ReadWriteWeb

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. Today we'll take a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2) Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3) Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4) ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

That segmentation makes sense to us, to let's look now at how the online finance market is shaping up.

MySpace is announcing today that it is partnering with Citi to offer its users a co-branded credit card. We expect to start seeing cards flashed at retail outlets by 99-year olds named "bongkillah," or what have you. MySpace is a lot of things, and despite Facebook's formidable attack it remains wildly popular, but an institution of trust and responsibility MySpace is not!

That's exactly what the company is aiming to become, though, with this new partnership. The "Generation Forward" campaign will reward credit card users with music downloads and other tokens of thanks when they make "responsible choices" like pay their bills on time, donate to homeless shelters and promise to be nice to small animals. How much more surreal could this get?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love to talk about the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications. However, while a lot of these services make our life on the Internet a lot easier, another group of services on the web helps to keep our offline life organized. Here is our list of the top 'real world' apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008. We will look at the following five six categories: finance, travel, education, health, politics, and non-profits.

Back in September, Visa announced that their Visa Mobile Application would become the first financial application for Google Android-powered handsets. The application, launched only days ago, lets users receive notifications on their mobile phone about their account activity, receive offers from merchants, and use GPS to map out where those mobile offers can be redeemed or to find ATMs that accept Visa.

Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.

Wesabe and the UK Telegraph Think You Might

Online money management service Wesabe and the UK newspaper giant The Telegraph have entered a partnership to offer co-branded tools on the Telegraph website. It's a daring move, we can't help but admire it. We can't help but wonder how users will feel about it too, though.