SmartHippo
SmartHippo says the mortgage process is too complicated for consumers, with too much data hidden from plain view. Their service focuses on transparency in the home lending process. Imagine everyone in your company trading info on their salaries before the next employee review—HR wouldn't like it, but it would arm you with info you didn't previously have, to better negotiate for yourself. SmartHippo lets users build lending profiles and share information on their mortgage rates and lenders, so that you can compare notes before you settle on a rate of your own. Lenders also have a presence on the site and can share their rates directly.

The service claims to be truly transparent in collecting and sharing data among users—no bait and switch with interest rates. This month, they're rolling out a revamped rate search engine that pulls data from over 200 lenders. They claim that since lenders don't purchase position in their database, it's a great way to see what are frequently better rates from small banks and credit unions that you wouldn't otherwise see, since they don't have large advertising budgets to get the word out to consumers. If you try it out, let us know what you think.

Credit Karma
We’ve previously recommended Credit Karma, which offers a near-FICO estimate of your credit score for free. Their new tool is a Credit Simulator, where you can play out various scenarios—applying for a new credit card, taking out a personal loan, making six months of on-time payments, declaring bankruptcy—to see how they affect your score.

MoneyAisle
This is an online auction site where banks compete for your CD and high yield savings account business. The banks participate in a true reverse auction in real time, using bots to increase rates until a winner emerges. The founder emphasizes that this is not comparison shopping or sponsored bids—it's basically eBay in reverse, where participating banks compete for you.

The site is four months old and has around 100 participating banks and credit unions, so they admit that they don't always have the very best rate, but the number of institutions are increasing. On the other hand, they also don't allow low-rated rated banks to participate, so bids will only come from "healthy" institutions.

Yodlee
Yodlee's new offering is called PayToday through their BillPay partnership with Western Union. Through Yodlee you can pay immediately-due bills (as in, it's due today) with over 1,000 billers. It's not cheap at $15 per use, but it "solves the problem of last-minute payments."

One interesting note if you're into finding weird little ways to save money: Yodlee says if you're paying $5-10k a month on a mortgage payment, making last-minute payments can actually work out cheaper than regular payments, because it buys you a couple days more float time on your funds each month.

Mint
Mint's big news is that it officially left beta today, and that it now offers lots of investment tracking tools.

Thrive from Loudwater Labs
Thrive—which looks a little like a citrus-flavored version of Mint—attempts to combine the data reporting that every personal finance site offers with some level of advice and financial planning. We're not sure how Thrive makes money, though, and when we checked out the question on their FAQ, they didn't provide much info on that either, although they announced yesterday that they've partnered with Credit.com.

Fun features: a numerical "Financial Health" score calculated based on your data, and interesting factoids like "You can survive without a job for n days," "You can afford a home priced at n dollars," and "You can retire on n per month."

BillShrink
We've discussed BillShrink before—the site finds the most valuable credit card offers for you, and lets you adjust your criteria quickly (and anonymously) to search for specific types of offers.

They've launched a third service called My Account, which lets you register with the site so that it can keep tabs on your criteria and keep updating the best offers for you.

Boulevard R
This is a web version of meeting with a financial planner to develop an investing and saving strategy—they describe their offering as a "3-step process that puts the interests of consumers first and lays out a clear, actionable path to financial security." You start off by dragging-and-dropping your life goals onto a timeline of when you hope to accomplish them, then you prioritize some other goals, then input your monthly savings and liabilities. The site then comes up with an animated chart showing what you'll need to do in the coming years to meet those initial goals.

Once the fun interactive part is over, you have two choices: for free, you can receive a financial plan on one of your goals; for $80, you get a comprehensive plan, access to lots of professional advice, and assorted online tools. As you can imagine from the $80 fee, Boulevard is targeting people making approximately $100k a year with roughly $200k in savings. But hey, even if you're not in that customer demographic, you can still play with the initial goal planning widget.

Inner8
A social site that matches people to people, stocks to stocks, your perception of market conditions to stocks, and and people to stocks. (That's how they described it.) They also said it's like a Match.com for investment advice, and sure enough, they use 45 different criteria to develop a profile of you.

In one example, you enter a stock—say, Apple—and you can see stocks that move with Apple, or stocks that run against it. Inner8 says the value is that some of the stocks you'll see will be counterintuitive, but supported by the data and their fuzzy logic. They said "fuzzy logic" several times. Lots of fuzzy logic in this service, apparently.

Another feature lets you see how other people are doing with stock selections, so you can track their choices. Yet another feature shows stocks that are "appropriate" to your profile.

We'll need someone with better investing experience to check out what Inner8 offers and see whether it looks worthwhile as a suite of investment research tools.

Rate Surfer by My Best Interest
Poor Rate Surfer looked old-skool and kind of ugly compared to the other screenshots being shown this morning. Its also Java-based, so, yay for cross-platform compatibility, boo for being slow-assed Java. (My Mac product ownership is revealing itself here.)

The application runs on your desktop and doesn't connect with any company middle-man, so it theoretically offers better privacy than most everything else on display today. (We're not saying better security, just more privacy.) The app downloads your credit card data, then goes out to bank websites and pulls rate info on comparable products, and then collects all of it into one dashboard for you to compare services.

There's no third-party aggregating being involved—it's just scraping bank websites directly and displaying them for you, so if you really don't want to trust third-parties with your accounts, here's a way to do it from your desktop.

The app also lets you control all of your bank accounts from a single interface, and lets you set up a phone account so that you can execute bank transactions—things like balance transfers—from your phone via text message.

MyMoney on Facebook, by FiServ
Their goal: connecting generation Y with financial providers, because they earn a considerable amount of money, and stand to inherit a lot of ca$h from dying Boomer parents. Hey, that's what the guy said, basically. They're here today to talk about a FaceBook app called "MyMoney" that they introduced earlier this year.

If you're shopping for a place to store your money, MyMoney hooks you up with banks and credit unions, based on search criteria you enter—things like "auto loans" or your zip code. It also shares reviews and commentary from trusted friends (the Facebook version, at least) to help you evaluate offerings.

If you already have a bank or credit union account and it's cooperating with the MyMoney app, you can authorize that account through MyMoney and will be able to see balances and other account info directly on your Facebook page.

Some of you may remember that I am being laid off in four days, and may wonder why I, of all people, have been assigned to do this extra bout of work on behalf of Consumerist. I know, right? But Ben has asked me to watch the presentations and report their new features for you, the readers, so I have agreed. I have ulterior motives: I have also brought along a pile of business cards to pass out, and I figure I can pocket a bunch of these croissants and freeze them, then live off of them through Thanksgiving.

Here's the first group of customer-facing service being discussed this morning:

QuickenOnline
Intuit's fully free (as of yesterday) online money tracking service has been intentionally simplified—their presenter kept emphasizing that this is not supposed to be as dense or complicated as their desktop software. Features include a "What's Left" summary of your dwindling account balance, as well as a cool-looking and potentially very useful "Spending Money Outlook"—a fancy chart that graphs your budget over a timeline and pegs scheduled payments to your balance, so you can visually take in your budget in the weeks to come in a purely graphical representation. They'll also text you daily balance updates and let you know whether or not you're on track to making your payments.

WeSeed
If you're a bit afraid of the stock market—and we don't mean just this past month, because that doesn't count—then you might really appreciate WeSeed, which is basically a giant sandbox where you can play with investments using fake money with real data.

The site pulls you into investing as soon as you hit the site, by asking you what you like—pizza, dogs, survivalism—and then throwing specific companies at you that you might want to investigate. From there you can read about the company, check out its financial history, or see what other users are saying about it in the comments section. We're not sure what value the comments section will have in real life, but the social aspect will probably be a welcome safety net for beginners who want to talk about investing as they learn.

We're impressed with the concept. It will look too simple for knowledgeable investors, but if you've been putting off investing because you don't know what you're doing, it looks like a great immersion-based way to learn. (We have a feeling it will be good for teens and tweens, too.)

Wesabe
Personal finance site Wesabe now has Twitter functionality—you can tweet data into your wesabe account as you're running around buying those dreaded budget-killing lattes financial advisors are always warning you about.

Another new feature Wesabe is rolling out: graphs you can use to see how you spend in particular categories, then compare to how other Wesabe members (they want you to call them "Wesabeans") spend compared to you. Wesabe says over time the community data will build into a library of spending graphs that you can pull up and map your own data against.

Wesabe also lets you rate your relationship to merchants: fan, user, or captive, although I'm not sure yet how this helps your spending.

ZoneAlarm ForceField by Checkpoint Software
Cybercrime is coming after you! Arrrggh!!! "Hooking into your web browser" is a "new thing this year" that's threatening your way of life. Bleyarg, ZoneAlarm's presentation is kind of vague.

ZoneAlarm ForceField has heuristics, which I think are what causes allergic reactions in your nose, that they use to identify phishing sites as soon as they're created—sort of a SpamSieve for phishing sites. FF also watches out for things like keylogging software.

Basically, ForceField looks like an antivirus program specifically for your web browser, which means it will likely be just as intrusive ("We've just stopped 66 MB of data from being spied upon!") and annoying. Until we look more closely at it, we'd suggest your best defense against phishing and scams is to continue being as careful as we hope you're already being.

FiLife
FiLife says their goal is to help find the best products available to you. To do that, they've amassed a vast directory of "product types," and then huge amounts of supporting content to explain the product types and provide reviews and recommendations.

New navigation tool, a "product picker." Their launch product picker is for credit cards: you enter data on your credit card usage patterns and desires, and FiLife filters out the noise and

FiLife also uses proprietary algorithms to come up with a "Personal Value" of the selected product—for instance, credit card A has a personal value to you of $84. We don't fully get it how that translates into real money for you, but it definitely works as a sort of score you can use to quickly compare choices.

Another fun toy is the Stacker, a graphical representation of your personal data. In the example given, you can enter your salary and your age range, and the Stacker reveals a pyramid of little animated people and shows where you stand among your peers or the nation. It looks like a fun way to explore your own personal data and gain a different perspective on things.

And that's the first batch. Off to grab some more croissants, and then we'll hear from the next batch of presenters.