TechCrunch has been blogging its TechCrunch40 Sessions for the past couple days, and it has been fascinating to see some of the new product rollouts that were done at the conference. There have also been some interesting panel discussions. When you have some time available, I encourage you to visit their site and see what I am talking about. Then I would appreciate you coming back here and letting us know which TechCrunch40 news you found to be most interesting.
The two announcements that were of most interest to me personally were
- Google’s release of Presently, its online competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint (screenshot below), and
- Mint.com, a free online money management tool, going live.
I have been involved in the private beta of Mint.com and think some of you will find this to be a useful supplement to your existing money-management tools. (People most likely to benefit are those who have several different accounts.)
Mint can pull together your data from various sources and give you an overall picture. It also looks for ways you can save money and makes recommendations to you:
- It recommended a bank to me that would improve my interest income.
- Some of its algorithms for these recommendations still need fine-tuning, as evidenced by it recommending that I replace my Comcast and AT&T services with TimeWarner, which turns out not being available in my area. And, of course it did not recognize that my AT&T services also include my cellphone plan, which would not be replaced by TimeWarner cable.
Nonetheless, its recommendations will sometimes pay off for you, and continued fine tuning will only improve on this. (The service makes its money from commissions on recommendations it makes to you. If they don’t do a good job with it, they will not be making money.) If you would like more info on this, Paul Stamatiou has been testing Mint much longer than me and has a good writeup on it.
As promised above, here is a screenshot of Google’s Presently, showing an empty presentation and some of the formatting tools and options:
Mint, eh? Thanks – I’ll check that one out. MS Money is one of the few programs keeping me tied to Windows. I’m always interested in free web or Linux based alternatives.
MS Money has kept me tied to Windows, too, along with Outlook. If I could just sync my BlackBerry with Thunderbird I could probably wean myself altogether.