Image by emilychang via Flickr To say that Apple’s App Store is thriving would be an understatement.  There have been 800 million downloads across Apple’s 30 million iPhones and iPod Touches — meaning on average each device has downloaded 27 apps.  The App Store now has over 25,000 apps and 250+ are added every day. [...]

Mint, Thrive, Cake, Yodlee, Quicken Online, Buxfer, Geezeo, Wesabe, and Moneytrackin‘. These are just a few of the many companies in the crowded field of web apps for personal finance management (PFM).  These consumer sites all perform the same basic service: aggregating data from disparate financial accounts (savings, checking, credit cards, loans etc), helping users [...]

I was surprised to see an ad for Xobni on Gmail today.   Xobni (‘inbox’ spelled backwards) is an Outlook plug-in that helps organize a flooded inbox and basically makes Microsoft Outlook into a bearable (and semi-useful?) product.  Why is the company advertising an Outlook plug-in on Gmail?  That’s beyond me…perhaps that’s the beauty of [...]

Among the startups I’m watching closely is Yodle, a company focused on local online advertising.  The company is poised to expand into the huge market void/opportunity created as newspaper and yellow page advertising increasingly go the way of the dodo.  How big of an opportunity?  “$20 billion…big enough to support one to three public companies” [...]