Twelve promising new Web sites and services

This week saw the battle of the Web 2.0 conferences, with 70 entrepreneurs presenting their ideas at Demo Fall 2008 in San Diego and 50 more making their pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Some of the ideas are little more than a glimmer in a coder's eye, but others are already doing business, are in private beta, or are soon to launch. Here's a selection of our favorites.

[ Find out more news from the latest IT startups at Demo and TechCrunch50 in our special report. ]

Really simple passwords

Is the password for my bank Ra&18eR or rA#19eR? I can't remember and neither could most people, especially if they regularly access 20 or more online accounts. Usable aims to solve the problem by letting you use a simple word like "raider" to log in anywhere. The service (which is supposed to go live early next year) works like this: You visit your bank's Web site, but instead of encountering the usual sign-in boxes, you are greeted with an image like the one above. Usable remembers your user name, and you type in your simple password. Usable uses code on your PC and on their servers to slice and dice that simple word into a highly complex and secure password.

Getting the band together

Traditionally, bands have been some variation of four guys from Liverpool -- friends who start playing music together and decide to get serious. But what if you live in Livermore instead of Liverpool and you can't find three other musicians who are interested in playing the kind of music you like? MixMatchMusic should help. Individual musicians upload their favorite bass lines or drum patterns. Then other musicians looking for good accompaniments to their new guitar lick can browse through the offerings and mix the individual components together to form a full song. If other people like the tune enough to download it, all of the artists involved get paid automatically.

Find long-lost friends

Whenever a company pitches a new search engine designed to find people, I test it by searching for a guy with whom I shared a cockroach-infested apartment in Boston. iSearch is the first engine to pass my test. The site conglomerates information from public records, social networks, white pages, news, and professional connections. I can't wait to reconnect with my old friend. I just hope he's forgotten about that $200 I owe him.

Financial forecast

Lots of financial services are good at telling you what you've spent in the past and how much money you have right now. But few online systems so far have attempted to tell you how much you'll have next week or next month, especially if you decide to buy a new iPod after all. Making contingent cash-flow projections is tough, but GreenSherpa's system (due to reach private beta next week) seems as though it could work. It lets you account for regular bills, but it also simplifies the task of entering one-time expenses or factoring in a bonus check you're expecting.