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.

TextPayMe blogs about the use of their new SMS-based mobile payment service for face-to-face transactions -- such as paying the seller when you're picking up goods you're purchasing from a Craigslist listing -- following mention of the idea in a Search Engine Journal post about Google Payments last Friday.

Cooper Marcus, the founder and CEO of startup Spark Parking, has started the Spark Parking Founder's Blog where he says he'll "be writing about all manner of items related to Spark Parking, including wireless sensors, mobile phones, future commerce (typically involving mobile phones or Web 2.0 approaches), and of course parking!"

Rachel Metz reports for Wired News on mobile payments company TextPayMe.

Here's another new approach to democratizing consumer finance: LoanBack, launched back in December. LoanBack takes a much simpler approach than Zopa and Prosper.com - LoanBack is designed primarily for documenting friends and family lending.

One of the cool things about Zopa is their Zopa blog where they talk regularly about the stuff they're doing in revolutionizing the consumer finance space. We first wrote about Zopa last August.

TextPayMe CEO Phil Yuen emailed me today with some updates on his recently launched mobile payments startup.

Over on the TextPayMe blog, the founders share why they really started this new mobile payments company:

"We wanted to split dinnertime bills easily and fairly."

John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogs about BillMonk, his "startup of the week".

BillMonk's initial service, a hybrid of social networking and personal finance, offers the ability to track (via the website or using mobile phone SMS) what the founders call "social money" - informal debts between friends and family.

Technorati Tags: BillMonk

Earlier this month, TextPayMe announced a new text messaging-based service for sending money using mobile phones. The company says it supports deposits from electronic bank transfers or credit cards and supports withdrawals via wire transfer or mailed checks.