

Mint's iPhone app lets you check out bank accounts, credit cards and monthly budgets.

(Credit: Mint.com)