The average American home spends more than $2,000 a year on residential energy bills. Many people simply consider energy a cost of living, like rent, or other things that are simply out of our control. But there's plenty of money to be saved by saving energy, it just requires a bit of effort. An app called WattzOn seeks to help you save energy, save money, and save the planet -- and soon, it might be partnering with your bank.

Various attempts to normalize micropayments have flopped over the years, but a new crop of providers think they can reverse the decade-old notion set down by Clay Shirky, that “Micropayment systems...have failed because they are a bad idea. Furthermore, since their weakness is systemic, they will continue to fail in the future.”

ISIS, the telecom-backed mobile wallet venture, takes another major leap forward with the addition of American Express credit cards and Serve, the card issuer’s own digital payments platform. The agreement may allow ISIS to achieve dominance and edge out the slew of mobile wallets on the market.

There's hardly a company in the tech world that wouldn't like to have thorough, detailed access to the way you spend money. Big data is the name of the game at the intersection of tech and business, and American Express might be the leader of the pack. But for all the promise that big data holds, will marketers really be able to drive conversions based on what we already do? What if our spending habits are gross and sad?

Most mobile apps that relate to your finances take it as a given that you'll be using them to spend your money. A mobile wallet app makes it even easier to pay for goods by using NFC technology or giving you location-based coupons. Banks have apps that enable P2P payments, which is certainly convenient, but won't help you save. Now there's an app that does: it's called Urge.

As Finovate 2012 kicked off this week in San Francisco, one of its past presenters, Bankons, was scooped up by CapitalOne. Bankons offers its users merchant-funded discounts based on their spending history, and now it is part of CapitalOne's Digital Innovation Lab. Clearly many see great promise in this leveraging of consumer data to help retailers compete with online giants like Amazon. Finovate 2012 has two more companies banking on the same -- will this work?

Yodlee Interactive, which developed the systems used by hundreds of financial institutions to power online banking, is opening its data and security platform to crowdsource innovation. Yodlee’s partnership with early adopters miiCard and MyRewardsTree has already been made public, and they represent just how vast Yodlee hopes the projects will get.

The world of online digital purchases is less likely to involve the use of debit and credit cards as more companies welcome the use of carrier billing. Most recently, Google Play and Boku entered agreements with major U.S. telecoms to simplify the process of buying digital goods.

We like to think that our Twitter persona is slightly different from who we really are. We make a different impression in real life, we hope. In the future there may be no difference between your online and real life. Things like Google goggles, terrifying as they seem, may become more commonplace. You already walk around with a computer in your pocket that records your every move and connects you to the entire world, so you might be able to say we're already there. This week at MyBankTracker was all about closing that gap that exists between the online and the real world. It's a terrifying process, but it's the only way forward, apparently.

Google (NYSE: GOOG) is rejoicing at the launch of three new smartphones that support the search-engine giant’s mobile payments application - Google Wallet. The mobile wallet faces slow adoption amid a competitive race to revolutionize how consumers make purchases in the future. So, the expanded availability of Google Wallet may contribute to its success.