Tractis, which recently came out of private beta, allows you to negotiate and execute worldwide legally binding contracts online. Tractis’ focus is making e-commerce more safe by providing not only digital signing of contracts, but conflict resolution and micro-insurance services. Today, they officially open their doors for Spain and plan to eventually make their service available worldwide. Tractis is useful for all types of contracts, whether you’re selling an item on eBay, providing creative services over the Internet, or sending a non-disclosure agreement. It allows anyone to easily organize, collaborate, and sign contracts online, all in one place. Digital signing of contracts is a very interesting space with only a handful of companies in it. EchoSign is one company offering the digital signing of documents online which I have used numerous times with excellent results. DocuSign is another company which recently received $12.4 million in funding for its electronic signature service.

Aside from signing contracts, Tractis also provides a database of contract templates which anyone can save to their account and use for free. Right now you’ll find non-disclosure agreements, design service agreements, and contracts for the selling of goods. (Goodbye lawyers!) But where do these contacts come from? The answer is other Tractis users. In your account, you can create contract templates and make them publicly available for others to use. This is a great idea and I definitely see the value in it, however, I can’t help but feel uneasy knowing they are from users that are likely not lawyers. (Lawyers, come back!) On the plus side, templates are open for all to edit, rate, and comment on. Also, Tractis plans to roll out a reputation system in the next few months that would allow users to rank other Tractis users, according to Business 2.0 Magazine.

Additionally, Tractis is a collaborative environment for your contracts. Invite your whole team and the people you are sending contacts to. Start a contract from scratch or from a template, make changes, revert to older versions, and add comments. When you’re done preparing the contract, invite your client to review and digitally sign. If the client isn’t in agreement, you can discuss and edit the contract right then and there with them. One thing to keep in mind is the person signing the contract will need a Tractis account. This is said to be for identity protection reasons, but I’d personally prefer sending a contract to anyone, whether they have an account or not. Also, as of now, each digital signature will cost you 1 Euro, so be sure to increase your balance before sending off a contract to a client.

What’s more important, are contracts sent using Tractis legally binding? Even now I have clients questioning the legality of signing a document over EchoSign, even though E-Signatures were legalized in the year 2000 (see, E-Signature Act). I will admit the concept does seem questionable, but Tractis does guarantee that contracts are not only legally binding, but valid worldwide. At the same time, it’s hard to trust a guarantee when pages like contact, about, and terms of use are missing from the website. (I believe the content did exist during the private beta, but seem to have disappeared at public launch - oops!) Let’s hope they get that fixed quick! (Update: I’ve spoken with David Blanco, founder of Tractis, and have been told that they are working on new content and translated versions for the website.)

Working with Tractis is much like typing a document in a web-based word processor, or a contract focused Writeboard with basic contact management. You create and edit contracts in a WYSIWYG editor, invite users to collaborate, and eventually save for signing. And this works great, except my biggest complaint is that you cannot upload existing contracts that you might have, something that EchoSign does very well. Tractis also lets you create groups of people, find new people on Tractis, download vCards, and add people to your team. And what would a collaborative application be without being able to customize your interface to match your company? Nothing too fancy - you can change colors and replace the Tractis logo with your company logo.

As I brought up earlier, Tractis also allows you to create templates which can be used to start off new contracts. You can browse the public database of templates, edit as needed, and add them to your account for easy access. Very helpful, but they are no more than basic documents of legal agreement containing filler spaces and strings like “(Your Company Name).” They work fairly well, but one slight annoyance is having to replace thirty or so “(Your Company Name)” tags in a template by hand. The templates would be much more useful if there was a way to somehow mass replace a string with a new value, or perhaps create a custom markup or generate a form that fills in the information for you. Either way, the templates do save a lot of time, not to mention possible lawyer fees.

Signing a contract with Tractis is a bit more involved than using a service like EchoSign, but Tractis has decided to take extra measures to verify the identity of a signer. When signing a contract with Tractis, you are to provide a digital certificate. Now, to be honest, I don’t expect the average person to have a digital certificate, let alone know what one is. So, for those of you who don’t know what a digital certificate is, it’s an electronic document issued by a certificate authority that basically contains some data proving you are who you say you are. As of now, Tractis is only accepting digital certificates issued by a group of pre-selected Spanish certificate authorities, but plan to connect with more authorities wordwide as they go. (Current accepted authorities - translated by Google) Because of these measures, Tractis can confirm the identity of you and the signer and offer their planned services of micro-insurance and dispute resolution. (Certainly a huge task) Once you’ve got a certificate, you’re set to continue to the next hurdle of having Java 1.6 installed on your machine which allows Tractis to upload and verify your certificate. Sorry Mac users, you can’t sign because Mac’s latest Java version is 1.42 - unfortunate, I know.

Once you get passed having a digital certificate and Java 1.6 on your machine, you can finally sign a contract. It’s all simple from here on and you just have to check the box stating that you agree and click sign. It verifies the form and submits your signature and lets contract participants know. I feel the whole process of signing a contract may be a bit much for the average person, but it certainly does add a sense of trust and security to the signing, which is exactly what Tractis was aiming to do in making e-commerce more safe. Although, I’m not sure I’d want a client of mine to go through all of that. Fortunately, I’ve been told that there are plans for additional methods of authentication and signing, including “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements, but will strongly recommend the use of digital certificates.

Even though Tractis is out of private beta and officially launched for Spain today, they still have a ton of work ahead of them. I expect it will be a while until Tractis is available for U.S. users, but I definitely look forward to using Tractis when it becomes available. What I like most is the public database of templates and the ability to collaboratively edit a contract before making an agreement, features Tractis’ competitors do not have. I don’t necessarily trust the public templates just yet, but they are nice to have around as reference and to act as a starting point. I also found the signing process to be a bit much for my line of work (creative services), although my opinion on that would change if “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements are implemented. I just wouldn’t want to have my clients create an account on Tractis just to sign a contract and then have to deal with providing a digital certificate. I do, however, see the value in requiring digital certificates when handling large transactions, such as buying a car from a random user on eBay. In all, I feel Tractis is building an impressive service and I hope to use it when it’s ready worldwide. Until then, I’ll stick with EchoSign and the old-fashioned way of signing contracts (pen and paper).

Still tracking your car mileage with spreadsheets and scrambling to gather old gas receipts? Try MyMileMarker, a new service by Sidebar Creative that allows you to track and analyze your car mileage online through a browser or mobile phone. It’s extremely easy to use and unlike some services which require you to record every mile you drive, MyMileMarker only asks that you record when you fill your vehicle with fuel. After a few fill-ups at the gas station, MyMileMarker calculates your averages and predicts future mileage and costs.

Getting started with MyMileMarker is as simple as creating an account (OpenID support) and listing each vehicle that want to track. MyMileMarker then creates individual pages for each vehicle where you can log your mileage and view your history. You are also able to record your mileage on a mobile phone using MyMileMarkers mobile friendly website or Twitter, enabling you to access your account from any location. Adding a record with the mobile interface works much like the browser-based version, but if you are a Twitter user, you can very quickly log your mileage by sending a one-line Twitter message. Just add the official MyMileMarker Twitter user as a friend and send a direct message in the format, “D mymm [miles] [gallons] [price]”, and MyMileMarker will handle the rest - even make a guess at which car you filled up based on the mileage you entered.

When adding an entry, MyMileMarker requires that you fill in your vehicles current mileage, the amount of fuel you filled it up with, and the cost of fuel per gallon. There are also a few optional questions that MyMileMarker asks so it knows when you last changed your oil and filled your tank. Furthermore, MyMileMarker is location based, so when filling in your information, it will either ask for either miles and gallons or kilometers and liters depending on where you’re from. You can pick your location in the account settings area. Lastly, be sure the information you enter is correct the first time because you can only remove the latest record from your history. In other words, if you make a mistake three records back, you will have to remove the last three records and add them back again just to correct the one entry. (Feature request: edit past entries!)

After logging your mileage a few times, MyMileMarker will begin to show graphs and make projections based on the mileage and fuel costs that you have entered. It will try and project the amount of miles your car will have and how much you may spend by the end of the year (or any set date). It will also show line graphs plotting your miles per gallon (MPG) and total vehicle miles helping you learn about your fuel economy. Additionally, MyMileMarker estimates your vehicles overall MPG and allows you to view your entire vehicle history. Sadly, I could not find any method of exporting my vehicles history.

MyMileMarker is off to a good start. What I like most is that you only record your mileage after filling up your vehicle, unlike many services which have you record your mileage every time you drive. It’s also nice being able to log your mileage from anywhere using a mobile phone. Additionally, I found MyMileMarker’s projections of year end costs and mileage to be useful and a real eye-opener. There are a few things that I don’t like though. For starters, there’s no way of importing or exporting your vehicles history. It would save a lot of time if you could import a spreadsheet or some kind of CSV (comma separated values) file. Also, you can’t edit past entries and fixing a mistake involves deleting old records and adding them over again. Otherwise, I like MyMileMarker for its simplicity and accessibility and plan to continue using it.

Released awhile ago, SnapPages is a flash powered interface that allows you to share your hobbies/interests, organize schedules, and socialize with friends. They have three applications currently, including: Friend’s Manager, Calendar Manager, and Photo Manager. Each one of these applications has their own specific uses and functions nicely.

The first, and probably most in depth section is the Friend’s Manager. This area allows you to talk with friends in the form of “Gabs”. You can assign Gabs to your friends and enable whether or not you wish to allow them to invite others to the Gab. It’s more or less of a simple flash messaging system. There’s also a “Email Alerts” option which will automatically inform you by email if: you get a new friend request, someone accepts your friend invitation, you’re included in a Gab, or if someone replies to an existing Gab. You get your usual User Profile to edit; name, birthday, picture, hobbies, location, etc. Additionally, they have added a section called “Exchange” which categorizes all types of hobbies and interests: Auto, Finance, Books, Games, Jobs and many others. In these categories, you can create mini threads so that you can share all your favorites interests with your friends. A five star rating system has been implemented so that you and your friends can vote on what things are cool, and what things are not. You can sort them by name, date, friend or rating, as well as add “Opinions”, which are just comments on your Exchange items. If you want to, they’ve also added a print feature for the User Opinions. It reminded me of Delicious Library, a simple application for Mac users to categorize their interests in their own libraries.

SnapPages also includes a Photo Manager application allowing you to organize your screen shots and miscellaneous pictures. To start, you can create an “Album” to import your photos and other pictures. Each album can be set to public, private, secure, or friend-only. Secure requires for you to input a password to access it, the others have permission according to their name. You can add tags to the photos to help organize them for later use. While in your albums area, you can enlarge your photos by using the slider found in the upper right corner. They have included a mild photo editing section in the Photo Manager where you can rotate, crop, and/or adjust brightness. They have a few others setting to revise the lighting and other effects, but there isn’t many option currently right now. If you’re looking for some more in-depth online flash photo editing, head over to Picnik. You able to share your photo galleries with friends by selecting the particular album that you want to share and adding recipients along with an optional message. Lastly, there’s the download feature that simply let’s you download any of the photos you have in any of your albums.

The last section of SnapPages is the Calendar Manager. Each calendar that you create acts identical to the Photo Manager’s Albums in regards to their property settings: private, public, secure, and friends-only. You can color coordinate new calendars when you create them as well as changing their format from the normal month calendar, to a weekly or daily calendar format. You can add events to your calendars which will require you to specify a time, a place, and any further details you need for the events. They also give you the option to input a URL to an online map if you find it necessary for the event. You also can define whether your event is a repeating affair. If so, you can input the time span it repeats: day, week, month, or year. You can also add notifications to each event, which sends you a reminder prior to the actual event. They also give you the ability to add tasks to your calendars and set exact due dates for each project. Like I mentioned, they have the Share option just like the Photo Manager if you desire to collaborate or share certain calendars with friends. They’ve included a nice RSS feature which allows you to subscribe to your friend’s calendars and see their past and upcoming events. Overall, the Calendar Manager is a nice simple way of helping to keep yourself on track for things you need to get done. It’s not nearly as in-depth as something like Google’s Calendar, however for the average person, it’ll suffice just fine.

To be honest, I liked SnapPages. Though it didn’t bring anything incredibly new to the table, it laid out all the old stuff neatly and thoroughly. Since it was created in Flash, the animation helped give it a nice touch of fluency. Give it a try, it was fun to play around in it. They plan on continuously adding new features to SnapPages, so we can only hope for the best.

BudgetPulse is a new financial management service in closed beta that aims to simplify the way you manage your money and track budgets. It allows you to manage multiple accounts and track income, expenses, assets, bills, and more. Additionally, BudgetPulse lets you set goals which assists you in tracking and recording how much money you spend over certain durations of time. (weeks, months, years, etc.)

If you’re looking for a financial application with all the usual Web 2.0 design elements, BudgetPulse may be the service for you. You’ve got your gradients and reflections, Ajax calls with every action, and of course, neat JavaScript slider effects. I can’t say I’m a fan of applications that over do it with Ajax, but enough about that and let’s get started. Logging in to BudgetPulse will direct you to the Dashboard showing a brief overview of your financial situation. You can see each of your accounts and their balances on the left as well as upcoming expenses and expense categories that are close to going over budget in the middle. BudgetPulse also aggregates financial news from top financial news sources like Google and Yahoo! which can help you plan your spending and budgets accordingly. You can also search through all of your transactions using the search form on the right column.

To get an account up and running, head over to the accounts area in the tracking section. You can add an account and set its opening balance, then start adding expenses, sources of income, and recurring payments like bills. BudgetPulse also allows you to make a money transfer from one account to another like real banking. Additionally, you can categorize each transaction you add to an account so BudgetPulse can later group the transactions and base them against your budget goals. Expect to type out the category every time you add a transaction though as BudgetPulse does not pre-populate your list of your categories for you.

As you’ve probably guessed, BudgetPulse helps you create and track budgets on the expenses your make. It groups up each expense by the categories you create and allows you to set a specific budget amount to an expense category. So, for example, if I were to add a couple transactions with the category, “entertainment”, BudgetPulse will show that category in the budgets area and allow me to set a budget amount to it. It will then display a simple bar that compares how much I have actually spent on entertainment and what I have budgeted. At default, it bases the data on a months time, but you can set a date range at the top.

After getting some data into BudgetPulse, you can view charts and summaries on your financial activity. The charts are especially useful because just seeing your expenses visually can be a real eye-opener and help you better plan for the future. There are three different charts: Expense allocation (pie chart), monthly expenses shown by day (line graph), and monthly expenses shown by month (bar graph). The BudgetPulse summary section allows you to view each transaction category and narrow down into each category showing totals of the last four months and the overall difference of your income and expenses.

With many other personal finance services out there, where does BudgetPulse stand? BudgetPulse offers a nice set of features, though I found the interface a bit clunky and ran into some small bugs here and there (mostly when submitting a form with invalid information or nothing at all). However, I did like the ability to quickly search through all of my transactions. I also liked the summary overview and the budgets area where you can assign budget amounts to specific categories of transactions. On the down side, you cannot export or import data, but that’s said to be in development for BudgetPulse’s public beta, along with other features like a calendar, mobile access, and SSL encryption. As it stands, I’m going to continue using my favorite money manager for the mac, Cha-Ching, but I am interested in seeing the public beta release of BudgetPulse. I have noticed some changes to BudgetPulse since I first started testing too, which is always a good sign.

In related news: check out Expensr, a social expense tracking application reviewed by Webware. Also keep an eye out for Mint, a personal finance service that’s been generating some buzz lately.

If you’re a fan of 37signal’s Basecamp, you’ll probably like Cashboard, a new application designed to help service-oriented businesses manage estimates, invoices, timesheets and payments. It’s like a combination of SlimTimer for time tracking and Blinksale for invoicing mixed with some basic accounting. It also complements project management systems well. You could, for example, start off in Cashboard by sending a project estimate to a potential client. Then, once the project has been given the go, plan the project and communicate as you normally would in your project management application. While you work, track time, send out invoices, and keep an eye on company payments with Cashboard. And to make things even easier, Cashboard integrates Basecamp so you can sync projects, contacts, and tasks between both applications.

Cashboard has four main areas: Estimates, Projects, Timesheets, and Accounting. Let’s start things off in the estimates area. This is where you go when you need to send an estimate to a potential client for a project. Cashboard allows you to list each task for a project estimate, set with a hourly rate or flat fee, and send the estimate to your potential client. What’s also nice is the ability to add a best and worst case estimate for each task so the client has an idea of possible overhead. Cashboard then allows you to either have your client login to Cashboard’s client area and accept the agreement or let you print out the estimate and send it to your client.

(Note: figures in the screenshots are just test numbers)

The projects area is the main area of Cashboard and is where you will spend most of your time. Like the Estimates page, you can add and remove tasks and reorder as needed. You and your employees can also log time for a specific task in the task overview. Cashboard also made it very easy for you to keep on top of costs as you add time to tasks. A row will appear stating the billable hours and amount compared to the original estimates or planned hours, which is very helpful for service-oriented businesses. It’s also important to note that when you create your company, you fill in a default hourly rate, but the hourly rate for each employee can be changed on a per project basis in the details area of a project. Cashboard will spot the difference and show your clients the totals based on the company hourly rate while you can view totals based on the company rate and employee rate.

You and your employees can also log their time in the Timesheets area. I’ve tested many time tracking products and I must say Cashboard has done a pretty good job with it. What I like is that it doesn’t force you to track your time a certain way. You can submit time on a daily basis adding the hours you worked for the day manually or using their stopwatch counter. Or you can go into the weekly tab and fill in the amount of hours you worked each day of the week at the end of the week. You can also submit as you go in the “All-time” tab. Whichever way works best for your team, you can do. The only problem I have with the Timesheets page is that the stopwatch counter cuts off when you close the window (maybe adding a simple session when the counter starts would solve this).

The project page also allows you to create invoices from your company’s logged time. Just click, “Create Invoice,” and it will automatically grab the amount of hours each employee has worked and fill in the information for the invoice. You can also add your own items to the invoice manually so anything that wasn’t in the original task list can get invoiced. Cashboard also lets you change the invoice id, sales tax, date range, and add a small note to your invoice. When your invoice is good and ready, send it to your client with Cashboard, which will give your client a login to review it, or print it out to mail to your client. Once you receive the payment from your client, head to the invoice, click “Add Payment” and fill in the amount the client paid up. To close an invoice, just mark the invoice as “paid in full” when adding a payment.

Ok. You’ve created estimates, projects, and invoices. Now you’re ready to view the Accounting area. It’s no QuickBooks, but it covers recent invoices, recent payments, and provides helpful information about client balances and net profits. Perhaps my favorite section of the invoicing page is “Company Cash Stats” which shows totals each employee of your team has made and how much you received from invoices with the end net profit. The cash stats can also be found in an individual project page letting you see how much profit your company actually took in after paying your employees for time on a project. Another helpful section is “Account Balances” which lists each client with collected information on invoices and payments giving you a quick glance at who’s on top of payments and who’s not. My only complaint about the accounting section is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to export the data or print it out.

In all, Cashboard seems to be a helpful product for service-oriented businesses. It’s a well thought out product that was obviously created by people in the design and development industry. You can create estimates, manage projects, manage timesheets from company employees and subcontractors, send off invoices to clients, review company payments and more. I was a bit overwhelmed at first and had some confusion when invoicing clients and splitting employee earnings (figured this out after adding employee hourly rates), but the rest came without problem. It’s also worth mentioning that Cashboard has a Mac Dashboard widget for submitting time and that Basecamp users can sync tasks and use projects from Basecamp.

Cashboard is currently in its alpha stage and offers plans ranging from free to $40 per month. However, and take note, the pricing page states prices are at half price during it’s alpha stage and that pre-launch users will get a promotion code for two free months once the alpha stage has completed.