Mint is a new free personal finance software that was released on the Web. Apparently, it is initially designed for the people reside in the US where an user need to enter the US zip code. Upon signing-up for Mint, you’ll able to use it as a single Web-based for all account types such as banks, credit cards, and credit unions. In order to download data to your Mint account, you’ll also need to enter the bank or credit card number. Currently, it supports more than 3,500 US financial institutions, such as Bank of America, Chase, Citibank Bank, HSBC, PayPal, just to name a few. Mint also supports investment account whereby you can fetch your personal data from your investment accounts such as Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Merrill Lynch, etc. More account types such as student loans and mortgages are on the way, probably available in June.

One notable feature Mint render is safety. If you’re connected to Mint and log into those of your bank accounts, Mint will automatically log you out if they find your account is being idle for 10 minutes, as all the data fetched from your bank accounts is sensitive data. The primary objective Mint offered to users is letting them handle their money in an efficient manner. How much money left in the accounts, how to do money budgeting yourself. An advanced alerting system is also being built into the system to alert users on issues such as unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills. In Mint’s About page, it seem that their next goal is to be a recommendation engine, if your balance in your bank is earning no interest, they might recommend a high interest rate savings account and you might earn some interest based on their suggestion.

Though Mint has many notable features pertaining to money management, it does not help an user to do money transferring or bill paying. You still need to do it by logging in to those accounts separately. What Mint can offer is their insights, by illustrating your money flowing in a pie chart or bar graph, you’ll be able to read your personal finance in this elegant way and help you to practice smarter in the future.

I’ll give Mint a real try in near future since my local bank is not in a list of Mint’s supported financial institutions. Stay tuned.

via [All Thing Digital]

There are as many different reasons social networking platform providers will be considered as the hot targets in venture capital as social networking sites. HiveLive, an enterprise social software solution provider is announcing that it has raised $5.6 million in a Series A financing. In a press release, this round of financing was led by Grotech Capital Group and with participation of the current private investors. This bring HiveLive’s total funding to date is $7.8 million, which includes prior angel investments of $2.2 million. In addition, Grotech General Partner Joseph R. Zell will take a seat on HiveLive’s board of directors with immediate effective.

This news reminds me of another social networking platform provider that called Five Across, acquired by Cisco exactly one year ago. Both target on enterprise customers, with the offering of some social tools such as wiki, forum, blog, all with the core purpose to facilitate the online communication from one enterprise to its enterprise clients. Frankly, I never used or get involved with HiveLive software, but reading some other blogs on HiveLive, I know that HiveLive tend to become a Web software that is a highly customized, configurable, and scalability. Since HiveLive is an on-demand, companies that want to create social network on their sites will probably short-list HiveLive based on the aforesaid features. If you want to know more about the social networking functionality that offered by HiveLive, you can visit the review done by TechCrunch.

Finally, HiveLive is a Boulder-based startup that just launched in last year.

LongJump, a customizable business applications provider is unveiling a new service, i.e. Database-as-a-Service (DaaS). With Software-as-a-Service becoming more mainstream, it is inevitably to observe the trend and market response of this DaaS. Unlike SaaS, DaaS-delivered offering is a new service in the market, with the main purpose for mid-market businesses to automate a database that is highly scalable, secure and cost-effective. According to LongJump, DaaS is a database service that drive your data on the Web, eliminate infrastructure management as well as a service that helps to reduce administration effort.

Visually, there are no much detailed information available on their landing page, but through a chart offered by them (also embedded in the below), we roughly know that a back-end open source database system is being used, and users are allowed to access this DaaS through a Web browser and SOAP or REST APIs is provided in this instance.

Unlike SaaS, DaaS may sound like a mere fad. Thus, for the corporate decision makers that choose to this DaaS route, they need to consider what are the main reasons for them in adopting DaaS. Can DaaS serve a disruptor to the database market, it is still an early question. Perhaps, to make initial decision whether a DaaS is suitably for an enterprise, 30 days trial period is not enough. On the other hand, securities vulnerabilities, integration issues, and etc. must taken consideration in the first place if an enterprise want to move into this DaaS route.

via [InfoQ]

InstaColl has released an office suite that was probably developed by them for more than one year. It is called Live Documents since the name they chosen reflected this office software, the documents can be worked “lively” in both environments, the desktop and on the Web. Though InstaColl has reiterated that this software they developed is not competing with Microsoft Office or Google docs, but this powerful office application can offer functionality equivalent to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint would definitely make their users unconsciously compare them hand-in-hand. On top of that, Live Documents is built using RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as Flash and Flex, the effect of Flash-based user interface could generate the same kind of experience that is comparable to the experiment of using BuzzWord.

One of the most powerful features in this Live Document is the dual use of online and offline. Any changes on either side of the desktop version or Web version are automatically synchronized and hence, the value of a document can be magnified as multiple users can edit a specific document and the document is always in sync. Meanwhile, they’ve planned to release the software into two different versions, one is free and the other one is the commercial version. Though Live Documents is still in beta, this software has caught the eyes of some corporations. As stated on the InstaColl site, the first commercial version will be deployed at Aricent, the world’s leading independent communications software company with over 6,700 employees globally.

InstaColl is well-structured and created with the hype of being co-founded by the co-founder of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia. Mr. Bhatia, a native of Bangalore, India, also a graduate of Caltech and Stanford University, went back to Bangalore from US to create this new startup. Now InstaColl hoping to do something special, and entrepreneurial about software development. It seem they’re well in progress developing the first “Made by India” product brand and the first product released likely to be used by users throughout the world. For those who want to receive the beta invites, you can visit the sign-up page here.

Last month, Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity and many people including me had questioned the future of this product, since Buzzword, Virtual Ubiquity’s Flash-based word processor might bundle with some other Adobe products. Now, one month later, it looked like Adobe will only make this Web-based application for the better, new features are work in progress. On top of that, Buzzword is now opens to all the users without requiring any invitation code.

An user simply need to submit her name, email address and password, and Buzzword is ready to go. To get Buzzword, it is on the web at http://preview.getbuzzword.com. Meanwhile, I just typed a short document using Buzzword, as shown in the above picture.

iLike, an Internet music service provider has released a plugin that works on Windows Media Player, shortly thereafter the released of iLike Sidebar for iTunes. The plugin is a relatively small download weight in at 2.6MB, and existing Windows users that download and install this plugin will automatically see an iLike sidebar appear in the right-hand side when they open Windows Media Player. In fact, this plugin can only works on the latest and updated Windows Media Player, if you’re still using Windows Media Player version 8, you’ll find that you won’t see any sidebar you expected it to be appeared in the first place.

According to iLike, this new iLike Sidebar combines an existing iLike.com user’s friend-list and her Facebook friend-list, as well as show what all her friends are listening to. It has designed to test the listening habits with friends, share music library and show some music recommendations based on what songs an existing user listening to. The interesting parts after an user installed this plugin are the information flow, transparency feature, and the connections between the iLike users. For instance, an user’s profile on iLike.com will show the music that she play in the Windows Media Player.

Adobe has acquired a Waltham, Massachusetts based startup Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum, according to this blog. This startup was founded in June 2005 and made their name on the Web by created a Web-based word processor application that called Buzzword. Obviously, this acquisition did not took people by surprise since Adobe and Virtual Ubiquity have pre-existing software relationships as the Buzzword, still a test version was built on Adobe’s Flex framework and users must enable their browsers the installed of Flash Player 9. While I attended an Adobe training today, I was told that the team made up of Virtual Ubiquity’s success, i.e. eleven (11) people, half of whom worked at Lotus Development Corp. in the 1980s and 1990s will join the Adobe family. What are the likely repercussions of this acquisition in term of the product development of Adobe? It’s indeed too early to tell that.

Meanwhile, this acquisition has given new prominence to the Adobe and Microsoft, both companies’ previously hidden rivalry, with Adobe indisputably has every right to integrate the Buzzword word processor into their Adobe Acrobat family or LifeCycle platform. In fact, the competition and struggle for market share has not been standing still but intensified over the months after both companies, Adobe and Microsoft have released the desktop video player and rich media browser extension, i.e. Adobe Media Player that built on Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight at the same time in April this year. However, the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity definitely has been a source of competitive advantage especially for Adobe, with plans to push for the Web office market.

Given the saturation of the Adobe’s existing markets for their core products which are Acrobat and Web design softwares, Adobe definitely seeks to expand into other fields. Things are getting more interesting now. While Adobe was still perceived as immature in developing its enterprise market, albeit that they believed the growth must come from the “enterprise market,” Adobe’s main strength was more likely to be appealed to the desktop buyers. They simply have no credibility to the enterprise buyers, especially for now. I’m sure they know building its integrated Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) software product line bundle with Buzzword is less difficult and yields profits faster than developing the products and solutions that geared toward the enterprise businesses.

Zoho has released an office productivity suite purposely for the business use. It is called Zoho Business which temporarily in private beta mode and rich features are being built-in to this suite. The release of this business suite will not affect the availability of Zoho personal version as Zoho has stated that they will continue to develop the personal version for the best of individual user.

This Zoho Business will bring multiple Zoho applications under a single roof and provide an administration console to manage users, domains, groups. It mean when an user sign-up and use this suite, the role of super administrator is given by this system and hence, other new administrators can be added to this Zoho Business. Customization, flexibility, telephone support, data storage management and remote back-up can be found when we use this business version of Zoho. It is a complete suite of business software, as its popular Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Chat, Calendar, just to mention a few are bundling to this Business suite.

Zoho Business is created based on the concept that companies should be able to run their businesses in an online environment. However, it is known that it will only be officially marketed in the marketplace in this October.