The clearest trend of the day: Business models that depend on financial institutions to pay for consumer-facing services. It seems that few firms expect to make money from consumer fees, ads or marketing offers.

The services themselves were all over the map. I was particularly fascinated by a couple of electronic check deposit services. MShift has technology that lets you electronically deposit checks by submitting photographs (front and back) captured with any 2-megapixel or greater phone camera.

Fidelity National Information Services has developed technology that not only lets consumers submit a scanned checks, but gives institutions tools to assess the risk involved in accepting the check. Is it from a valid account? Does the depositor have a history of bounced deposits? Is there anything unusual that might justify placing the funds on hold? If so, the service raises a red flag.

A couple of personal finance management services designed for financial institutions to offer customers showed off nifty new bells and whistles. Yodlee will introduce a highly customizable user interface for which third parties can develop widgets; FinanceWorks (from Intuit-owned Digital Insight) will integrate with Intuit’s TurboTax to make entering tax info easier than ever. Both were among the best-of-show winners based on Finovate attendee votes.

Another show winner was First ROI and BancVue’s Kasasa–basically a rewards checking program created for small community lenders. BancVue provides the technology and, perhaps more importantly, brand marketing services that these small banks and credit unions wouldn’t be able to afford on their own. I was also impressed by S1 Enterprise‘s suite of template applications that institutions can customize and offer their customers.

Also present at the show were Mint.com, which is in the process of being acquired by Intuit (and is taking up residence on Yahoo’s home page), and Simplifi, which is making its financial planning and management service available to banks.

A couple of companies have created applications designed to educate kids (Skill-Life’s Cents City) and novice investors (TILE Financial-TILE stands for The Investment Learning Environment). Of personal interest to me as a newly self-employed writer is Outright.com‘s free small business accounting service. Billeo flags Google and Bing search results that have special offers (e.g. online coupon codes) for something you might be shopping for.

Finally, a number of companies are working on payment services. Bling Nation provides consumers with chip-equipped stickers to slap on the back of their cell phones and use, a la RFID, to make payments to merchants with Bling terminals. PayByMobile envisions a system where you’d fund an account (much the way you fund a prepaid cell phone account) that you could draw on to pay participating merchants using a SMS short code message.

CashEdge’s POPMoney (for Pay Other People Money) would empower people to send and request payments using e-mail and existing bank accounts. Payments to accounts at banks participating in the CashEdge network would occur immediately; otherwise, the user would have to provide wire transfer information.

I could go on, but it’s late. You can peruse the full list of presenters on the Finovate site.

Content sharing made super-simple: That’s the pitch for some pretty impressive technology previewed in the latest beta of the upcoming version of Opera Software‘s browser (Opera 10). Called Opera Unite, it basically puts a web server inside your browser, allowing you to easily share pretty much anything on your PC via a custom URL (and a password, if you wish).

All you have to do to enable Opera Unite is to sign up for an account by creating your own user ID and assigning a name for your PC (you can set up several for your account). The URL for a user named denny with a PC named home, for example, would be http://home.denny.operaunite.com/.

Opera Unite is not just a service; it’s a platform that Opera hopes will attract developers. But to get you started, Opera provides a basic set of widgets, including ones for photo-sharing (without having to upload files to Flickr or other services); a chat room; a sticky-note board called The Fridge (because that’s what the interface looks like); general file-sharing; and–for the really ambitious–web site hosting.

I downloaded and installed the technical preview and set up an Opera Unite account in just a couple of minutes, then started playing with widgets. You don’t need to be running Opera to access Opera Unite content — just to serve it up. I got a friend who, using Google’s Chrome browser, was able to post a sticky note to my fridge:

The basic Opera Unite interface, showing the Fridge widget.

There was a bit of lag (we compared notes on instant messaging while waiting for the sticky notes to appear). And I had a bit of trouble getting my usually reliable screen-grab app (Snag-It) to work, making me wonder about what resources Opera Unite requires. But it did work. Here’s what you get as a visitor to a password protected Opera Unite link:

The Opera Unite interface for password-protected content.

One potential fly in the ointment: Opera in its presentation sort of glossed over the potential for copyright problems (like the ones that killed off the original Napster and its ilk). Basically, it sounds like they’re trusting to the honor system (don’t share stuff you have no right to share).

You also have to trust that Opera has plugged all potential security holes — a big question that I’m not equipped to answer. And of course, to make content available, you have to keep your PC on with Opera Unite running, so it’s not exactly a practical alternative to professional web hosting. Still, I think it’s got great potential for empowering non-technical users to dip their toe into content-sharing via the web.

You can learn about Opera Unite and download the preview at unite.opera.com.

As I’m writing this on my notebook, I’m intermittently checking e-mail, answering instant messages, tweeting, and sending Facebook updates. That’s a lot of windows: Wouldn’t it be nice if I could take care of all these things within one easy-to-use application?

Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers behind Google Maps, thought so too–and the powers that be (a.k.a. Sergey Brin) at Google believed in the concept enough to give them a team in Australia to develop it over the last two years.

Today, at the Google IO developers conference, the Rasmussen brothers and lead product manager Stephanie Hannon previewed the results of their labors: a browser-based communication and collaboration platform called Wave.

It took them a good 90 minutes (the entire day-two keynote) to show off Wave’s many capabilities, but at its most basic level, it’s a cross between e-mail and instant messaging client. If the person you’re communicating with is online, the communication becomes a two-way IM chat; if not, your message is waiting for them when they log on.

One panel of the paned interface shows every conversation–live or latent, Google calls them waves–much the way most e-mail inboxes look. Another pane shows the actual messages in the wave. Here’s a screenshot I grabbed from the Wave preview site:

The IM functionality has a very neat aspect that alone sold me on the concept: As you type, each character is sent in real time, so that I can even “interrupt” you by typing back before you complete your sentence. I also liked Wave’s ability to let you admit third parties to your conversation–and a playback feature that lets them see the messages they missed.

But wait, there’s more. Waves can include images, videos, even maps–making Wave a document creation tool, too. And multiple users can edit waves in real time, with tracking a la Word revision mode–powerful collaboration features.

Because Wave is browser-based, you can use it from in Web-enabled phone (there was a brief demo of this). And because Google is open-sourcing what Lars Rasmussen described as “the lion’s share” of Wave code as well as its protocols, developers are free to create their own Wave clients and servers that can still communicate with other Wave clients and servers (much the way e-mail works).

All this makes Wave a candidate for all sorts of uses, including forums, wikis, bug-track systems (Google I/O is a developer conference, remember) and anything that you might now be managing via, say, Yahoo Groups.

Of course, e-mail and traditional IM systems aren’t going away anytime soon. But because Wave’s protocols are open source, developers could (in theory) create gateways between these systems (not to mention Twitter and Facebook) and Wave so that early adopters could use Wave for all their communication needs. (That’s a big if, obviously.)

The Wave demo earned a standing ovation from the developers at this morning’s keynote. Sadly, however, Wave is still at least a few months away from even a beta public release: Right now, all you can do is sign up to be notified when it’s ready.

In the meantime, you can read Lars Rasmussen’s post about Wave on the Google blog, or if time is no object, watch video of the keynote.

With Google CEO Eric Schmidt as emcee, several Google execs showed off a variety of cool technologies, based on the upcoming fifth version of HTML that will make browsers more powerful than ever as application platforms. These include new markup tags such as <canvas> and <video> that will provide native support for, respectively, 2D drawing and running videos in browser–tasks which today typically involve installing plug-ins such as Flash or Shockwave. As guest speaker Jay Sullivan, a vice president at Mozilla, put it, HTML 5 will get “things like video out of plug-in prison.”

Also coming: new APIs for other features such as offline storage of data (so that you can use Web apps even when you’re not online), 3D graphics (think first-person-shooter in a browser) and geolocation (Google demo’d a new “My Location” button on Google Maps that you can opt to share with others — hmm, will this supercede Zhiing?).

An Android guy (Romain Guy, to be precise) talked about how the next version (code named Donut) will include a neat open-source text-to-speech engine and multiple language packs. Used with a translation app, this could basically turn your phone into a neat portable translator for supported languages.

You can read Google’s official Google I/O keynote press release to see what they thought was important (but remember, it’s for developers).

As for news you can use right now, head on over to Google’s Web Elements page, which has an assortment of neat code snippets that make it super easy to instantly add modules for Google search, chat, YouTube video, maps and more to your Web site.

You can add this Google Custom Search web element by pasting a few lines of code onto your site.

The best part of the keynote, though, was the end, when Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra announced that all attendees would be receiving free Android phones – and SIM cards for 30 free days of unlimited voice and data use. I’m looking forward to some quality time with Android.