Finance

MIAMI--Walk around the Future of Web Apps event in South Beach this week, and you'll see loads of eager young entrepreneurs and developers proudly displaying the names of their fledgling companies on their conference badges.

Aaron Patzer, who founded personal-finance site Mint.com and sold it to Intuit for $170 million last year, might tell them that the company name might be the first place to make changes.

"Choose something with meaning, even if it's expensive and difficult to acquire, rather based on domain name availability, because otherwise, you're going to kill word-of-mouth," he told … Read more

iCash bills itself as a simple program, a financial management tool for people who don't know anything about accounting. Unfortunately, the program did not seem to bring either intuitiveness or outstanding features to the table, making it a pretty mediocre choice among similar programs.

iCash's interface looks nice enough, with attractive buttons and tabs that organize its main features. However, the way that the program attempts to organize things--both accounts and transactions--doesn't always make sense. The program comes with a 13-page Word document Help file, and it does seem that with careful studying a user could figure … Read more

After years of Facebook executives and investors saying "not yet" to an initial public offering, 2010 finally looked like the year when it could happen.

Nope. Or at least that's what two major Facebook investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies, said during an onstage talk at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich on Tuesday.

A live-blog of rough notes from the talk reveals that both Breyer and Milner ruled out the possibility that Facebook will go public anytime soon. "I am happy to announce that there will be … Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court's sweeping ruling on Thursday that invalidated large chunks of campaign finance law arose in part from an unlikely source: the emergence of Facebook, YouTube, and blogs, and the decline of traditional media outlets.

A 5-4 majority concluded that technological changes have chipped away at the justification for a law that allows individuals to create a blog with opinions about a political candidate--but threatens the ACLU, the National Rifle Association, a labor union, or a corporation with felony charges if they do the same.

The now-invalidated law "would seem to ban a blog post … Read more

Pacific Gas & Electric will fund the installation and leasing of solar panels at about 1,000 homes and businesses this year.

The California utility on Wednesday announced a deal with SolarCity, a Silicon Valley start-up that will provide PG&E customers the financing to install rooftop solar panels with little upfront money. PG&E subsidiary Pacific Venture Capital will provide $60 million in tax equity to SolarCity for its installation and financing services.

Rather than own solar panels, SolarCity customers pay a monthly fee and a relatively small or no upfront investment. SolarCity, which owns the solar … Read more

This is interesting: Bundle.com is a new start-up centered on a database of personal finance and spending data so that you can punch in a couple of criteria, find out how much people like you who live in your area are likely to be spending and then share your discoveries in pretty Flash graphics through your contacts on Facebook and Twitter. It's backed by investment money from Microsoft, Citigroup, and Morningstar.

All the data on Bundle currently comes from Citigroup--the former employer of founder and CEO Jaidev Shergill--but the Bundle team tells me that data from other banks … Read more

There are a lot of programs (not to mention Web sites) out there these days that make keeping track of your personal finances practically effortless. If software creators are hoping to compete with these extremely effective and well-designed programs, they'd better go big or go home. We wish that the creators of JaHoCa had gone home.

The very first thing we look for in personal finance software is the capability to import transactions that users have downloaded from their banks. JaHoCa does not offer this feature, and we have trouble imagining why anyone would want to manually enter each … Read more

As CES settled down in Las Vegas, I spoke with Mint.com founder and former CEO Aaron Patzer, now vice president and general manager of personal finance at Intuit following its $170 million acquisition of Mint last fall.

Patzer, who is 29, is tasked with uniting two distinctly different personal-finance software brands--the downloadable, established, desktop-oriented Quicken and the cloud-based, two-year-old Mint.com.

What's on your plate with regard to Quicken and Mint? Patzer: Quicken Online will be going away, and we'll be migrating to Mint. There are 8,000 banks on Mint today, and another three or four … Read more

Two solar project developers this week raised funds to install commercial and utility scale projects from a somewhat unlikely source: venture capital firms.

On Friday, Tioga Energy said it has raised $20 million to build out its business of providing project financing for commercial and municipal solar installations, such as schools and businesses. Investors included solar wafer manufacturer MEMC and venture capital companies NGEN Partners, Nth Power, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

SunBorne Energy Holdings on Wednesday disclosed that it has secured $5.2 million in funding from venture-capital company General Catalyst. It plans to develop utility-scale solar projects in India, … Read more