Digg works well for those of us seeking out technology news, but let’s face it, the site primarily lures users that can be best defined as the geek niche. Chris McGill, CEO of Mixx and former general manager of Yahoo News, is betting that the Digg format of news aggregation has legs in other niche populations — specifically ones that don’t currently have a home of their own.

“We have great respect for Digg and Reddit, we like what they do, but this is for people who don’t have a place to turn right now,” McGill told us.

Set to launch its public beta sometime today, the Mixx site looks a lot like Digg, except the homepage is customizable. Think Google News meets Digg. When you sign up, there are a bunch of predefined topics they you can choose to follow on your homepage, but you’re able to make up your own categories, too. In addition to being grouped by a main category, submitted stories can be tagged with other topics, so they’re easier to find. The site also offers the option to track and vote on photos and videos.

Yesterday, Mixx said it has signed content partnerships with USA Today, Reuters (RTRSY), the LA Times, and other publishers, though the specific terms of those deals were not disclosed. The way the site is structured, content publishers can target users based on their chosen topics of interest.

McGill, who prior to his gig at Yahoo News worked as head of strategy at USA Today, told us he isn’t worried about making money yet, but eventually he plans to run advertising on the site.

One nifty feature is that users can create private groups, within which anyone can tag and discuss content. This would be useful, for instance, if employees of a startup want to keep tabs on the media coverage on their competition and discuss the news, but keep these discussions private.

I agree with Adam Ostrow over at Mashable that while Mixx looks like a Digg competitor, its competitors are really the traditional start pages à la My Yahoo or Netvibes. I doubt Digg users will abandon their community, but others who use Internet news sites to track the latest information in specific categories might find value in Mixx.

Based in McLean, Va., Mixx was launched in March. It has completed one round of funding led by Intersouth Partners of Durham, N.C.

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Tags: Mixx, Social News

Predictify, a social prediction startup, launched out of private beta today. It’s based on a belief in the wisdom of the crowd, especially when it comes to predicting the future. After all, if nine out of 10 people think the same thing is going to happen, odds are that outcome will occur, right? Well, so the site’s premise goes. Users are lured in with the opportunity to earn a few bucks here and there by offering up their guesses as to the outcome of future events, from which presidential candidate will win the Democratic ticket to the color of Angelina Jolie’s gown at the Oscars.

The site has an ever-changing list of “free” and “premium” questions. The premium questions, sponsored by companies looking to poll the Predictify audience or advertise a product, pay accurate guessers a percentage of the total money offered by the sponsor for their participation.

Guessers offer up answers to non-paid questions as well, and in turn help to “build a reputation” based on the accuracy of their predictions. The more accurate the user is over time, the higher their payouts are on the premium questions.

In order to be eligible for a premium-question payout, users have to provide certain demographic information, such as age, income, political party, and religion. The question sponsor gets to chose which specific information they wish to gather from the user and is allowed to keep the data gathered through that question private. Free questions, meanwhile, poll 100 users at most and the data is made publicly available.

Predictify competes against other social prediction startups, like ZiiTrend (which doesn’t pay users to predict future events) and traditional online survey companies that pay users to answer a series of questions online.

Company founders Parker Barrile and Mike Agnich, currently students at Stanford’s graduate school of business, started their Menlo Park, Calif.-based company in March. CEO Barrile previously worked at Google (GOOG) in business strategy, while CTO Agnich used to work at Zazzle, where he was VP of product technology.

We predict that unless the team finds some popular partners to pay for premium questions, the site isn’t going to last. Paying people to answer questions is a promising method of convincing users to sign up for the site, but the site doesn’t make it clear exactly how much money users can earn. It does, however, note how much the premium questions will pay out overall. It looks as if, currently, most of the premium questions on the site pay out a total of $500 (the biggest payout is $2000). But so far, according to a list on the site, the top-earning users in the private beta have made a total of just $9 . So we’re not really clear how broad of a user demographic the prospect of earning a few bucks for providing predictions will draw.

It’s a challenge Predictify’s founders acknowledge. “It’s absolutely a concern. We believe the Internet population is getting more and more diverse,” Agnich told us. Their belief in the site’s premise, however, remains undeterred. “We’ve taken a lot of time looking at CNN.com,” Barrile added. “They allow users to post comments after the stories, and a lot of those comments are actually folks predicting the outcome. Prognostication is human nature.”

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Is Facebook planning on launching an MP3 store? Mashable this morning linked to a post on All Facebook that notes an “extremely reliable anonymous source” tipped off blogger Nick O’Neill that Facebook is prepping to launch an in-house competitor to iTunes.

Facebook has reportedly “been searching for a CEO to head up this new subdivision” and has “been pursuing agreements with a number of record labels.” O’Neill writes that his most recent unnamed informant actually knows one of the people being interviewed for the job. We put in a call to Facebook to inquire further into the matter, but haven’t heard back yet.

While “rumor” seems to have become Facebook’s second name lately, maybe this lead has some substance. Facebook’s roughly 40 million users are clearly music fans — iLike, the third-party music discovery app, is the eighth most popular application on the site with 705,943 daily active users, according to application tracker Appsaholic.

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Geezeo is trying to help the average person manage their personal finances online. Following our glowing write-up last month on their competitor Mint (which took home the top prize at the TechCrunch40 event), Geezeo gets a quick mention today for being the first social finance site to add investment accounts to users’ online finance portfolios.

Geezeo, based in Framingham, Mass., has also inked a partnership with the Motley Fool to integrate that group’s CAPS stock rating service.

These “social” personal finance sites are based around the idea that there’s a lot to learn about spending and saving money when a group of people share data and other information about their finances, anonymously or otherwise. Each startup in the space has its own idea of how that works. Geezeo and and similar startup Wesabe employ a bunch of ideas from social networking. Mint, for now, isn’t much of a social personal finance site, but it does offer a personal finance blog and forum where users can read posts and chat with each other about money issues.

Mint’s user interface is still a thousand times cleaner and easier to navigate than Geezeo, but right now Geezeo has a better offering when it comes to adding accounts. Both Mint and Geezeo let users add checking and savings accounts, but only Geezeo allows for the addition of student loans, mortgages, car loans and investment data.

Users can supposedly connect automatically to account data from over 10,000 financial institutions on Geezeo, but I’m still having trouble adding my Bank of America accounts. Meanwhile, when I tried to add in my Roth IRA info, I was told that Vanguard wasn’t supported yet and that I should try again tomorrow. So much for that.

Another free personal finance site, Yodlee, which is modeled more closely on traditional personal finance software and lacks the social aspect found in Geezeo and Wesabe, already offers the ability to add investment accounts. After giving up on Geezeo, I went over to Yodlee to add my accounts and had my full profile, investments and all, up and running in about 10 minutes. But after that, I was on my own. The site offered a detailed look into my spending habits, but didn’t provide any information on how I might go about saving money or advice on budgeting, features I’d expect on the “social” personal finance sites.

Of the aforementioned sites, Mint’s still got my vote, as long as it can add investment accounts in the near future (i.e. before Geezeo gets its act together). Yodlee is functional as a personal finance software alternative, but Mint has tools that fully take advantage of it being an online application. Mint, like Geezeo, adds value to the basic personal finance idea by suggestion specific ways to save money, like higher-interest savings accounts and high-yield CDs. Check out my full review of Mint here.

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Are you sick and tired of phishing attacks, those fraudulent emails designed to look like trusted corporations but aimed at stealing your personal account information? Today Yahoo (YHOO), together with eBay (EBAY) and its PayPal unit, started to roll out an authentication technology called DomainKeys that supposedly blocks malicious, fake eBay and PayPal messages from being delivered into the inboxes of Yahoo Mail users by allowing Internet Service Providers to automatically decide if messages should be delivered.

Speaking of PayPal, the company has teamed up with News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace to “virally fundraise” for nonprofits and politicians on the social networking site. PayPal has developed “fundraising badges,” which are basically widgets that are a bit fancier than the typical PayPal “donate” button that could be copied onto any site to inspire philantrophy via the Internet.

The widget, which can be found on over 20 charity and politician profiles on MySpace, makes it easy for site visitors to donate money to their chosen cause. Once users donate funds, their name is added to a scrolling list that includes the names of other supporters of the particular campaign. Since each of these widgets can be copied and pasted into any user profile, web site or blog, the idea is that the badges will spread virally and subsequently increase the amount of funds raised. To encourage the viral effect to take place, the widget also displays a “supporter tree” that tracks the users who have added the tools to their profiles, and how much each person has raised.

The fundraising widget was created in “PayPal Labs,” a new division of the company designed to look for innovative and creative ways to leverage the online payment service. Launched today, the PayPal Labs site (which can be found at x.com) also describes a Facebook app that can be used to send and get money from friends.

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Zoho threw a jab at Google’s (GOOG) suite of online office applications with today’s release of its free database app, Zoho DB & Reports. Zoho’s latest offering brings the number of its online office applications to 13, an impressive attempt in the company’s bid to become the ubiquitous online office suite provider.

With competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Adobe (ADBE), we wonder how much the company’s lack of brand awareness will hurt it in the long run. However, if Zoho continues to innovate at top speed, it might make a smart acquisition target, perhaps for one of its competitors.

Zoho DB, at first glance, is reminiscent of Microsoft Excel, but a closer look reveals a database application more like Access. The SQL-based database supports importing and exporting from a bunch of different format types, and also makes it easy to make charts, summary views, and table views. Thanks to the online functionality, all this information can be shared with anyone across the web.

Earlier this week, Adobe entered the online office game with its acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, a Waltham, Mass.-based startup behind online word processor Buzzword. Meanwhile, Microsoft just unveiled its Office Live Workplace, a web-based feature of its office suite that will let people access and share their documents online.

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Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, following rumors last week that the software giant is considering an investment that would value the social networking company at $10 billion, is saying the craze for social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a “fad.”

I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people.

Facebook is also built on technology that “dozens of people could write in a couple of years,” he told Times Online. On the other hand, he suggested that the combination of the well-known brand and the community of more than 40 million users has some value.

But is Facebook destined to become a fad? I don’t think so.

Facebook’s biggest problem right now is its escalating legal issues regarding the safety of minors on its site, not whether or not it’s a fad. As of August, the number of unique users on Facebook had soared 117 percent year-over-year, to 19 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Originally open to college students only, the growth over the last year was first fueled, in September of 2006, by Facebook opening its doors to all interested users, then by its announcement in May that external technology companies could develop advertising-supported mini applications for the site.

Ballmer compares the potential faddishness of Facebook to Geocities (which was bought by Yahoo for $3.6 billion in 1999). But Facebook is different. Encouraging outside developers to create applications for Facebook enables the site to constantly add new content for its users without having to spend any money in-house. New, easy-to-find content, whether created by friends or outside developers, drives the growth of social networking sites.

Additionally, Facebook is a mix of personal and professional social networking. And it’s about to be an even better mix, as the site will soon add the ability to separate work “friends” from social ones. Lindsay Blakely of Fortune asserts that this “seemingly innocuous change… could pose a threat to business networking site LinkedIn.”

Ultimately, though, social networkers aren’t as fickle as some would like to believe. Sure, there’s always the possibility that something bigger and better will come along, but anyone who has actively belonged to a social networking for a significant length of time knows that it’s difficult to just pack up and move from one community to the next.

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Yahoo (YHOO) rolled out some major upgrades to its search engine today. Dubbed “Search Assist,” the addition to the interface integrates audio, video, and photos directly into search results. The updated search also features “suggestions” that actively guess what you’re about to search for when you type in a few letters of your query.

Yahoo’s search traffic is on the decline as competitor Google (GOOG) gains momentum. Yahoo captured 19.9 percent of total search market share in August, down from 24 percent in August 2006, according to Neilsen/NetRatings. Meanwhile, Google claimed 53.6 percent of search market share in August, up from 50.2 percent in the same month the prior year.

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MySpace President Tom Anderson posted a blog last week detailing a bunch of recent changes to the site. The new features lead me to believe that the company is finally starting to realize that Facebook, with its anti-spam features, clean-cut layout, and growing traffic figures, might be on to something.

One of the most annoying things about MySpace is the gobs of spam that get through to members’ inboxes. Getting dozens of unsolicited friend requests and emails from faux porn stars gets old pretty quickly.

Facebook doesn’t seem to have these problems. Plus MySpace, despite being owned by News Corp. (NWS), still looks like a hobby project. Maybe that pseudo-authenticity is why it still thrives, porn spam and all.

Here’s a list of all the changes to MySpace, and how they compare to what Facebook offers:

New (Optional) Homepage MySpace’s new optional layout for its homepage is a bit like Facebook, except with a lot more color. The layout separates each area of the page in boxes, with a prominent friends status box, similar to Facebook’s user interface. In his blog post, Anderson notes that eventually users will be able to drag-and-drop the boxes to different parts of the page (exactly like what Facebook already allows). Note: Facebook uses this content-dragging interface for user profiles, whereas it sounds like MySpace just plans to implement this feature for the user homepage, which cannot be seen by other members.

Updated Music Player Compared to Facebook, MySpace has a strong musician presence. The latest music player update on the site just adds volume control and a song history link that will display songs previously added to a profile. Facebook doesn’t have an official music player for user profiles, though users can add sound files by putting a music app (such as Project Playlist, Imeem, or iLike) on their pages.

Updated Forums. MySpace’s forums are traditional message boards. Facebook only has a forum-type communication option within its networks and groups.

New “Friends View” MySpace’s Friends View display has traditionally made it very difficult to sort through people on a user’s friend list, while Facebook’s user interface for organizing friends is thorough and one of the best features on its site. The new display on MySpace now lets users choose to view “all friends,” “online friends,” “mutual friends,” and “recently added friends.” It’s still nowhere near as good as Facebook.

Updated Photos Section “You can now tag photos and link them to a friend’s profile,” writes Andersen. This sounds suspiciously similar to Facebook’s photo section.

Spam Control MySpace finally makes it possible to block inbox spammers and cut down on random friend ad requests. Users can decide what level of spam filtering they want through their account settings. Facebook already has many of these controls built into its user contact system. Then again, Facebook is now cluttered with what I like to call AppSpam — dozens of unwanted application invites sent by “friends.” There are days when I think MySpace’s porn spam is easier to deal with than nine thousand invites for the latest Vampire or Zombie game on Facebook!

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Amazon (AMZN) is apparently within days of announcing it will relocate its scattered Seattle-area offices to the city’s South Lake Union neighborhood, according to a local publication. Crosscut, which spoke with unnamed company and City Hall sources, said the relocation would take place over several years and could result in the online retailer moving nearly all of its roughly 5,000 Seattle-area employees into a single, urbanized campus.

Seattle and the surrounding area is, of course, also home to Starbucks (SBUX), Microsoft (MSFT), and numerous Boeing (BA) facilities. The city’s South Lake Union neighborhood currently consists of mostly biotech businesses and University of Washington Medical School facilities. But the local biotech industry hasn’t been growing as fast as expected. If Amazon were to move in, the area’s shift to high tech might be inevitable, and could spurn some startup growth in the neighborhood as well. Microsoft recently leased 126,000 square feet in a building one block south of the expected Amazon campus.

Amazon, which opened its online store in 1995, is one of the few Internet retail sites that survived the dot-com crash. In 1996, its first full fiscal year in business, Amazon generated $15.7 million sales. That figure increased by 800 percent the following year and in 2006, the company posted revenue of $10.71 billion. We’re curious to see what their sales figures will look like when their DRM-free music download sales start to take off. Maybe they’ll be enough to fund the move.

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As Apple (APPL) and Amazon (AMZN) duke it out in the MP3 price war, music publishers are still trying to figure out how to cash in on a crowd that will go to great lengths to get its music for free.

Imeem, a San Francisco-based music discovery startup, said it has signed a content agreement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment that gives users access to the Sony(SNE)-Bertelsmann joint venture’s digital catalog of music and video for ad-supported, “free” streaming of these files.

The company, which competes with Project Playlist, makes a customizable music playlist that can be embedded into MySpace and Facebook profiles. This is its second deal with a major label; it inked a similar partnership with Warner Music Group (WMG) earlier this summer.

SpiralFrog, which has a partnership with Vivendi’s (V) Universal Music Group, also offers free music downloads, but of course there’s a catch (actually there’s about 20 catches).

Launched earlier this month after lengthy delays, SpiralFrog makes money through site ads, and then splits these profits with the music publisher.

The good: Users have access to over 800,000 MP3s from popular and lesser-known artists available for free download.

The bad: To keep these files playable, the user needs to sign in to the site once every 30 days. Downloading takes about 90 seconds per song, and SpiralFrog forces users to download songs one at a time so the user stays on the site awhile and has time to view all of those lovely ads.

The really bad: While SpiralFrog supports portable players, it doesn’t support iTunes (or Macs at all, for that matter) at this time.

Meanwhile, LTDnetwork’s legal peer-to-peer (P2P) service QTrax, which has yet to launch, has already signed deals with Universal, Sony/ATV, Warner Music Group, The Orchard, EMI Music Publishing and EMI Music, TVT Records, Go Digital, ASCAP and BMI. They plan to make money through advertising in a P2P client that helps users find legal content.

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Tags: Imeem, project playlist, Qtrax, Spiralfrog

Google (GOOG) is acquiring certain assets and technology of Zingku, a mobile social network startup that helps users organize their social life via the web and text messaging. Zingku wrote about the deal on its site, and a Google spokesperson confirmed the plans. Zingku, a Boston-based startup was co-founded by Sami Shalabi. The service has been in private beta and new user accounts are currently frozen.

What is Google’s motivation to acquire this little known company? One explanation would be to get talented engineers, but we suspect it would be to bolster their Orkut social network. Zingku is an SMS-turbocharger of sort. While Google lost out to the king and queen of social networking in the U.S. (that’d be MySpace and Facebook), their Orkut is extremely popular in Brazil and India.

These are two countries, where basic phones and text messaging reign supreme and wireless broadband options are less common. Furthermore, Google has plans to roll out a mobile phone that takes true advantage of the mobile web, as rumor has it. But if the phone relies too heavily on wireless broadband, it won’t get much traction in fast growing markets where mobile broadband is still in infancy.

The total number of mobile subscribers worldwide is set to cross three billion in late 2007, and worldwide mobile penetration will pass 50 percent in 2008, according to UK-based research firm Portio Research. The firm notes the number of SMS messages will spike from 967.7 billion in 2006 to over 2070 billion messages by 2012 in Asia Pacific. Meanwhile, SMS accounts for approximately 75 to 80 percent of non-voice service revenues worldwide.

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Tags: google, Orkut, Zingku

What will the next generation of social networking sites look like? Zude, a startup based in Roslyn, N.Y., thinks the answer lies with customization, and as such is offering a platform that is part social, with a community of member pages, but also part web mashup, with a drag-and-drop design application that lets users drag content from (almost) any web site directly onto their Zude pages.

Owned by Fifth Generation Systems (5g), Zude had raised $5 million in VC funding when it rolled out its private beta last May — only to find it was unable to handle the site traffic. So the company regrouped, beefed up its capabilities, and launched a public beta, to little fanfare, in July.

The pre-designed templates on which users can build their pages resemble a typical MySpace profile, with features including a guestbook and profile information. Also like MySpace, Zude is trying to tap into cool by encouraging musicians to add profiles and music to the site. It also plans to eventually add a classified directory, according to CEO Jim McNeil.

At its core, however, the company is trying to make it easy for users to design their own, fully customizable web sites and profile pages that are a mashup of found and created content, sort of like a free-for-all NetVibes.

Do they accomplish this goal? Well, sort of. The interface is fairly painful to navigate at first, at least in Firefox (it’s supposedly better in Internet Explorer; it didn’t work at all in Safari), but with the end goal of putting together a custom webpage, it’s still easier to figure out than Dreamweaver.

It’s also easy to make a really ugly, graphic-heavy web site, replete with clashing colors. As we learned from MySpace, self-expression isn’t always pretty.

What really sets Zude apart from similar startups like ZCubes, PageFlakes, NetVibes and others is that it lets users actually drag content in from other windows and plop it right down on their page. Similar to competitor ZCubes, you can take an image from Google image search in one window, and click and drag it onto the page, easy as…potential copyright infringement? We’ll leave it to Zude’s lawyers to deal with that problem.

Like ZCubes, Zude lets users create a mashup of Internet sites. For instance, check out this Zude page that includes GigaOM, Earth2Tech, and NewTeeVee that I spent about 30 minutes creating — 25 of which were spent trying to get the application to work properly in my browser.

Don’t bother trying to put a Facebook profile on the page, though. McNiel explains that Facebook is among the list of sites that block the ability to plop their content into a mash-up page on Zude; The New York Times is another one. Instead, users are limited to posting links.

It turns out it’s not too difficult for companies to block Zude from being able to go in and, uh, borrow content from their pages. Sites might want to block Zude because it’s not exactly kosher to run ads on someone else’s content. But some sites might like the added traffic. The copied web sites load in full inside the Zude pages, with advertising intact. It’s unclear how many sites will block Zude, and if that will affect their growth potential.

The biggest problem with Zude at the moment is its interface. Even a well-designed page gets cluttered with an annoying and ugly navigational bar at the top of the screen, and the banner ad that pops up in the bottom of the screen for the first 30 seconds after the window loads doesn’t help, either. The company plans to offer paid accounts that will get rid of that advertising altogether.

If Zude can clean up its UI a bit, it could catch on.

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Project Playlist calls itself a “social music experiment.” In other words, it’s just one of the many options available when it comes to adding an embeddable music player to MySpace or Facebook profiles. Its simple player lets users aggregate free MP3 files available on the Net and put them together in a widget that can be posted just about anywhere. This week the company even announced a version of Project Playlist for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based startup has raised $3 million in funding, according to PE Hub. We tried to contact the company to find out more about their Series A round, but to no avail.

Project Playlist makes some money through advertising on its site, and spends on “performance royalties” paid to performance rights organizations. These orgs, in turn, dole out undisclosed sums to songwriters and music publishers. The more their songs appear on playlists, the more they get paid.

Even though the company pays musicians and publishers, as with any music player, copyright is a serious concern. Project Playlist doesn’t host music content (it plays files hosted on third-party web sites), and claims it maintains no editorial oversight over what gets posted by its users.

iLike (the popular Facebook music discovery app) also aggregates external files, while Imeem has a growing, but limited amount of approved music content available to use in playlists.

Project Playlist’s site traffic has rocketed higher by nearly 2000 percent in the year since August 2006, according to this graph from Compete.com.

It’s hard to say which music player is the most popular overall, since iLike and others allow full use of their application directly through Facebook.

According to current stats from Facebook app traffic measurement tool Appsaholic, iLike is the most popular, with 789,329 daily active users, followed by Project Playlist, with 21,350 daily active users. Imeem has 9,005 daily active users.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Here’s Our NewTeeVee Wish List, What’s on Yours? NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington ";

Posted by Adena DeMonte on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments
Tags: project playlist, social music wigdets

Update: This morning, we found out some more information about 360Desktop. While when we chatted with CEO Evan Jones last night, we were under the impression that the company plans to support itself through partnering with advertisers in the creation of branded desktops, Jones sent us an email this morning noting that the company expects that ”advertiser-branded 360’s would make up less than 0.5 percent of all the 360 content available.”

What about the other 99.5 percent of content? Jones said that these user-made mash-up desktops are available to use for free, just like any free-to-download wallpaper, and that they will “never have any ad content delivered into them, ever.” Additionally, Evans wrote, “In the same way that line or button-sized ads are delivered into apps like Messenger, we may also deliver ads into one small spot in the drop-down navigation utility, but that is not our primary focus.”

360Desktop, an Australian startup, wants to unclutter your desktop and turn it into an unending panorama, and oh by the way also a giant billboard.

The company makes software that turns an ordinary desktop into a long, scrollable horizontal rectangle adorned with customizable wallpaper. Users can leave widgets, Internet windows (that automatically refresh), and applications open on the desktop without clogging up their entire screen.

The self-described “panoramic desktop platform company” based in Melbourne launched at DEMOfall this week. Backed by $1 million in angel funding, the company will make its products publicly available on Nov. 5. Their plan to make money revolves around what else: advertising.

They want to partner with big brands and offer branded desktops, and advertisers can update the page whenever they feel like it. This is a new spin on ideas first attempted by PointCast and Microsoft (Active Desktop.) Those two attempts didn’t go according to plan.

Pardon our skepticism, but does 360Desktop really think there will be enough users that sign up for a product where the advertiser has free reign to do whatever they feel like it? If you want more desktop real estate, then there are quite a few freeware options for virtual desktops, which allow users to have multiple desktop windows accessible at the click of a button.

When applied to small, specific niches for subtle brand-building, 360Desktop’s idea has legs. For instance, Ford Motors (F) can create a 360 theme for Mustang fans that would include a car that would appear to “drive” through the background scenery. A few areas where the latest Mustang news and special offers can be delivered in real-time to the desktop could actually prove to be useful for Mustang enthusiasts. 360Desktop should forget the all-purpose advertising idea, and focus on a brand-extension strategy.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Here’s Our NewTeeVee Wish List, What’s on Yours? NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington ";

Posted by Adena DeMonte on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments

If you’re like me — tired of old-school personal finance software à la Quicken, you’re in for a treat. Mint, one of the best online personal finance startups I’ve seen, launched yesterday at the TechCrunch40 event. (It was the winner of TechCrunch40’s $50,000 award.)

I’ve been using the beta version for a few weeks now, and I am impressed with what the site has to offer. While competitors Geezeo and Wesabe are reasonably adequate for money management, Mint gets online personal finance right.

First off, the site makes it easy to connect checking, savings and other non-investment accounts. Sites like Wesabe require a software download for automatic updates, but Mint automates the entire process without any extra download hassles. The entire sign-up process for Mint took a few minutes, whereas it took me a good half an hour or so to get started on both Wesabe and Geezeo.

Once signed up, I really noticed a difference. Given design doesn’t matter much in the success of a startup (have you seen MySpace?), when it comes to a company that needs to earn the trust of an online banking audience, a clean, well-designed site could be its ticket to success. Mint not only has a better name for branding than its competitors, but a clean and easy-to-navigate site design to boot.

While Geezeo focuses mostly on mobile access to data and Wesabe is keen on providing a social networking experience, Mint’s site is geared at providing the best user experience possible in terms of breaking down where money has been earned and spent. The site makes spending patterns easy to track by automatically creating graphs displayed on a privately accessed site.

According to Mint, 65 million people in the U.S. use online banking today, and the average American has more than four bank relationships. It’s nice, then, to have one place to go to view spending on all of these accounts. Of course, not all of the 65 million online bankers in the U.S. will trust an online finance site with their banking passwords. Will enough of them trust Mint for the site to be successful? In this age of identity theft paranoia, I’m not so sure.

Mint will try to persuade those users to sign up for the site with a bunch of nifty features. Besides the graphs, my favorite feature is a weekly e-mail that reminds me of my balance and latest purchases on my various banking cards. If my account balance dips below a certain amount, they’ll send me an e-mail to let me know I need to be careful not to overdraw it.

And here’s where online advertising and user value fit nicely hand-in-hand: Mint partners with various financial firms that will offer users savings on their accounts. For instance, Mint informs me that I can save $403 a year just by signing up for its recommended offers, such as American Express (AXP) credit card or an E-Trade (ETFC) CD with 5.05 percent APY interest.

Mint, Wesabe and Geezeo have yet to make it possible to link up access to investment accounts. It seems Mint plans to eventually offer the ability to link monthly bills to the online account as well, as there is a grayed-out “monthly bills” graphic which leads one to believe this is a feature on the way. Mint is backed by First Round Capital and other angel investors. It was founded in 2006.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Here’s Our NewTeeVee Wish List, What’s on Yours? NewTeeVee – by Chris Albrecht "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington ";

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