Wesabe: Your Money. Your Community.

I’ll be leading a workshop discussion, “Whose data is it?” at next month’s Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’ve been to the previous two conferences, and each time I’ve been initially overwhelmed by the number of people and sometimes the buzzwords, but I later find myself sitting next to people I’m very happy to have met, or attending talks that are amazingly good. Last year’s session capturing technology opinions from a high school- and college-aged panel was hilarious and wonderful, and Pierre Omidyar’s closing talk was inspiring. I’m very much looking forward to it. If you’re attending, please drop by and say hello.

I had a great time in Brussels at EuroOSCon, and met a bunch of entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas. I was somewhat surprised, talking with people at the conference about Wesabe, about how clearly they wanted the same sorts of tools. Reading news accounts in the U.S., you sometimes get the impression that struggles with debt and credit are more severe in America than elsewhere, and that certainly is true by some objective measures. But still, people all over seem to have the same feelings of uncertainty and guilt about money, and the same desire for better support.

Just after getting off my return plane flight, I dropped by Adaptive Path in San Francisco, and gave a demo of our preview release to the people there. It was a huge amount of fun to talk to people who know web apps as well as their team does, and to see them latch on immediately to some of the ideas I find the most exciting about Wesabe. Thanks to David Verba and Janice Fraser for the invitation to speak. I’m going to take some of the slides from my talk and turn them into posts here later this week.

Next Monday, I’ll be speaking at the European Open Source Convention (EuroOSCon) in Brussels, Belgium on “Startups 2.0.” This is a talk I’ve given several times, and it basically covers how developers can become entrepreneurs. It’s great fun to give, since I wind up meeting people with great ideas and enthusiasm for what they’re doing. I wrote up my last version of the talk as a post called “Entrepreneurial Proverbs,” which a lot of people seem to have enjoyed. If you’re interested in the topic, check out that post, and if you’ll be in Brussels, please drop by or drop me a line.

Welcome to Wheaties for Your Wallet. I’m Marc Hedlund, one of the co-founders of Wesabe. I started Wesabe because I thought there were way too many companies out there helping businesses get more money out of consumers, and not nearly enough helping consumers get more value out of businesses. The idea of Wesabe is to bring consumers together in a community where we can help each other get the most from our money. I’ll use this blog to talk about consumer culture, stress around money and what to do about it, tools to help with money (Wesabe tools or otherwise) and whatever else comes to mind. Enjoy.