Personal Capital’s CEO, Bill Harris, who headed up Intuit and PayPal previously, is unveiling his latest company today, which melds technology with financial advisory services.

He says the goal is to bring the decades-old business of managing money to the masses, by replacing fancy offices and golf club memberships with software and video chatting.

“I think we are going to see a radical deconstruction of financial services over the next decade that may be similar to what’s happened to the media or GM,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they will go away, but they will look astonishingly different. That spells tremendous opportunity. It’s really difficult to take a large company with established ways of doing business and change.”

On the surface, it doesn’t look like Personal Capital would have a chance against Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab, Fidelity or Edward Jones.

It has zero clients, 40 employees, zero branches, $27 million in capital and obviously a long, long way to go. Harris admits: “I bet Wells Fargo or Schwab has 1,000 engineers for QA (quality assurance) alone,” but he counters, “We are better off than they are because we can move quickly.”

In a demonstration, Harris walked me through the site, where you can log in to all of your various bank accounts and brokerage accounts.

By doing so, Personal Capital will be able to see everything in one snapshot, so it can tell you that you are invested 79 percent in U.S. stocks, or if you have too much cash. You can even drill down to see how much money you spend at Amazon on a monthly basis, or on a category like groceries.

All of these tools are free, but users will have to pay for the advice — if they should want it.

Harris said the tools show you what you have, but the advice will tell you what to do if you are over-invested in U.S. stocks, or in a particular company.

“Most people have no idea and it’s the most important financial decision that you have to make,” he said.

The advisers will also help you eliminate fees that you are currently paying for mutual funds and come up with a long-term plan.

Personal Capital charges less than 1 percent of all the assets it is managing a year, which is below other brick-and-mortar businesses, he says. Additionally, the sales people don’t work on commission, so their interests are aligned with the client.

“I’m 55, and in some ways this is the culmination of my career,” Harris said. “I’ve done so much in financial technology over the past 20 years. … All of it has been pieces of the puzzle.”

Personal Capital is not the only one in Silicon Valley going after Wall Street.

Harris is also an adviser to Wikinvest and PageOnce.

PageOnce is building mobile applications to help people track their bills. Similar to Personal Invest, Wikinvest is building software to help users manage assets across multiple accounts. But instead of using advisers to make recommendations, it will eventually provide tips using algorithms to decide what is cheaper or more lucrative based on your holdings.

“I would argue that nowhere near enough is being done,” Harris said. “If you look at finance overall, it’s a huge and vital part of the American and global economy, and finance is one of the largest industries in the world. It’s up there with housing and autos and medicine. But when I think of all the industries where the Internet, or connectivity or mobile, has changed everything, it could be even more transformed.”

It’s easy to get Harris up on his soap box, but Michael Sha, the CEO of Wikinvest, will join him.

Sha says the irony in the industry is that the more you pay for financial services, the lower your return. Still, it’s not the aim of Wikinvest to replace the big brokerage houses. Its users will need them to make a trade.

Here’s a video of Harris, wearing a jacket and displaying the polish of Wall St.:

Bill Harris Overview from Personal Capital on Vimeo.

Before you snicker, bear in mind that Carol Bartz’s “B-” aside, people are still buying a lot of ads on Yahoo (YHOO), at least when it comes to display ads, where the Internet giant dominates. JP Morgan (JPM) puts the company’s share of the U.S. market for display ads at 17 percent, well ahead of No. 2 Microsoft (MSFT) at 11 percent and AOL (AOL) at seven percent.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of the more interesting inventory the company has sold in the last year. From the outside, at least, a lot of this stuff seems fairly similar to other big attention-getters that marketers are running on other Web sites. Apple’s (AAPL) inventive ads, for instance, are all over the Internet.

And lots of publishers are pushing oversize ads (and I bet that Web surfers will soon develop the ability to ignore those, just as they do with conventional banner ads).

Note that not everything here is a holy-cow-wouldya-lookit-that presentation, though. One of the highlights, for instance, is simply the addition of video to a search result for Charles Schwab (SCHW).

In any case, the clip works as a pretty good survey of Web advertising, and it’s reasonably short. Though if you’re not a huge fan of hairband guitar solos, you may want to turn the volume down.

Trading volume surged 14 percent or more last month from July at online brokerage firms Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW), TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD) and E*Trade Financial Corp. (ETFC). Electronic trader Knight Capital Group Inc. also posted a 7.7 percent increase.

It amounts to an unusually large jump in online trading, traditionally the domain of smaller investors. “Usually, August is one of the worst months of the year,” said Richard Repetto of Sandler O’Neill Partners L.P., with volume typically falling 10 percent from July.

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Ancient history, I suppose. But perhaps worth thinking about in light of OpenTable’s rather astonishing IPO last week. Originally priced at between $12 and $14, shares in the company were instead listed at $20. They opened at $24.50 and then spiked to $33 before closing at $31.81. A 59 percent surge on the first day of trading. For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry? Impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for OpenTable’s’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in the company. Charles Schwab (SCHW), Pacific Asset Partners, W Capital Partners, Venture Frogs, Zagat and a number of small private investors sold off all their OpenTable shares as part of the company’s IPO (click on chart below), according to the SEC filing.

Interesting, yeah? Seems at least some of the company’s investors had been hoping for an exit. And they fled for it in unison, pockets full, when one was offered. Perhaps they’d lost their appetite for risk after reading through the Risk Factors section of Open Tables IPO filing, which grimly noted that “a significant majority of our restaurant customers are fine-dining restaurants which have been particularly affected by economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing.”

Or perhaps, like Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at I.P.O. Boutique, they remember Foodline and the last dot-com bubble and bust. “People don’t truly know the story here about this company. It’s a one-trick pony company,” Sweet told the New York Times. “Pricier restaurants in San Francisco, Tampa, New York are not that hard to get in right now. In fact, one can do it themselves if they choose, with 15 minutes notice.”

Jill Nash, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, has told CEO Carol Bartz and other Yahoo staff this afternoon that she is leaving the company.

Yahoo has not made Nash’s resignation official, but is likely to do so quickly as Bartz tries to stanch incessant leaks (like this one; see below!).

In any case, sources said Nash does not appear to have any definite plans to move to another company immediately, so the reasons for her departure are unclear.

BoomTown would have to guess that Nash is simply completely spent from her past two years at Yahoo (YHOO), which have been very fraught from a public relations perspective, to say the least.

Nash, who was hired by former CEO Terry Semel, has had to deal with everything from management turmoil, after Semel was replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang, to poor financial results to a nasty takeover attempt by Microsoft (MSFT) to an even less friendly proxy fight to a failed search deal with Google (GOOG) to recent wrenching layoffs.

Not much good news to report, in other words, especially with a tough turnaround road ahead with newly installed CEO Bartz, who seems to have a very strong mind of her own about public relations.

(Including, several sources tell me, this week in an internal memo, offering cash rewards to employees who turn in other employees who leak to the press. Bartz has also initiated investigations to stop leaks. All I can say about these tactics–while it might seem reasonable to try to stop the leaking, from a management perspective, and I see why Bartz is focusing on it–is: Yahoo is not a prison and its employees are not snitches and–more to the point–they won’t leak to me if Bartz fixes the company.)

While I have not always seen eye-to-eye with Nash on this column’s coverage of Yahoo, I have found her to be a pro to deal with and fair, especially considering the often tense circumstances at Yahoo in the last year.

Nash is not the first top Yahoo exec to depart since Bartz got to Yahoo in mid-January and will not likely be the last, as the new CEO carves out her own path and chooses the team she wants.

Many Yahoos have told me, not for attribution and at all levels of the company, that they are bone-tired of the long-term struggle the company has been engaged in and want to move on, even in this weak economic climate.

Last week, this column reported the departures of Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj and marketing exec Eric Hadley, neither of which was necessarily due to Bartz’s arrival.

Now it’s Nash’s turn to say goodbye. According to Yahoo’s Web site, her duties were to lead its outward-facing efforts.

It reads, in part: “As a key member of the Yahoo! executive team, Nash will be responsible for the company’s worldwide communications efforts, including public and media relations, corporate reputation, corporate, financial and employee communications, and crisis and issues management.”

Nash came to Yahoo from the Gap, where she was the VP of global corporate communications. Previous to that, she worked at Charles Schwab (SCHW), KPMG and Transamerica Life.