Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

The holiday season is in full swing, which means shopping, lots of eating, some traveling and lots of pictures. If you’re not 80 years old, every photo you you take is now digital. Of course there are always a few each year that you really want a physical copy of, and maybe one that you would love to see blown up hanging on your wall.

There’s no shortage of digital photo printing options, all touting different benefits and prices. I’m not exactly what you’d call a professional photographer. There’s a lot of subpar pictures on my Flickr account. Therefore, I’ve generally gone with more consumer grade printing services, thinking that it’s not really worth the extra cash for some of the more professionally oriented printers. You can get a 20″x30″ blowup for $9.99 at Costco’s photo center. Even if the picture sucks, it costs less than lunch.

I had a picture that I really liked and decided to spend the cash to get it printed at a real printer. A friend of mine suggested FotoFlot. They’ve got a unique system that prints on high-quality photo paper then fuses it to an acrylic backing. It comes with a mount that secures the pictures via magnets, making it trivial to swap out pictures as you desire. All the coolness comes with a hefty price tag. The same 20″x30″ print that costs $9.99 at Costco will cost you $185 at FotoFlot.

I went ahead and ordered at 15″x30″ crop at FotoFlot and, out of curiosity, a 20″x30″ blowup from Costco. I had expected the FotoFlot to be better, but I was surprised at how much better.

The first obvious difference is the the color. For best results, you can include your color profile with FotoFlot and they will make adjustments to their printing process. With Costco, you upload just the original image and they do the normal big-box color correction.

In this picture, I’ve overlaid the FotoFlot print on the bottom of the Costco print to capture the difference. The grass is much greener in the FotoFlot print, while both made the mud redder. Personally, I like the richer green, even though it’s not as bright in the source print.

Far more important than the color differences is the difference in detail. Take a look at the close up of the Peugeot (FotoFlot on top, Costco on the bottom).

You can see that the lines on the Peugeot in the top frame are far crisper and sharper. A zoom in comparison of the Peugeot badging on the side of the car really highlights this difference.

In the top frame, almost every letter is legible. Only the P, U, and G are clear in the Costco print.

The definition of objects is clearer when looking at the Mazda6 sign. It’s bold and clear in the FotoFlot, but faded in the Costco print.

In the FotoFlot print, the individual pieces of rubber are clearly visible. On the Costco print, only the very large chunks appear. The rest blend into the track. Even more troubling on the Costco print are the vertical lines left by the printing process. The FotoFlot doesn’t have any introduced artifacts of the process.

While the price difference is as large as the differences in photo quality, I think getting large prints printed professionally is completely worth it. The details that made the picture interesting are simply lost in commodity printing. If it’s good enough to put on a wall, then it deserves a quality printer. I see myself using FotoFlot a lot more in the future. I couldn’t be happier with the results. If you would like to see all the images associated with this review, you can find them in this Flickr Set.

Something that I find incredible tedious and boring is managing money. My philosophy is that if I wanted to look at numbers all day, then I would have become an accountant or an applied mathematician. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife that keeps me debt-free and makes sure the bills get paid on time. However, even she struggles when it comes to getting a bearing on our entire financial outlook, a struggle that compelled us to join Wesabe when it first launched. We’ve been casual users since joining, but this morning we decided to give the better hyped Mint a shot. This is my rundown from using both services.

Wesabe

I started using Wesabe a few weeks before Mint’s big launch at the Techcrunch 40. We’d always gut feel that we were spending too much on eating out or electronic gadgets, but the actual numbers were hard to find. Wesabe gave us deep insight into how our money was being spent by allow us to tag each transaction. For instance, Wesabe can tell you exactly how much money you spent on tacos last month, if you tag your transactions right.

The other big feature of Wesabe is the focus on community generated content and suggestions. The system tracks your tags and transactions and suggests tips that you might find beneficial. It also has discussion forums where people talk and trade tips about personal finance.

Wesabe isn’t perfect. Until recently, you had to us a relatively flakey desktop uploader to keep your information in sync. The site now includes on online uploader, but in keeping with the teams (quite understandable) paranoia, they only use banking interfaces they have written themselves. Unfortunately this means that most banks still require a manual upload, thereby reducing the usefulness of central account tracking.

The other major drawback is Wesabe does not support loans or brokerage accounts. This wasn’t a big deal when we signed-up, since all we had was a checking account and some credit cards. A lot has changed since then and our personal finances have gotten far more complex and Wesabe’s inability to track these accounts have made it almost useless.

Mint

That force us to take the plunge with Mint.

Mint’s interface is super slick. Not only are there fun ajax-y effects, but it’s functional, too. Adding your accounts to auto-refresh is simple and trivial. Mint supported every account where we have online access, right out of the box. With that, we get a dashboard that shows exactly where our money is (or isn’t). What required 8 visits in the morning (most of which never happened), is now a 30 second activity. A time-saver and reality dose all at once.

Even better, once it loaded my transactions it matched them against similar transactions and automatically labeled each one. I spent hours tagging transactions in Wesabe. Mint leveraged the power of the community to categorize everything for me. It’s such a good idea, it’s hard to believe nobody did it before (and that Wesabe doesn’t do it now).

Both services have neat charts, but Mint’s got one that compares your spending habits to people that live in your area allowing you to see where actually are in relation to the Jones’. Also compared to Wesabe, Mint’s site is far more responsive. Pages load fast on Mint, but Wesabe feels like it’s running on the Twitter infrastructure.

However, Mint’s a beta product and crowds aren’t perfect. The transaction for my wife’s tag (license plate for you non-Georgians) was categorized as a Doctor’s expense, which left me scratching my head for a bit. Some of the interface is a little quirky and un-intuitive. The way multi-select works, for example, is just weird. The spending chart that fascinated me earlier doesn’t account for household size, making it all but useless. But these are small issues compared to the vast benefit the service provides.

The Bottom Line

It would seem that Mint is the hands down winner and it is, with one caveat. It integrates with more types of accounts, it takes less time to set-up, the site is more responsive, the interface is slicker, etc. If your time to budget is tight, Mint is the way to go. It’ll get you much farther, faster than any other solution that I’ve seen.

The Caveat? If you’re willing to spend the time to diligently track each transaction, Wesabe is a far more compelling service. It’s ‘savings tips’ aren’t just advertisements in disguise. Mint tells me to switch banks and credit cards. Wesabe tells me to split portions and order lunch entrees to save money. Mint tells me how much I spent on restaurants. Wesabe tells me that I spent more on Pizza than Mexican. Mint feels like a utility, Wesabe a community.

I really like those things about Wesabe and am going to miss them. A personal finance tool needs to be able to manage your finances and today the tool that does that is Mint.

Modern technology rocks. I’ve got my entire music collection, and a few movies, in my left-back pocket. The phone numbers, email addresses, the telephone network, and the internet is in my left front pocket. In my back-right, is a couple bucks and some credit cards. Hardly anything at all compared to what’s in the other pockets. That’s why this picture is just so wrong:
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Every year, our cellphones, music players get smaller and do more, but my wallet has done nothing but get bigger. Eventually I got tired of it, stashed my ID and credit card for easy access and threw the wallet in my computer bag. However, I decided that having those rather crucial pieces of plastic floating around probably wasn’t the best of ideas either.

So I Googled “world’s thinnest wallet” and found my solution. I ordered it, along with a card-holder for my wife, and four short days later, a thin, regular looking envelope arrived in the mail. Much better (there’s only three cards less in this shot):

This wallet probably isn’t for everyone. It’s made of the fabric they use on sails. It crinkles a little bit when you touch it and only holds 10 cards. It lacks the prestige of a fine-grained leather wallet. So if these are your criteria, you’ll hate it. However, if you want something that hold what you need, will fit in your pocket, and not mess with your spine alignment, ALL-ETT billfolds is the way to go.