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July 03 2010
Indinero: A Realtime Financial Dashboard for Small Businesses
Web technology has revolutionized finance by making it easier than ever to monitor cash flow and track trends in your spending. Mint.com has been a leader in this realm for personal finance: its technology helps you track multiple accounts, analyze spending trends, and manage financial goals.
There isn’t a clear counterpart to Mint for businesses, though. That’s where inDinero, a Y-Combinator-funded startup, comes in.
inDinero, which launches today, is a web-based financial dashboard for small businesses. Like Mint, it aggregates financial data from bank accounts, investments, and other sources and places them in a simple, easy-to-navigate interface where you can quickly see your income, spending, recent activity, and your financial runway.
The app is divided into five parts: Dashboard, Income, Spending, Planning and Trends. Dashboard provides an overview of your business finances, Income provides detailed information about your income streams, Spending breaks down your different costs, Planning helps you set goals for your business, and Trends analyzes and graphs out spending and income trends in order to provide useful insights.
Businesses need this type of information in order to minimize costs while maximizing revenues. While solutions such as Mint also aggregate financial information and analyze it, they are not focused on small businesses. We look forward to seeing inDinero’s business toolset grow and evolve.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jwohlfeil
Reviews: Mint, iStockphoto
More About: finance, Financial, Indinero, mint
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April 16 2010
No Free Lunch for Ning Users; Still Plenty of Bargains Elsewhere
The social networking platform Ning announced today that it was making some substantial changes to the company. The news, coming just one month after Jason Rosenthal replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO, was sour for both employees and for many users of the service. Ning will cut 70 jobs and will end free subscriptions to the site.
Rosenthal writes in the press release, "We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning."
Sponsor
According to the release, paying subscribers account for 75% of the service's traffic. These fees have ranged from $4.95 per month to use your own domain name, to $24.95 per month to remove Ning's promotional links, although it's unclear if those fees will change.
But the service has long been used by many small groups and organization, many of which are in a tail-spin over today's announcement. Educators in particular have found Ning to be useful, as both a tool for classroom collaboration and for professional development. Tom Whitby, founder of the Educator PLN Ning, expressed his frustrations this morning: "Ning is throwing us under the bus."
Lisa Sjogren, a technology coordinator for the Osseo Area Schools in Minnesota echoed the frustrations of many teachers, noting that Ning's decision was a "big headache" that threw a wrench in a six-month-long, district-wide technology integration and standards project. Like many educators and non profits who work with limited budgets, Sjogren is now tasked with finding a new site where she can host her project for free. For teachers that already struggle to convince their districts to not block social networking sites, requesting funding to join or host sites might not be feasible.
Ning is, of course, not the only platform for creating personalized and private social networks. This afternoon, many educators shared suggestions for alternatives via Twitter. Here are a few other free and open-source options.
- Buddypress (http://www.buddypress.org)
- Pligg (http://www.pligg.com/)
- Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)
- LovdbyLess (http://lovdbyless.com/)
- Mixxt (http://www.mixxt.com/)
- Insoshi ( http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi)
- Xoops (http://www.xoops.org/)
- Community Engine (http://www.communityengine.org/)
- Astrospaces (http://sourceforge.net/projects/astrospaces/)
While many are looking at Ning's announcement today as a reflection on the success or failure of a freemium model, for many users of Ning's free services, that lesson is a bitter one.
DiscussMarch 31 2010
Pay for Starbucks with Your iPhone at 1,000 Target Stores
Here’s some good news for Target shoppers. The Starbucks Card Mobile iPhone application [iTunes link] can be now used to pay for Starbucks purchases via barcode scan at more than 1,000 Target locations across the United States.
Starbucks has also updated the application with support for Starbucks Cards. Users can now register their cards, check their balances and reload empty cards using a credit card.
The news is pretty significant for the coffee retailer and consumers alike. While the Starbucks Card Mobile app looked promising (who doesn’t love the idea of flashing their iPhone to pay for coffee?), in the past it could only be used for mobile payments at 16 retail stores in Seattle and Silicon Valley. By adding the alternative payment option to Starbucks locations inside Target stores and the additional functionality, the company has instantly upped the utility of their application.
We can only hope that the payment trial will be extended to more retail stores in the coming months. If you’ve yet to see the app in action, it’s definitely worth a trip to Target for a test drive.
For more mobile coverage, follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
Tags: iphone app, mobile payments, starbucks, Target, trending
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