In addition, the financial tools now available in the Citi iPad app seem to take inspiration from similar online services, like Intuit's money management suite at Mint.com, for example. And, says the company, the iPad app's progress won't stop here. It will be under constant evolution, getting "smarter" over the coming weeks, and may even help users manage offers and rewards in the future.

When Citi approached the iPad, explains Tracey Weber, Citi's head of North American Internet and Mobile Banking, it did so thinking of it as not just another mobile offering. "We view the iPad as an opportunity to engage with customers in a much deeper way," says Weber.

People use tablets in differently than they do their mobile smartphones, she says. They often engage with them in the evenings, reading magazines, books, and newspapers, playing games, and watching videos. This engaged type of use is what gave the bank the opportunity to provide its own more deeply engaging experience via the iPad.

Analyzing Your Finances, How Very Mint-Like!

Instead of simply providing company info and access to banking transaction tools, the app delves deeper into your finances, with rich, interactive charts highlighting things like cash flow, balance trends, overall debt and more. There's even a section where you can compare your personal data to the aggregated, anonymous data of other Citi customers by a number of factors, including income level, household type, location and so on.

Being able to dive into your own finances like this, visualize trends, and make comparisons is one of the primary functions of the online financial management service Mint.com.  Of course, Mint can track more than just bank accounts, covering everything from investments to auto loans. But such deep data analysis is still a rarity among banking institutions, which is why it's so interesting to see what Citi is doing here. Even banking giant Bank of America only offers a fairly traditional iPad application, which just launched last month.

Future Offers/Rewards Platform?

Meanwhile, Citi comes out of the gate ahead, and is now planning to incorporate even more features, most of which it can't talk about too much. But Citi is a launch partner with Google on Google Wallet, the new mobile wallet service designed for Android handsets. And Weber says that the company sees a "huge opportunity" in the offers/rewards space, which incidentally is a feature of the new Google service.

While there's no direct announcement related to an forthcoming offers/rewards feature within Citi's mobile apps, iPad or otherwise, it only makes sense that the company would one day port the rewards programs it now operates online to these newer form factors. It could then take advantage of the unique opportunities that come from being on mobile: access to a user's real-time location, SMS text messaging, and more.

Banking just got a little less boring, we'd say. We're staying tuned.

That's what Manilla promises to address: the organization and the simplification of our household bills.

In addition to the one-stop-shop to be able to view your various monthly bills, Manilla offers reminders - via email or text message - that you have bills and renewals due. You'll be able to pay online and the service will keep an archive of your bills for you. Manilla is free and while the service says it isn't ad-supported per se, you will see offers and notifications (um, ads) from the companies and magazines to which you're subscribed.

It's all the the service of helping make the process of managing your household finances easier - something that a recent study found to be more stressful than housecleaning. That's hardly surprising because while the enemies of Dirt and Grime are a constant battle, they're never really delivered with the regularity or with the commandments to Pay Now or Destroy Your Credit Score quite the same way that our billing statements are.

Manilla frames the savings it offers in terms of environmental costs (postage, paper) and financial costs (you won't miss a bill), but it's the emotional costs here that may be the most compelling reason that people will opt to sign up for the service. Of course, Manilla isn't the only startup in this space. Doxo launched last year with its own promise of being your "digital filing cabinet."

The site rolls all these different search and comparison tools into one place so you can examine providers side-by-side. Looking for a checking account with no monthly fees? Looking for a credit card that offers frequent flyer miles? Looking for a low-interest mortgage? These are the sorts of questions the new site can help users answer.

Next to medical data, financial information is probably some of the data people are most sensitive about. Google insists it will protect the privacy of those using the site. Google Account information won't be shared, and phone numbers will only be shared with lenders if users allow it.

Currently Google Advisor is only available in the U.S., and while the offering isn't as robust as other financial services available (such as Mint.com), the site is an indication Google may roll out more features in this area.

Information about debt reduction can be difficult to find, and there are plenty of questionable practices by banks and by debt consolidation companies that just serve to muddy the waters.

So making the task of tackling your debt easy and transparent is a big part of the mission of the YC-backed company Ready for Zero. Ready for Zero a free service with a very simple interface that helps clarify your financial status and plan your way out of debt.

The emphasis here is on transparency and interactivity, and users can see how adjusting payment amounts, for example, change their status. The software also offers other advice, including tips on how and when to approach a bank to renegotiate your interest rate.

Launched last month, Ready for Zero co-founder Rod Ebrahimi says that the system is already tracking $29 million in credit card debt.

But it isn't simply a matter of tracking - and helping users track - debt. Ready for Zero has recently partnered with the peer-to-peer lending network, Lending Club. By monitoring its users debt and their work towards paying it off, Ready for Zero can give a snapshot of one aspect of someone's financial health, and Ready for Zero makes it easy to share that with potential lenders at Lending Club. This means that people can apply for P2P debt consolidation loans at rates that are typically far lower than other banks and lending institutions.

As the startup expands, Ready for Zero says it plans to eventually give users the option to make payments, not just monitor payments, through their interface. "We're just three guys and we're a technical team," says Ebrahimi. But the startup is hoping that by merging that technical expertise with more open data, that Ready for Zero can scale up while helping the rest of us scale back our debt.

Visa's announcement includes a partnership with CashEdge and Fiserv, two person-to-person financial transactions companies, which will now have access to VisaNet, the company's payment processing network.

Visa describes cash and check transactions as "inefficient" and indeed, there are many reasons why a move to offer this makes sense for Visa. Yet, despite Visa's leadership as a credit card processing company, it might have a difficult task ahead of it in unseating PayPal as many people's online financial transactor of choice. PayPal, after all, doesn't require you have any credit card, let alone a Visa.

Mint Data launched today and is the product of Mint.com, the personal-finance management site. Mint Data aggregates anonymous spending data from Mint's more than 4 million users "to deliver an unprecedented real-time economic index".

Mint Data is open to the public in beta beginning today and it's worth a gander. It breaks down spending habits across more than 300 U.S. cities by category, specific business and as a overview of the city itself. For example, let's take a look at Austin, Texas.

The city overview gives a general feel of Austin - how much you might expect to spend monthly on living costs and how much would go to food and dining, shopping, etc. Below the main graphical overview, the site offers a finer breakdown of these four general categories, including specific retailers ranked by cost or popularity.

You can see that Austin is a techie, outdoorsy town that likes to spend its money on outdoor gear and Apple products. (No surprise there.) But beyond getting even just a general feel, you can see each store and average spending. Clicking on a specific store shows an even finer level of detail.

At this level of detail, you can see how the specific store compares with others of its kind and get an even greater feel for what you might expect to spend there. Like we said, never mind $ or $$, I want to know that the average charge at Bouldin Creek Cafe (one of my favorites in town) is going to be $11.69. Of course, this data should not be used on its own - if we did that, we wouldn't know that Bouldin is more of a vegan restaurant than simply a coffee shop and we would assume that it's ridiculously expensive, by the chart.

Talking with a friend recently about all the free Web-based services out there, we began discussing how they all make money, ad revenue aside. As the discussion wound on, we came to a concluding point - if you don't know what the product is, then the product is you. While that can be a scary idea, we can hope that playing our part in providing anonymous, aggregate data can provide more helpful tools like Mint Data.

Mint has partnered up with Zillow to help determine home value and include this as part of the broader personal finance landscape.

Zillow also has both Android and iPhone apps and offers home details and historical data on more 95 million homes in the U.S.

"Because a home is usually a person's largest asset, it makes perfect sense for us to integrate with Zillow, to help our users track their home's Zestimate in their Mint account," said Aaron Patzer, vice president and general manager of Intuit Personal Finance Group and founder of Mint.com.

Almost two years ago, we wrote a survey of the 10 leading personal finance sites. In the intervening months, three have shut down, one has been folded into another and a fifth, Mint, has been acquired. That's quite a grisly faceplant for a sector in which we could find 10 companies to profile.

One user, Rob Darling, bemoaned the loss of the service.

"Too bad. I liked this service since I could upload my data rather than allowing it to connect directly to my bank accounts."

Westlund said users can delete their information until July 31. Wesabe will provide additional tools to export client financial information off the site and will keep the discussion area on the site open indefinitely.

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

Editor's note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance. Up until April 15, the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we'll be looking at how finance software has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping online finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati.

In our overview of Personal Finance, we explained how free tools like Mint, moneyStrands and Wesabe are making it easy for consumers to monitor their income and expenditure. The current market leader in personal finance is Mint, which was acquired by Intuit in October 2009. Today Mint has more than 1.7 million registered users, about 700,000 of them active every month.

The online small business accounting market is less well formed at this time, which means there are opportunities for startups. Particularly as for years now small business owners have had to suffer relatively expensive and complex desktop software - such as MYOB, Intuit QuickBooks and Microsoft Office Accounting.

Internet DNA

In an August 2008 article, we wrote that many of the small business accounting software incumbents were struggling to make the transition to online accounting. That was one reason why leading financial software firm Intuit acquired Mint, to import some Internet DNA. Just months later and Intuit is already planning to phase out Quicken Online and replace it with Mint.

Just as Mint came out of the web 2.0 world to re-shape the Personal Finance market, it will likely be a web-based company that does the same to the small business accounting market. It may end up being Xero, a completely online accounting service which was founded in July 2006. Xero hails from New Zealand, but is aiming for global success. Full disclosure, ReadWriteWeb uses Xero to manage its accounts. We've found the integration with online banking systems to be impressive, the design slick, and functionality such as multi currencies useful. Perhaps most importantly, Xero has the support of many accountancy firms.

Playing in Multiple Markets

According to Xero founder Rod Drury, another trend in the online finance space to watch is that "each vendor might play in the adjacent market as it's good exposure." We've seen this happening for years with the likes of Intuit and Microsoft. But now even the small players, such as Xero, are doing it. Drury says that for his firm, doing personal finance "creates a great opportunity to talk to banking partners and enables us better access to banking web services." He added, "it's a useful marketing tool, though the primary monetization is upsell to the business product."

We'll discuss Cloud ERP products in a separate post, so for now please tell us your thoughts on personal and small business online finance tools. Which products do you use, whether for personal finance use or your business?

Image credit: An&

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?

We're all for the webification of financial data, with proper privacy and data portability steps of course. We're big fans of some of the personal finance apps available. We really want to see innovation in this space and even some of the paternalistic shoving towards social responsibility that MySpace is engaging in seems like a good idea.

This is MySpace, though. It's got a lot going for it, but a "responsibility based" MySpace credit card sounds like an Octuplet Mom co-branded condom to us. This just seems too far afield from the brand that made MySpace what it is and we expect the credit cards to be something that more people make jokes about than use.

This is the seventh in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
6. Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008

Finance

Mint

Mint single-handedly changed the market for personal finance tools on the Internet in 2008 and forced Quicken, its closest competitor, to start offering its own online tools for free as well. Mint aggregates personal finance data from across the web and displays a consolidated view of all of your accounts in a very well designed and easy to use user interface. Mint also uses this data to recommend better credit cards and savings accounts to its users.

Mint launched its beta program in late 2007 and came out of beta in October 2008.  By October, Mint already had close to half a million users and had managed over $12 billion in transactions. In the course of 2008, Mint added a substantial number of new features to its lineup, including the ability to get an overview of your investment accounts. Mint also launched a major redesign of its user interface in August.

Rudder

While Rudder might look similar to Mint at first, this personal finance tool has a very different focus. While Rudder also aggregates your banking and credit card accounts, it does not focus on analyzing your past spending habits in the way Mint does. Instead, its focuse is on the letting you know how much money you still have to pay your monthly bills. One of the great advantages of Rudder is that it sends all your updates to your inbox, so that you don't even have to log in to the service to keep up to date.

Rudder debuted at this year's DEMOfall conference in San Diego and, given the current economic situation, couldn't have launched at a more opportune time. Rudder also features a large number of useful finance planning tools and a great mobile site.

Health

PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Fibromyalgia. Even though the site is still relatively now, it already provides on of the largest patient communities, and also features a wide range of research tools for symptoms and treatments.

PatientsLikeMe was founded in 2004 and defines its mission as providing a platform for sharing real world medical data. Members of the site often share data about their individual health experiences like symptoms, weight, mood swings, or drugs they have taken. Thanks to this, you can easily find others who are in the same situation as you and see what treatments are working for them.

Earlier this year, we named PatiensLikeMe as one of our favorite Web 2.0 health apps.

Sermo

Our second top health app is also a social network, but this time for physicians. Sermo has over 90,000 members who exchange information about both medical and non-medical issues. As Matthew Holt from the Health Care Blog pointed out to us, the site also features some highly sophisticated survey and ratings tools, though it is only open to registered physicians.

This year, Sermo also rolled out a partnership with Bloomberg that provides healthcare investors with access to medical information compiled by the site's members.

Education

TeachStreet

TeachStreet is not an educational site in the traditional sense. Instead, it provides a marketplace for teachers and students to meet. TeachStreet, whose motto is 'Learn New Things,' focuses mostly on teaching adults anything from arts and crafts, to bagpiping and foreign languages. TeachStreet started out in Seattle, WA, but expanded to Portland, OR and the Bay Area this year. The site already lists over 60,000 different classes and instructors.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes and teachers. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, TeachStreet has already made a name for itself in the regions where it has officially launched and is poised for more growth in 2009.

After the jump: Politics, Non-Profits, Travel

Politics

OpenCongress

While the U.S. election surely dominated the news this year, one non-election related web app that we really came to appreciate this year was OpenCongress. OpenCongress is a project by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation and is definitely a must for political junkies. The site tracks all the news and votes in the U.S. Congress through an easy to use interface that features a lot of AJAX and RSS. The site even supports OpenID and also provides its users with a large number of widgets they can implement on their own sites.

As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out in his review of the site, it makes users "want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling."

Non-Profits

Kiva

Kiva is a micro-lending service that was founded in 2005 and at that time, it was the first person-to-person micro-ending site on the net. Kiva allows its users to lend small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing nations. The loans typically go towards starting up or expanding small, local businesses, ranging from a motorcycle repair shop in Lebanon to tailors in Pakistan.

In November, Kiva announced that over $50 million have now been lend by Kiva's over 330,000 members. This is a major success for the organization, especially given that Kiva had only loaned $11 million by September 2007. Kiva also ran a successful billboard campaign in California thanks to the help of PayPal.

The current financial crisis is obviously affecting Kiva and the organization is already seeing fewer lenders. Hopefully, this trend will reverse in 2009.

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot provides software-as-a-service solutions to small and medium sized associations, clubs, and non-profits. It has created tightly integrated solutions for membership management, event registration, and creating customized web sites, with a focus on the non-profit sector. Service plans range from free to a flat fee of $200 a month, depending on the size of the contact database you plan to manage on the service.

In 2008, Wild Apricot rolled out a number of updates to its software, including support for Google Checkout, custom URLs, and better group management. Currently, Wild Apricot has more than 10,000 non-profit organizations as clients. We also like the company's well-written and informative blog about technology for non-profits.

Disclosure: Wild Apricot is a RWW sponsor.

Travel

Yapta

The web clearly revolutionized the travel industry. Booking flights and vacations online has quickly become a routine activity, even for less savvy web users. While Yapta launched in 2006, it was really only in 2008 that the site was able to differentiate itself from larger competitors like Kayak, FareCompare,  or Farecast. In June, Yapta announced a new feature that allows you to track airfare changes, and in November, Yapta unveiled a unique service that also allows you to track when and where you can use you frequent flier miles to book a flight.

While it's probably best to take this data with a grain of salt, Yapta claims to have saved its users over $91 million in airfare since May 2007.

PlanetEye

PlanetEye is a social travel site with a strong focus on providing both user-generated content, as well as stories from local editors all over the world. One of the core features of PlanetEye are its Travel Packs, which let you clip content from the site while you are planning your trip. This allows you to easily create your own personalized travel guides. PlanetEye came out of beta in the middle of 2008 and has already managed to established a loyal community of users on its service. PlanetEye also partnered with Travelocity, OpenTable, and StubHub.

Besides giving you great info for planning your trip, PlanetEye also lets you share geotagged photos with the rest of the PlanetEye community. The highlight of the service, however, is the content added by PlanetEye's local experts which ranges from blog posts to reviews of restaurants and local sights.

That's our list of 'real world' web apps that we think have made a difference to mainstream people in 2008. Let us know in the comments what your favorites are.

Currently, the Visa Mobile Android application is available for select Chase Visa cardholders who use the T-Mobile G1 handset.

Are Mobile Financial Apps Safe?

As great as the Visa mobile app sounds, those over at Phandroid discovered something in the fine print that sounded a little troubling. Buried in the terms of service, there is a line that reads:

"...unfortunately, no data transmission via a mobile handset can be guaranteed to be 100% secure."

Of course, nothing is 100% secure these days - that's a given - but what does this mean for consumers using the application? Is Visa trying to cover themselves in case of any liability? That's the conclusion Phandroid come to. Visa is probably just trying to make sure that they aren't held responsible in case an error on T-Mobile's part leads to a data breach of some kind.

Still, it's interesting to read how the original press release about the application had an entirely different message. In it, there was a statement from Elizabeth Buse, Global Head of Product at Visa, where she noted that the mobile application "makes the consumer payment experience more convenient, more secure and more rewarding."

It's probably nothing to worry about, but the tone of concern in blog posts reminds us of the fears that people had when online shopping, banking, and bill pay services were first introduced. If you'll recall, there was an initial period of skepticism about the safety and security of performing financial transactions over the internet. The next frontier for fighting those same concerns may be mobile. Will consumers fear that mobile apps managing their financial data are insecure, too?

Making Mobile Mobile Secure

Consumers may have good reason to be hesitant though, and not because of Visa's pseudo-CYA line in their Terms of Service, but because mobile phones are often lost or stolen. If you're managing your financial data through mobile applications, there need to be some safeguards in place so that thieves can't access your credit card numbers and steal your identity just by snagging your phone.

We would also love to see remote backup and shutdown features built into applications such as these in the future which would allow you to quickly deactivate the app remotely in the event your phone goes missing. Even better, why aren't handsets manufacturers building these features into their phones? That would be a huge selling point for consumers when shopping for a new device.

It's not as if the technology doesn't exist. For example, at this year's DEMO conference, a startup called Maverick Mobile demonstrated a mobile security application that backs up your phone book and messages remotely in the event you lose your phone. It can also send activity reports via SMS as to what was happening with the handset - like if it was being registered to a new carrier and who that carrier was. It even let you remotely lock the phone or pester the thief with a loud alarm that couldn't be disabled without removing the battery.

We think more applications like that should be introduced to guarantee the safety and security of our mobile devices before we're hit with a ton of mobile apps for managing our finances. It would definitely make us feel more comfortable. Still, it's good to see innovation taking place when it comes to what these smartphones can do. An app like that from Visa means we're only one step away from actually being able to use our phones to make purchases...and that's really something to look forward to.

Web Trends

RWW Live: Health 2.0

We have been tracking the so-called 'health 2.0' trend for some time now. We've covered the top health web apps, the trends to watch in health 2.0, and the latest industry stats. And we published a Health 2.0 update this week (see below). So in this week's episode of RWW Live, the ReadWriteWeb authors get together with a number of industry experts to discuss how the Web is changing health care.

Download MP3

Health 2.0 Through the Eyes of a Diabetic - One Year Later

ReadWriteWeb founder/editor Richard MacManus: One year ago, I discovered that I had contracted Type 1 Diabetes. I was 36 at that point and it's relatively rare for someone of my age to suddenly get Type 1 Diabetes - indeed they used to call this form of diabetes "juvenile diabetes", because it mostly occurs in children. So it was quite a shock to discover that I had it! Immediately I looked to the Web to find out all I could about this condition. I discovered a thriving community of 'health 2.0' apps and social networks, which I then wrote about in this blog.

As it's now a year later, I thought it'd be good to review health 2.0. What has changed in web-based health services over the past year? And indeed what web tools do I use to help me manage diabetes?

Nine Recommendation Tools We Wish We Had

...And The Best Substitutes We've Come Up With So Far

There's so much content online every day that it's totally overwhelming. That's where good recommendation technologies and media outlets come in handy. As a blog that seeks to share the most interesting web technology and trends with readers, automated help with the discovery process is of great interest to us. In this post, we discuss some tools we wish we had and the closest makeshift substitutes we've been able to come up with. Maybe you'll find some of them useful or have even better recommendations to offer us and other readers.

2009 Tips for Big Web Companies

2009 is approaching quickly, and the consensus is that it's going to be a really tough year. The US financial crisis is triggering a global recession. Yet, a crisis is also a time full of hope. It is a time to re-think, re-tool, and get ready for the next upswing.

For big Internet companies, 2009 is going to be a very bad year for sure. Advertising profits are going to plunge, and consumers will spend less money overall, particularly on the web. There is little that can be done to change that. But what big companies can do is invest in innovation and killer moves that will bear fruit in the years to follow. Here is what we think would be cool for various big web companies to do in 2009.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool.
• Pro Opinion allows you to get paid to take surveys.
• WildApricot is Membership Management Software.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• Glue enables you to connect with friends while browsing.
• Strands provides real-time recommendations of products.
• Direct Media Exchange is a solution for managing ad networks.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
• VisualCV lets you stand out from the crowd when job-hunting.
• Quintura is a visual-based search engine.
• Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

RWW Jobwire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Last Week's Jobwire Graphs

We all know the economy is in shambles and there are massive layoffs across most industries, including technology - but there are still new hires happening in tech and new media! Who's getting hired? That's what we're tracking at our blog Jobwire - the stories of lucky people with exciting new jobs.

Who's getting those jobs? What kinds of positions are being filled and in what sectors? Check out our first set of charts below from last week's aggregate activity on Jobwire to find out the answer to those questions.

SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEWEB'S JOBWIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH

Web Products

Google SearchWiki is Not a Wiki

Late last week Google unveiled the first major change to its search interface since the introduction of multi-media ("Universal") results into the search results page. They called it Google SearchWiki.

It's a big deal, it's awkward, it's frightening, it's brave, it's already both loved and hated - but it's not a wiki. As Ward Cunningham, the man who invented wikis, told us in our initial coverage of SearchWiki, "Collectively editing thoughts is what leads to the unique wiki behavior..." Days into the experiment it's clear that this feature is more like a forum, and it's not a particularly well architected one at that.

Your Favorite Mobile Web Apps & Sites

One year ago we ran a contest asking you to tell us your favorite Mobile Web apps. From the resulting comments there were 5 Mobile Web apps that clearly stood out, with multiple mentions: Gmail Java app for mobile phone, Google Maps for Mobile, Opera Mini, Fring, Shozu.

Well, a lot has changed in the Mobile Web application world since then. The Apple App Store launched in July '08, prompting a wave of new third party iPhone apps. And we've seen innovation from Apple's mobile phone competitors: Google's Android (which has multiple app stores), Nokia, and Blackberry, and others. So what are your favorite Mobile Web apps and sites circa November 2008? The ReadWriteWeb authors listed their faves, plus we polled our friends in Twitter (subscribe to our Twitter account @rww).

Firefox China Edition: Everything a Local Browser Should Be

Did you know that the way you surf the internet may be influenced by your culture? In the U.S. and Europe, web surfers are leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China, however, the process is much different. Web surfers there tend to lean back from the monitor while keeping one hand on the mouse, the other hand dangling. The keyboard is used much less frequently as much of the navigation is done with clicks instead.

YouTube: More to Love

As the prices of professional quality video equipment continue to drop and the number of people with high-speed internet connections continues to increase, online video sites have been scrambling to keep up with their users' desires to deliver higher quality content to their viewers.

YouTube is no different. This week, they announced the latest enhancement to the YouTube platform - a widescreen video format across the site - which they hope will provide users with "a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience."

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Is SaaS Cheaper Than Licensed Software?

Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. We certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. In this post we looked at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Explosive Growth

In Q3 2008, VeriSign Messaging and Mobile Media Divison's mobile messaging networks enabled more than 58.3 billion messages per day to travel through their pipes...10% more than in the previous quarter and up from 280 million per day in Q3. Based on these record-breaking numbers, VeriSign projects that their mobile messaging networks will enable close to 200 billion total messages by the end of the year.

Enterprises and financial institutions have seen growing numbers of mobile messages sent, too. From Q3 2007 to Q3 2008, the total number of messages delivered rose from 129 to 227 million - a 115% increase.

Much of that activity comes from SMS's new position as the preferred platform for mobile banking. VeriSign's Mobile Banking platform, which includes seven of the top ten banking brands and three of the top five credit card companies, has grown 35% since last quarter alone.  

Mobile messaging, as defined by VeriSign, isn't just SMS, though. They take into account a number of different types of messages, including the following:

• SMS - Short Message Service. SMS is the most common form of mobile messaging, also referred to as "text" messaging.
• ICSMS - Inter-carrier Short Message Service. ICSMS messages are text messages exchanged between carrier networks.
• MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS allows users to send multimedia messages that include images, video and audio.
• ICMMS - Inter-carrier Multimedia Messaging Service. ICMMS messages are multimedia messages exchanged between carrier networks.
• P2P Messages - Person to person messages, or messages sent from one mobile user to another.
• A2P Messages - Application to person messages, or application-generated content such as news alerts, ring tones, promotional video clips, and enterprise messages that are sent to mobile users.

It's interesting that even as the iPhone and other app-filled devices grow in popularity, when it comes to getting information quickly, we're still turning to the mobile message - and now more than ever before. Will this trend ever level off as more people switch over to the smartphones whose "real internet" experiences no longer require text-based workarounds for getting the information needed? By the looks of these numbers, it doesn't appear that will be the case.

Image credit: enV by Nesster

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.

We like this idea and it's clear that many people want to use online services to monitor and manage their finances. There's no doubt that many of the Telegraph's tens of millions of monthly visitors wouldn't have found out about Wesabe any other way. It does sound like a great convenience, as the company says, to be able to manage money in the same place that you get your news.

We suspect that there will be richer integration of Wesabe into Telegraph pages in the future. We can imagine, for example, news recommendations based on a reader's investment history. Something like the recent LinkedIn/NYTimes partnership.

Still, we wonder how comfortable people will be with this particular choice of partners.

Do You Want the Newspaper to Have a Direct Line to Your Finances?

Privacy is a touchy concern and it's generally assumed that personal finances are one of the most private matters in peoples' lives. None the less, online personal finance services like Wesabe and competitor Mint are growing fast. The value they are able to add on top of existing banking options online is substantial, though there may not be a big barrier to entry if established banks decide to offer similar features.

Partnership options are always interesting, and technology plays in finance are often fascinating - but the newspaper? We're not sure that an institution founded on the premise that it tells everyone everything is really the best choice to do personal finance through.

We like the idea of newspapers working with data (see what The Guardian is doing), but not necessarily our personal financial data - even if it is worked with in anonymous aggregate. Are we alone in that thinking? We doubt it.

What about readers? Are you comfortable, excited even, with the prospect of doing personal finance through your local newspaper? We suspect our readers are disproportionately uninterested in such things as you are more likely to know about these services independently. Still, isn't there something a little crazy about this?

Readers interested in learning more about this sector should check out our recent podcast edition of ReadWriteTalk on the topic, with executives from Wesabe, Mint and Tip'd as guests.