Wesabe: Your Money. Your Community.

It’s a big day here at Wesabe. We’re excited to announce that we’ve signed a partnership with Telegraph Media Group, publishers of The Daily Telegraph, the UK’s biggest selling quality daily newspaper. A co-branded version of our site, called the Telegraph Personal Finance Planner – launches today at Telegraph.co.uk (TCUK):

With 22.9 million unique visitors in September, TCUK is the UK’s fastest growing quality newspaper website.

This partnership will give Wesabe the ability to help millions of new international members better manage their money and reach their financial goals. It also represents much more than a distribution deal – with the Personal Finance Planner, consumers no longer need to head to a bank or finance site to check their balances. They will now have the opportunity to view their finances in the same place they already turn for news and information. There is tremendous potential here – imagine viewing the day’s news through the lens of your financial goals. Seeing your finances contextualized by what’s happening in the markets or the grocery store.

For our U.S. members, it’s business as usual – this deal will not have an immediate impact on you. It does, however, further validate our view that your banking data should be open and free, and we hope it will lead to additional partnerships. And the larger the Wesabe community grows, the more powerful our aggregate spending trend and tips data becomes.

In looking for ways to take Wesabe global and to start helping more people worldwide better manage their finances, we couldn’t ask for a better partner than Telegraph Media Group. Cheers to our new partner, and welcome to our new Telegraph members.

A great segment about Wesabe aired today on KGO-TV, the ABC station in San Francisco. In addition to talking about how Wesabe works, the piece looks at the kinds of discussions taking place on Wesabe and how the Wesabe community supports each other. You can watch the segment here – just click on the “watch video” link on the second picture (the graph).

One more thing while the horn is still in tooting position. Wesabe VP of Marketing Gabe Griego is going to be a guest on ReadWriteWeb Live today at 3:30 p.m. PT. The topic is Online Personal Finance. Details on how to listen in and participate in the call can be found here, and RWW will be archiving the audio on its site.

We’ve just launched the new Wesabe home page:

The new design features a set of photographs showing people working towards their financial goals and dreams. Magera, one of our designers, did a fantastic job choosing photographs that speak to why we love working on Wesabe — not just to make charts and graphs (though those are fun, too), but to help people find the life they really want, by helping them control the financial resources they need to get there.

The first name I thought of for our company was “Inreach” — that is, bring your goals in reach (and a pun on “enrich”). Unfortunately, that name belonged to another company already, but that idea continues to be the reason I so love working on Wesabe. When you use Wesabe, your goals — the goals in the pictures on our new home page, for instance — become reachable, achievable.

The home page photos, though, are stock images, taken from libraries of existing shots. They’re lovely, but at the same time, they’re taken ‘off the shelf’. We’d love to see some pictures of your goals. Do you walk by a house that is your dream to own? Are you saving up for your child’s college education? Is there a credit card you’ll gleefully cut into little pieces the day you pay it off? Take your best shot of your goal, post it on your refrigerator, and send it to me at marc@wesabe.com. I’ll post the best ones here, and if you send us one that tells a beautiful story about your goal, we’ll add it to the home page and send you a thank-you gift in return. We’d love for our home page to tell the stories of our members’ goals.

I’ve found that my financial life improves the most when I’m working towards a goal. Right now, my wife and I are saving up for the baby we’re expecting soon — let me tell you, having a baby on the way brings focus to financial discussions like nothing else! What goal motivates you? If you don’t have the perfect photo, tell us your story in the comments — about the goals you’ve reached, and the ones you’re reaching for now.

Congrats to Magera and Andre for their great work on the new home page. We hope you like it. More importantly, we hope you’ll let us help you reach your goals — that’s why we work here, and that’s what we love.

Wesabe‘s Mac Dashboard Widget has long been a popular feature for our Mac users, but we’ve gotten frequent (and insistent!) requests from our Windows users for something similar. Today we’re happy to be able to answer those requests, with the launch of the Wesabe Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget.

The Vista Gadget provides full access to all of your Wesabe account information in a compact, convenient window. Instead of needing to log into the Wesabe site to check your balances or look for a recent transaction, you can instead just call up your Vista Sidebar and get everything you need. If you see a transaction you want to drill into or edit, just click on it and you’ll get sent to the Wesabe site for the full transaction details.

If you don’t want people peeking over your shoulders at your bank information, just click the Wesabe logo, and the Gadget will collapse into a compact, hidden form. Clicking the “Wesabe” name at the upper right will take you through to the Wesabe site.

The Wesabe Vista Gadget is built completely using the Wesabe API, which allows you to get access to your financial data in other programs and forms. The initial prototype of the Vista Gadget was developed by a Wesabe user using nothing but the API documentation. We’re always happy to see people making good use of the API, and this application is a great result of providing a free and open API.

Thanks to Tim for the fantastic job building this out. Let us know what you think!

We’re really pleased to have been named as one of the top 100 Internet innovators by The Industry Standard. The next phase of the IS 100 Awards is community voting, where one winner is named in each of 10 categories. If you have a minute, we’d sure appreciate your vote. Just head on over to the Standard’s web site and click on the Commerce category. Polls are open until October 3.

I posted yesterday on Twitter about a new report that US consumers increased their credit card debt by $14.33 billion last month. That’s right, billion, and yes, last month alone. As I said in the tweet, “Makes me feel like we’re not doing enough. Tell a friend in debt.”

When I first started talking about the idea of Wesabe, one of the common reactions I heard was, “Doesn’t Quicken own that market?” I would always respond the same way. “How can Quicken possibly own this market when the national savings rate is negative, credit card debt has soared, and people list money as their single greatest stress? Owning this market would mean having a measurable effect on consumer budgets at the national level, and I don’t see that from any product with the personal finance label.” Quicken was fantastic for me over ten years of use in making it easier for me to pay bills and see where my money had gone — but what I want for Wesabe is to do more, and to measurably improve the net worth of our members, at a level that everyone can see the effect. If our users aren’t succeeding, we may well have other outward measures of success, but we won’t have reached the goal we all share for this company.

I will feel that Wesabe is succeeding when national governments start reporting on the positive effect we’re having on the economy as a whole. That may seem overly ambitious to you. Really, though, if that’s not our goal, why the hell would we even bother trying to build Wesabe? Companies affect the economy all the time, and I fully believe we have the opportunity to do the same, by giving consumers better information, support, and tools to make managing their finances easier and to make them better off.

I really meant it when I asked that you tell a friend in debt. Tell anyone that you think could benefit from joining the Wesabe community. Of course, I’m asking for this in large part because it helps Wesabe as a business and because it will help us continue to grow and improve the services we offer. I also believe, though — for Wesabeans more than for the members of any other personal finance site — that when you bring someone into the Wesabe community, you’re helping yourself and all the other members of the site as much or more than you’re helping us as a company.

Wesabe is the only site of its kind where the community gets smarter, the reports become more helpful and more informative, and the positive effect on everyone’s budget increases with each new member who joins, jumps into Groups, and starts tagging and rating the merchants where they shop. I see this happen on our site all the time. I love it when Wesabean BS0408 tells us he saved half his budget on an engagement ring based on advice from other members. I love it when Wesabean GQ tells us that after finding himself deeply in debt despite a high salary, he was able to work his way completely out of debt with advice from our members and others. I love it when Wesabean Bzzzz tells us that after using Wesabe for a year, “I had no idea how powerful doing [so] would be…I’ve saved more than I ever have before.” We don’t believe, and have never believed, that it is our job to simply show you your own data and let you figure things out from there. Instead, we aim to find the best strategies, the best tips, the best advice, and the best support for consumers everywhere, and to share that with all of our members.

I sometimes see our competitors talk about how mortgage foreclosures are simply the fault of consumers, or how easy it is to avoid overdrafts if you just put $10,000 in a savings account, and I think, wow, are they out of touch. Cynically, I think they must care far more about lining their own wallets than they do about lining the wallets of their users. No one ever gets hired at Wesabe with that attitude or approach. We’re inspired instead by what our board member, Tim O’Reilly, recently wrote as a challenge to Web 2.0 startups everywhere:

[W]hat good is collective intelligence if it doesn’t make us smarter? In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it’s time for us all to wake up, to take our new “superpowers” seriously, and to use them to solve problems that really matter.

One of our engineers, Coda Hale, put our view of this most succinctly a while back: “We’re not in this to get money. We’re not in this to get users. We’re in this to get money for users.” He’s absolutely right. I know as the CEO of Wesabe that if we succeed at that goal, all of the other kinds of success will follow for us as a business. In fact, I think there’s no better approach to business success than to put your customers’ needs first.

So today, I want to ask you for your help, because I believe that help will in turn help you and everyone who uses Wesabe. We’ve launched a new feature called “Tell a Friend,” which is available at the top of every page on Wesabe (you have to be logged in, so that it can’t be used for spam). Thanks to Matt at Wesabe for doing a great job putting this together for us. Of course, you can send a friend an email however you want. We wanted to make doing so easy and obvious, and we wanted to ask you to do it while you’re on the site.

Thank you again to everyone who makes Wesabe what it is. We get all worked up about new graphs and features from time to time, and those are certainly fun and very useful, but what makes Wesabe what it is are the people. You. Thank you.

I’ll be speaking at the Start Conference tomorrow in San Francisco about entrepreneurship. I’m really looking forward to it — there are a ton of great speakers and it looks like it will be a fantastic event. If you’re in town, please drop by and say hello. Hope to see you there.

If you’re a fan of Twitter like we are, you’ll be happy to hear you can now add transactions to your Wesabe cash account through Twitter. This is a great way to keep track of you spending on the go — just text Twitter the details, and it will show up automatically in your accounts. Or, use whatever other Twitter client you like.

To set this up, head over to https://www.wesabe.com/connections and identify your Twitter account for us (so we know we’re getting transactions for you from the right place). You can send transactions to us with direct messages, so only Wesabe will see them, or you can send an “@wesabe” reply if you want to share an interesting expense with your friends (and the world, if your Twitter feed is open to all). For either kind of message, start out with the amount and the payee (in whatever order you want). You can also add tags by putting them into parentheses at the end (including tag splits, if you want). Here are some examples:

d wesabe $2.95 Starbucks (coffee)

@wesabe Camino $27.95 (restaurant oakland yummy)

Right now, the transactions will be added to your first cash account, but our hardy testers have asked for a way to choose the cash account, which we’ll add shortly. Also, note that Twitter is not a banking site, so you shouldn’t consider it to have the same privacy protections Wesabe provides — use this for not-very-private purchases only (as I say in the docs, if you’re posting bail, wait until you get home to enter that .

Have at it, and let us know what you think. I’m in New York for the CNBC show (which was awesome), and it’s been great to be able to add cab fare to my “toexpense” tag as I run around town. Thanks, Brian, for another awesome feature.

I will be appearing on a new CNBC personal finance show, On the Money with Carmen Wong Ulrich, this coming Monday, August 4th, at 8p Eastern/5p Pacific. I’m really looking forward to the show — Carmen gives people very down-to-earth, sensible advice, and has done a huge amount to make sure she’s getting people accurate and realistic information about their finances.

One of the things they do on the show is answer questions from viewers about their personal finances. If you have a question you’d like to see addressed on the air, send it to us at carmen@cnbc.com. As we’ve been developing the shows, I’ve been completely impressed with how the questions are handled.

One of the reasons they’re having me on the show is to talk about the experiences of the Wesabe community, so I feel like I’m acting as a representative of everyone in Wesabe Groups. Thanks so much for sharing your stories, worries, and successes. I think you should all be proud that a channel like CNBC would want to feature this community on the air. It speaks to what an incredible job you all do of supporting each other. So, take a bow! Hope you have a chance to catch the show.