A Look at Wesabe - Social Smarts For Spending, Saving Money

PodTech has posted a great LunchMeet video interviewing Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund, the two founders of Berkeley, CA-based Wesabe, a new web site focused on personal financial management. A core idea behind Wesabe is the great notion that where you spend money represents an implicit recommendation by you of a merchant - sort of like how Google interprets links to a web site as representing a recommendation of that web site. The video includes a demo that shows how Wesabe works to bring together recommendations and experiences to help you better manage your money. Think of Quicken enhanced with the spending experiences of lots of your neighbors. What might be even more interesting would be to get below the level of the "purchase at a merchant" data itself - into the shopping cart and then mining that data for product specific recommendations.