When I reviewed the online money-management service Mint last month, I raved about how much detail it provided about my spending.

The system then organizes your expenditures into categories like “food” and “automotive” so you can see where all your money goes.

Mint is surprisingly accurate at distinguishing restaurants from garages from dentists. It’s also quite easy to correct whatever errors it does make.

Next month, Mint will take it a step further and provide similar detail about investment performance.

The site currently tracks to total amount you have in investment accounts at major banks and brokerages, but it provides no information on how your investments perform.

Judging by the screen shot at the top of this post, you’ll soon get a lot of detail on that, too.

The news has yet to hit the press release section of Mint’s Web site. The company apparently gave an exclusive to the WSJ’s Katherine Boehret, who gave Mint another rave review.

Starting May 6, the site will let users add investments, such as individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans, to their accounts, though Mint isn’t designed for serious investors. Today, readers can get sneak peak access to this Investments feature via www.mint.com/wsj. In June, Mint will add auto loans, student loans and mortgages.

When Mint completes these additions, the only thing missing will be the ability to transfer money from one account to another and the ability to pay bills through the site.

Even without those features, though, it’s a great site and one that’s obviously committed to getting better.

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Speculation and rumors are flying about the next generation of Apple’s iPhone.
It’s a given that the phone will have 3G networking for much faster internet access, but after that it’s anybody’s guess as to what will be included.
I like AppleInsider’s take that the phone will look largely the same, but be thinner and lighter.
My thought has always been the phone would be introduced at the World Wide Developer Conference in June and then be available for sale in the fall.
Now I’m reading Apple is ordering up to 25 million of the new phones and up to 3 million might be ready in late June.

If the $200 AT&T subsidy rumor is true I know Apple and AT&T will have a hard time keeping the iPhone on the shelves.

Anyone care to comment about what they’d like to see in the next iPhone?

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Fortune magazine is reporting what seems like a very big deal:

AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499.

You’ll only get that deal, though, if you buy your iPhone directly from AT&T, rather than through Apple.

But who cares?

As the article points out, a $200 price cut should bring in a lot of new customers. I wonder how far away we are from a four-gigabyte iPhone that’s free with a two-year contract.

The Fortune article also confidently predicts some features of the new iPhone (which it says will be released at the end of June):

The new iPhone will be 2.5 mm thinner than the 11.7 mm original. The iPhone will also have a GPS chip for navigation and other location-based services.

I’m in! (Once my stupid Sprint contract runs out. Sigh.)

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The point of televisions isn’t to show long diagonal lines. it’s to show large areas of video, so the measurement we should consider is total screen area.

Yes. Yes. I realize the diagonal measurements and screen area correspond, but they don’t correspond nearly as closely as you may think.

Many buyers may consider 42-inch TVs and 50-inch TVs as pretty close substitutes. The 50-inch set may be bigger, but it’s not a big deal. Right?

Wrong. A 50-inch set has a 40 percent larger screen than a 42-inch model. It’s an entirely different animal.

Here are some other comparisons that may interest you…

Diagonal/Screen Area
42 inches /754 inches
50 inches/1,068 inches
60 inches/1,538 inches
65 inches/1,809 inches
70 inches/2,092 inches

We don’t measure a book’s length by its surface area. Why would we use an equally silly measurement for TVs?

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Tim Draper of famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has listened to hundreds of pitches from start-ups over the past few years, but only three put themselves forward as alternatives to the online marketplace eBay.

“I was surprised when he told me that,” says James Chong (pictured), founder and chief executive of Wigix, the fourth eBay challenger to cross DFJ’s path.

Wigix’s pitch was impressive enough for the VC firm to lead a recent $5.3m funding round for the Bay Area start-up and for Mr Draper to take a seat on the board.

“EBay has been sitting on its laurels, this area is in real need of innovation,” says Mr Chong.

He spent 11 years at Charles Schwab and the last five setting up its accounts site, before establishing Wigix a year ago.

That explains the financial bent to the marketplace that differentiates itself from eBay by treating items very like company stocks.

EBay started out by offering collectibles, unique items, which goes some way to explaining the site’s sometimes rambling search results.

Wigix argues that most items for auction are now distinct commodities, such as an 8Gb iPod Nano, and they can be found and their market prices tracked more easily by users and search engines when they have their own page and even their own stock-ticker symbol.

Wigix uses the bid/ask principles of buying and selling shares and makes it possible to show current market prices for these commodity items. It says this allows real-time trading and combats the problems on auction sites of shilling and sniping.

A My Wigix section allows users to keep lists of their own possessions, see the market value of them and even name a price at which they would be prepared to sell them.

This gives a notional boost to the liquidity of Wigix’s marketplace. In theory, items may also never leave the marketplace if someone buys something from another user and leaves it on their public list of available items.

Wigix employs around 30 people in offices in Oakland and Beijing, China, but it is encouraging users to help it by suggesting different SKUs and taking ownership of category and product pages. They can earn a cut from advertising on the page and even sell ownership of it to anyone bidding.

Extra features allow users to submit reviews and manuals and ask others about what they think of products they own.

Wigix’s organisation of its auction site makes a lot of sense, but it is likely to be under-represented in items that are hard to classify, such as collectibles and jewellery.

The real test will be whether those items trading as second-hand goods in various conditions can be turned into commodities and traded like stocks and shares.

At its public beta launch on Tuesday, the site was slow and seemed short of inventory, despite its claims of having 500,000 items available.

Nevertheless, it may benefit from dissatisfaction with eBay and its fees structure. Wigix has no listing fees, free trading below $25, a $1.50 fee for buyers above that and a 2 per cent fee for sellers up to $1,000, then 1 per cent above that.

That’s a lot easier to understand than eBay’s complicated explanation of its charges.

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What should we make of the odd limbo into which Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo has fallen since the weekend, when it failed to follow through on a threat to go hostile? Here are the possible answers:

1. The two sides are just buying time while they stitch up a deal behind the scenes. Probability: miniscule. We’re still hearing that there haven’t been any discussions since early last week. When the bankers from both sides put their heads together at that point there was still no serious talk about price (one source suggests nothing has changed since day one, with Yahoo still holding out for $40 a share and Microsoft unwilling to budge from its opening offer, which is now worth more like $29.)

2. Microsoft is getting ready to walk away. Probability: a bit higher than miniscule, but not much. Proponents of the walk-away scenario hold that Microsoft has grown disgruntled at being rebuffed and that dissent in its own ranks, where a Yahoo deal is viewed with dread, has dulled its appetite. This sounds too trite. The move on Yahoo is a huge break with Microsoft’s past: the enormity of it points to how vital it is to control one of the Web’s leading advertising platforms (this could eventually become an important monetisation engine for much of its core software business as it moves online.) This takeover approach was not mounted on a whim. Whatever Steve Ballmer’s other character flaws, a lack of resolve is not one of them.

3. Microsoft is still trying to decide how tight it can turn the thumbscrews on Yahoo without incurring a backlash. Probability: Pretty high. The software company has shown an uncharacteristic restraint all along. There have clearly been people in the Microsoft camp who would have gone in all guns blazing from the start, but that is not how Ballmer has chosen to play it. He has probably calculated that there is a better chance of reeling Yahoo in faster by not forcing it to throw up the defences against a hostile bid. Ballmer was on the road in Europe last week, arriving back only over the weekend - after the Saturday deadline he had set three weeks before had already passed - so it makes sense to deliberate thoroughly on this before taking what could be a critical step. The next turn of the thumbscrew seems imminent.

4. (My favourite explanation.) Jerry Yang just had a baby. Maybe Microsoft just decided to take the heat off for a couple of days. Wouldn’t it be nice to believe that was true?

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The queues for Grand Theft Auto IV, which went on sale at midnight, seem justified judging by the rave reviews for the latest game from developer Rockstar Games and its publisher Take-Two.

“Rockstar’s magnum opus is a modern-day masterpiece that could change the way the world views videogames,” said Gamespy.

Its New York-based location “Liberty City is nothing less than one of the greatest videogame worlds yet conceived,” said IGN.

“I now know how film critics felt after screening The Godfather …Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming,” said Game Informer.

Metacritic, which provides a weighted average score for games based on a wide range of reviews, has rated the PlayStation 3 version of the game as a perfect 100 and the Xbox 360 version as a 99.

The industry average for video games is around 68, with Nintendo games scoring highest at an average of 75, Sony following on 74, then Take-Two on 73 and Electronic Arts on 72.

Metacritic is widely quoted by the industry and the Mature-rated Grand Theft Auto franchise’s excellence has to be one big reason why EA has bid $2bn for Take-Two.

At its analyst day in February, John Riccitiello, EA chief executive, expressed his disappointment that EA’s Metacritic average had dropped 5 points in five years from 77 to 72.

He set a target for its fiscal 2011 year of reaching an average Metacritic score of 80.

EA is this year building better games than it has ever done, he believes, but just imagine the boost to those averages the addition of Rockstar would give.

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The folks at Zoho keep adding tools to their online office suite far faster than their counterparts at Google or anywhere else.

Macros and pivot tables are both very handy, as you’ll see by watching the video.

And they’re just two of the more than a dozen improvements Zoho made to its spreadsheet program.

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Wired’s How-To Wiki offers some pretty good strategies for improving the recommendations you get from Amazon. Here’s one of five tips:

Rate items you like. Sure, it feels good to trash a book you hated, but telling Amazon what you enjoyed will generate better recommendations - and the more, the better. On hold with the cable company? Rate a few items. On a conference call? Rate a few more.

It’s all good advice, even if you don’t use Amazon, because nearly all e-stores use similar strategies for making recommendations.

That said, once you’ve made a lot of purchases at Amazon or any other store, you almost never discover new ideas through the recommendation engine because the only things on your list are more books/music by authors/artists you’ve already bought.

This strikes me as absurd. The whole point of making recommendations is to help me discover things I wouldn’t have discovered on my own.

I don’t need a complex computer program to tell me that if I enjoyed one U2 album, I might like another. I can do that on my own.

I need a computer program to tell me that if I bought an album by U2, I might like to read “Wide Sargasso Sea.” (Or whatever — I’m just making up a distinctly non-obvious relationship.)

I thus call upon Amazon and its fellow e-stores to abandon the low-hanging fruit of same-author picks. It would certainly add more value to my dealings with them.

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Is your primary drive filling up? Nothing frees space faster than moving your music/media library to an external or second internal drive. First, close any media playing software. In XP, open My Documents and drag the My Music folder to the external drive. Windows will figure out that you’re moving a special folder and will change its own settings accordingly.

In Vista, click Start, right-click Music, and then select Properties. Click the Location tab. Change the path to a folder on your new hard drive and click OK. If Windows asks whether you want to create a new folder, click Yes. When Windows inquires whether you want to move all of the files, click Yes again.

If you use Windows Media Player, open it after the move and press F3. Select the new Music folder and let the application search for files.

Source

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