VentureBeat

Personal finance site Mint.com has gathered data showing that its users spent an average of $300 less per month in August than in January this year — a 6 percent drop suggesting that the site’s 500,000 users are adjusting to the economic downturn (at least a little better than Wall Street).

Anonymous data culled from free finance sites like Mint, Geezeo and Wesabe that allow users to track their bank balances, set budgets, and control different types of spending, may become good barometers for how the daily lives of regular people are influenced by tough economic times. Early members on these relatively new sites are likely to be younger and more tech-savvy than the average American, but this could change as more people turn to web tools to help them cut costs and weather the storm.

In particular, Mint.com users spent about 1 to 3 percent less per month on entertainment, shopping and travel expenses, which is not surprising. Neither is the sharp 4 percent monthly drop in spending on gifts and donations. Discretionary spending is always the first to go. These changes were countered by a small 2 percent uptick in spending on both gas and utilities and financial advising.

The site will continue to pull data on a regular basis to keep tabs on how the recession is affecting its use.

New companies offering web-based personal finance management tools are popping up like Eggo Waffles in the 80s, ever since early start-ups like Mint emerged last year and won accolades.

There was Wesabe. We’ve also seen Geezeo, Buxfer and expensr all show up to take a shot at leadership in this area, but so far none seem to even come close. A new rival appearing at DEMOfall 08 is Rudder.

Tomorrow, at DEMO, another player, this one called Green Sherpa, will announce its existence to the world. The company, which looks a lot like the competition, sets itself apart with a cash flow projection feature that is more sophisticated than the simple budgeting functions offered by Mint. It hopes to capture the soccer moms who want more power than they’d get from Mint but less complexity and hassle that they’d get from Quicken. Why soccer moms? According to founder, Masen Yaffee, they’re more likely to be paying attention to family finances than their husbands.

To empower them, Green Sherpa lets users manually input line items and budget for big one-time expenditures. There is also a sharing feature that gives other people (like a spouse or accountant) access to the data. Mint currently doesn’t offer these capabilities and, while its automatic categorizations and elegant pie-charts cover most of my needs, the lack of manual input means that all cash I spend never gets categorized. This is a pain, but if demand were great enough, Mint could probably implement the necessary changes without a ton of effort.

This is not the only issue Green Sherpa must surmount. Mint has a one year lead on all fronts. It has momentum, solid traction and has extended beyond credit cards and back accounts into loans and investments. Green Sherpa is also going to charge a $7.95 monthly subscription while its main competitors are free. While it’s true that none these competitors have yet to produce ingenious business models, free ain’t easy to beat.

The company says that the market is big enough, but I’m not so sure. After all, how many desktop-based personal finance management products actually matter? I can think of all two.

Wesabe, a Web site that lets people manage their finances, and network with network with others for advice, has raised $4 million in a first round of financing.

We first wrote about the Berkeley, Calif. company in November.

The financing was led by Union Square Ventures, of New York, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of San Francisco, which provided the company with seed money. Its advantage over incumbent services such as Quicken is that it is online and offers its service is free.

However, the company has plenty of competition offering similar services including online services from mainstream banks. It is unclear how many people are entrusting their finances with Wesabe. The company says it has had “tens of thousands” of people register, and that between 60 and 70 percent of the people have returned to the site at least once after registering.

Competitor Buxfer launched a couple of months earlier, and offers more compelling visual graphics, such as pie charts, while offering similar other basic features such as importing expense transactions and providing ways to tag them. With Buxfer, you can add also your transactions via SMS. It does have some group features, such as ways to split expenses with roommates. There’s also Mint, which still hasn’t launched, but has generated buzz since getting backed by First Round Capital.

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund tells VentureBeat Wesabe’s primary advantage is the extensiveness of its social networks: It lets people share tips about places they visited while dining, and things such as bank fees and debt levels — which provide ways for people to make better financial decisions, Hedlund said. The company has recently offered a Flash-based bar graph comparing expense categories.

Here’s the latest action:

Netvibes offers Netvibes2go — Netvibes, the company that has gotten buzz with its cool personalized home page service, is offering a mobile version called Netvibes2Go. It lets you access all your info — contained in useful modules, including email, calendar, to-do list and any RSS feed — while you’re on the go. To get it, you have to configure your Netvibes account on a PC first (creating a new tab, called “mobile” and then putting in compatible modules). Founder Tariq Krim tells us an announcement will be coming shortly. Was discovered by bloggers.

Check out VentureBeat Newswire for latest stories — They include John Doerr’s latest company (physician software), video-sharing company Fliqz’s latest VC round (surprising, for us), Sequoia’s latest investment (in PopularMedia), secretive home telecom company Ooma’s latest round (from Sean Parker and others) and more.

Google adds real-time traffic to maps in several cities — Cities include San Francisco, New York and others. Image at left is a partial screenshot of what SF traffic looked like at 9:30am this morning. In other words, be glad if you don’t live or work in the East Bay.

Wesabe, personal finance site, raises $700,000 — The Berkeley company that lets you manage your financials, with things like tagging, and then lets you communicate with others about it (apparently, some people want this), raised the cash from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which itself just raised a new fund for hacker-driven companies (see our NewsWire story here, from yesterday). Here’s our earlier story about Wesabe from last year.

Second Life adds voice — You’ve been able to chat via IM before. But now the virtual world company is offering ways to talk with others, taking into account three dimensions to adjust volume, that is, how far away you are from other people (in the room or region where you’re conversing), and what direction you’re facing.

Hyped product of the day: Buzzword – Virtual Ubiquity, a Boston start-up, has created some buzz with its online word processor, BuzzWord. It isn’t out yet, but see here for details. Lots of effusive coverage elsewhere.

Another news ranking site, Spotplex — Techcrunch has a story about the Silicon Valley start-up Spotplex. At Spotplex, news stories aren’t submitted by users. Rather, blog and other news sites wanting to be featured at the site submit some javascript code, and it culls the most popular read articles on those sites, and then features them. We’re not sure how this is going to work, because by default, stories from the most popular sites are going to get read (and thus featured at Spotplex), even if they’re crappy stories. Also, there are other sites that do similar things, such as Topix. The company has accepted VentureBeat as a source. We’ll send in our code and see.

Adobe Systems to release Web version of its Photoshop image-editing application — It will do so within six months.

Invalid clicks on Gooole’s Adwords under 10 percent — Or at least, that is what Google tells us. Google adds that, in general, undetected fraud is less than 0.02 percent. However, there’s just no way for Google to know that for sure.

Wesabe is a new Web site that lets you manage your financials. It’s like a Web-based Quicken, with Web 2.0 stuff thrown in — for example, the customary tagging and social networking.

You register, and then you’re prompted to upload you bank account, credit card and other financial information (it holds you hand as you import the data directly from your bank’s site). It then provides your balances on one page, so you can have an overview of how you’re doing.

Click on the image below for a tour. You’ll see tags on the right hand side, which you can use to categorize as you enter your finances. So if you list a receipt from Starbucks, you can tag it as “food,” for example.

You’ll need to try it out yourself. To be honest, after watching the demo, it wasn’t compelling enough for us to upload our private banking data to a Web start-up that we have no experience with. But maybe that’s just us. (We risked uploading our credit card data, but the site didn’t recognize CapitalOne.) Still, if you’ve got problems saving, and want to chat with others and get support and tips for your goals, this might be worth trying.

Here’s a post by Liz Gannes about Wesabe, where we saw it first.

The company was founded by Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund, who are self-funding the six-person, Berkeley, Calif. company. Knight is a former marketing exec, while Hedlund worked at O’Reilly Media after co-founding Popular Power and Lucas Online.