After playing around with quite a few online tools and applications, I very well understood that the wave is so big that I cannot fit it in a small area on the main page. So, here is a complete section to just direct you to the most popular and most useful websites(web applications) that will serve as the online alternatives to your desktop applications. Web2.0 has become so popular that the new trend is to move service centric applications too to the online world. While it might a too futuristic idea, it is a very good one, depending on what it is that you are building the app for. The idea behind Web2.0 has been around from some time but it wasn't really termed as Web2.0 then. It used to be called a service, an applet or a snippet of code to give us some result. (ex: color code generators, websites providing driving directions, functions to calculate something like converting temperature etc). The same thing when done on a large scale for a specific idea/service is now termed as a Web2.0 application and you can find a more apt definition by clicking on the Web2.0 words above. Personal Finance Management/Personal expense or budget tracking If you are thinking you are left behind because you don't own Quicken Deluxe or Microsoft Money, you will have to think again. With so many websites that are trying to replace these applications, for your purely personal budget/expense tracking you will never find need for these two monopolistic applications. Here are some of the best online tools/applications for tracking your money matters. Wesabe is almost like Quicken and provides a lot of functionality like the standard suite of financial application. Buxfer is more for sharing and tracking your expenses. The most impressive feature of Buxfer is its ability to import your bank/credit card statements. It is worth trying out and is useful to settle your shared expenses. Expensr is another personal finance manager. Each of the above ones is good in its own way. It is just a matter of choosing what works for you, and what exactly you are looking for.
Track and/or Pay your Bills Online: Mint Mint.com deserves a special mention in what it is able to do. It consolidates all your financial information and displays how much AND how you spend it. It is interesting when you look up the chart for the last six months to see how high your Electronics/Entertainment spending is, which you never thought it would be that much. It is also very visually appealing apart from the consolidator it is. Mint has tied up with Yodlee.com to keep your bank/credit card information secure. Checkout their privacy information if you don't trust it enough to entrust your details with it. A quick view of their site would be enough. It surely is a helpful tool but does not have a bill pay facility from within. Yodlee's MoneyCenter
And when I mention Mint in conjunction with Yodlee, let me not forget another free and excellent service from Yodlee, the Yodlee Moneycenter (http://moneycenter.yodlee.com ). It is a free personal management tool and has an equally useful 'Bill Pay' service. It allows you to add all(most) of your utility bills, reminds you when a bill is due and you can pay all of them from a single place. And the best thing I like about it, is the 'Yodlee Financial Calendar'. It shows all your bill due dates in a Calendar view, so you know when to expect them and how much. Mycheckfree.com Mycheckfree.com is the other place to seggregate your bill paying activities. I was trying to find a single trustworthy website where I can pay all my utility/phone/insurance and credit card bills and this one would fill in for most of them except the credit card bills. So, if you need a service whee you can see your water/gas/electricity/phone etc bills, sign up with this one. Billeo :
Billeo is a free toolbar and allows you to keep track of ALL your bills. It is not like the bill pay services given above, but is more useful as a reminder and bill tracking service. Billeo provides a toolbar to help you track and pay your bills on time. And for a lot of skeptics out there who are thinking of your 'highly secured' personal information, Billeo doesn't store any of your personal details online. You have to try it to believe it. Here is a review from Techcrunch on this: Billeo Toolbar Password Management It gets difficult to manage/remember all the Ids and passwords we have across the internet. It is okay if you remember the user id as you can retrieve the passwords but with all the stupid standards (different for every site), you cannot have a uniform user id. Some say, don't enter special characters & numbers, some-numbers and characters, some-only numeric and some-a specific length user id. So, I would say User-Id management is actually more difficult than password management. Yeah, and I know that OpenID exists but is not there to resolve these issues. So, the following password managers are the most useful and reliable that I have found so far. Billeo Password Manager
Billeo also has a password manager which you can make use of, not just for bill paying, but for keeping track of all/most of your Logins and Passwords. Comodo i-Vault
Comodo's i-Vault is another such service and can be a very useful piece of software to help you getting organized in your password management.
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