Mint Wins TechCrunch40 Top Company Award; Takes $50,000 Prize

September 18th, 2007 at 7:53 pm

And the site is down now … Techcrunch40/digg effect I guess

September 18th, 2007 at 7:55 pm

Are you sure they won? Their site is down…….

September 18th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

I got a video demo from the CEO while I was at TechCrunch 40. I’ll try to get that up tomorrow on http://www.scobleshow.com. In the meantime, here’s a photo of the winner, CEO Aaron Patzer. You can use this photo on your blog posts as long as you give attribution. Thanks! http://www.flickr.com/photos/s.....400733726/

September 18th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

They should have went with MediaTemple. =)

September 18th, 2007 at 8:18 pm

Whoa, maybe they can use that cash to upgrade their servers ASAP!
It seems like a great tool… They’re data better be HARDCORE secure.

They should offer a Pro-level plan and work out a bundled deal w/ LifeLock… it be the perfect financial package for smart people.

September 18th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

I posted this question in the coverage of the session but got no answers, so here goes again: how does Mint compete with the upcoming web version of Quicken? Wesabe has the whole community/social angle, but is Mint just a nice front-end to Yodlee? As the VCs like to ask, what is the sustainable unfair advantage of Mint, especially over the 800lb gorilla in the personal finance space?

September 18th, 2007 at 8:27 pm

This can be done securely the same way Amazon and other online retailers store credit card data securely, through a one way system. Mint should publish details on their architecture.

September 18th, 2007 at 8:34 pm

i think the invitation code to join spendview.com for those that are interested is tc20…itz on back of the card they gave out

KD

September 18th, 2007 at 8:36 pm

nice app

rc

trading tennis blog

September 18th, 2007 at 8:38 pm

+1 to cero and Andrew
I just entered the comments to say the same thing, unless Mint gets bought by say, Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, (or as suggested by Andrew, partner up with all the big banks) there is NO CHANCE that I will put ALL my users and Passwords to all my financial information into some unknown website, Jeff Atwood (codinghorror.com) just posted about this issue a couple of days ago, and I quote :
“…This is a deplorable state of affairs. We’re teaching users that their credentials are of little value and should be freely handed out to any passing website that catches their fancy. It’s an incredibly dangerous habit to inculcate in users; it makes them far more vulnerable to phishing”

September 18th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

sorry for the double post, BUT

does anyone know if mint has a massive insurance policy to cover *any* losses to your account that might be suffered due to their access to your data?

i doubt the banks are going to cover your balance due to mint security blunders. in fact my guess is the person you will beg for leniency will not even know what mint is or what it does. they are just going to tell you your account is empty and its not their fault because you volunteered the data.

read up on some “direct withdrawl” horror stories. once a “black hat” has your account data, the bank will happily process the withdrawls all day long. even if you tell them the withdrawls are fraudulent. they will tell you that you can close the account, sometimes i have heard they will still hold you accountable for direct withdrawl claims.
remember your bank account does not work like your credit card - the bank does not do charge backs so easily. you really should think THRICE before handing account regular checking/banking account info to anyone.

September 18th, 2007 at 8:56 pm

really only fools need those catgory apps even if mint is
a good one all of them are just a waist of time
it’s not that hard to remmeber how much you earn
and spend less

and also its good to invest some saving
IN ETF like the fxi
and in new risk markets like the future exchange on tennis players
fxi roi is about 94% last year
on tennis trading usually the roi is 200% to 400% per single trade

if you invest you earn
if you try to manage the money you dont have wih mint
you get no where

jeff

September 18th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

I had a alpha invite that I used a few months ago. I signed in and figured out that there was no way I was going to trust an unknown with my account info. Nice app though and great idea. I wish them good luck but I’ll stick with my bank.

September 18th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

They need to implement some financial forecasting before they become a true online competitor of the MS Money’s and Quickens. There’s great graphs, reports on the way you spend your money.. but most of the time thats too late to do you any good! I need to know where my money is going as well as where its been. Great start! Hope they have those features in their cooker!

September 18th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

@12: Duncan and Mike are premium members at the latest series a recipient.

September 18th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

Hmm, interesting name. Looks like instead of trying to break into a number of banks, black hats just need to break into your account here, and then they can literally “mint” money.

I suggest a sort of a web 2.0 version of “The Truman Show” - put your genome data on 23andme (or whatever its called), all your financial data on mint, your whereabouts on twitter, google has the rest of your information anyways..

September 18th, 2007 at 9:41 pm

Anatoly, if you actually did any research on the company, you’d notice that they hire a third party that specializes in managing online banking information for several other companies, not just Mint.

September 18th, 2007 at 9:52 pm

Techcrunch 40 is killing me. Please end it and end the posts.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:01 pm

I am a beta user of mint and must say I love the service. There are some features that are missing but even so the product is not only helping me to stay in touch with my money, but it is also great looking.

My hope is that mint takes what looks like a great start and listens to their users so I can uninstall the my Sunday morning nemesis, quicken.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

@Don Wilson - it doesn’t matter. your bank will be unforgiving regardless of who is handling the transactions, should there be loss. the form entry wigets and display are hosted by mint, so they are taking possession of the data at some point. telling me that they have YET ANOTHER party in the mix makes it even worse - once again, you are incrementing by one (further) the number of companies who can ruin your life.

you cannot tell me their site is secure. no new site is secure. do you know why 3DES is still used? because it is mature, it has been beaten to death. maturity is the NUMBER ONE feature in security. mint cannot use the word “secure” until they go at least a year running their current code. even then, given the small number of users, its unlikely it has been exposed enough to claim security.

at best they can claim that they are “security minded and focused”.

and once again, if they are really sure of their security, they need to offer an insurance policy that covers 100% of any damages due to data loss. your bank won’t. in fact they will gladly process the direct withdrawls from your account even after admitting that they may be dubious. bank accounts are not credit cards. loss coverage works in a totally different way in normal accounts.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

Are you surprised after seeing the panelists?

You know the bubble is going to burst, when something like Mint is best company among 700 that applied. . The problem with mint is that I will never trust to give anything financial to them, or to anyone for that matter. They only chance they have is if someone like VISA buys them and uses their brand to create trust. Otherwise, forget it. I think it was best if the voting was done by the attendees, I think the collective sense of the crowd would have been better.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

I agree with peter.

Why would you give personal information to startup company that isn’t FDIC approval?

Let say stockmarket crash and Mint went bankruptcy. Mint still have personal information inside database. They take it like Enron guys & shredded insiders information. Seriously what would you do with your account?

Is FDIC going to help you? I don’t think so. Mint didn’t have FDIC. If they have FDIC approval. I would go.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

I am a Mint Beta Tester. I think it’s a quality product. Great job to the Mint team and congrats. This is a promising company with a well-developed product and an understandable revenue model.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:37 pm

A nice lesson in scaling for them. If you can’t handle the traffic, don’t promote the site.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

Too risky to give out personal information and bank company names.

You know in some countries they won’t allow you start legitimate financial site. What happens if thieves or hackers topple the site and break unsecure http rather than https?

You know hackers could use Linux to roll the whole information out from racket servers.

September 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

this is powerful, wont work as is but what a great vision and ideal! these guys gets bought by a bank for 20M

September 18th, 2007 at 11:10 pm

This may be hard for banks to set up, but they should let you have two passwords for each account. One password lets you transfer money in and out of your account, the other password lets you only look at what you’ve been spending on. Therefore, if anyone gets your account info they would only be able to look at what you buy.

Far fetched I know, but the ideal way to have it happen.

September 18th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

I’m disappointed that Techcrunch would award a top prize to a company that required you to break one of the fundamental aspects of security.

Ignoring the fact that (in the UK, at least) it would mean you had absolutely no comeback from fraud because you’ve given away your banking details, suggesting that having ’secure’ information held by yet another party regardless of SSL and privacy policies is satisfactory, is ludicrous.

It seems the whole ‘internet’ world is being seduced by fancy designs and ’special offers’ (”..constantly searching for deals..” equates to advertising), whist blithely ignoring the fact that they haven’t got any idea who’s actually seeing their data.

September 18th, 2007 at 11:52 pm

I don’t want powerful words coming from TRUSTe. I want FDIC runs by the U.S government. http://www.fdic.gov/

Those privacy crap…Stop giving people numbers to call fraud hotline. It’s like having helpless company asking people to dial circles.

Dial this… Dial that… People would easily give up calling and letting crooks and thieves win every year.

How long does take to recover stole property information?

September 19th, 2007 at 12:15 am

I am not giving all my info. to any one company/website; bank account #, login & password, credit card info my arse!…nope, that’s not going to happen.

I have worked in finance for about 8 years, with 2 in recover (fraud) and I can tell you right now: no company I have very heard of will allow you to give this type of information to anyone. Anyone that uses this service is violating their rights of recovery! Don’t believe me, please don’t! Ask your bank and credit card company if you still have fraud protection after having voluntarily given your account information to another entity.

September 19th, 2007 at 12:28 am

People would guess. They use information to buy weeds.

September 19th, 2007 at 12:34 am

I wonder about the close reference in Mints name, and general look, to Shaun Inmans stats tool Mint (see it here: http://www.haveamint.com/ ). The tools are both not only sharing the name, but also the floral logo and even a similiar color scheme.

As I read this post via RSS, i first thought: “Great Shaun. But what the hell did you do with your logo…”

September 19th, 2007 at 1:35 am

Uhhh… when I read this at first, I was thinking “Hey, that’s cool!” Mint is a really helpful web site analytics program that I’ve read really good things about. Then I realized it wasn’t the Mint program I was thinking about. It’s some “other” Mint. I think Oliver ^^^ said what I was thinking.

This Mint looks really shady to me. Especially with all that sensitive data right there, all in one convenient place for hackers to to attack. I don’t think I will be using this Mint, I might spend the $30 on Shaun Inman’s Mint though.

September 19th, 2007 at 1:44 am

Good morning to everybody. As a sponsor of TechCrunch40, I can tell you that Mint is a well deserved winner. The concept is amazing yet simple and, most importantly, immediately useful to just about any of us.

My only regret is that it is not yet available in Canada. Otherwise, congratulations.

Regards,
George Tsiolis
Founder
AGORACOM

September 19th, 2007 at 2:28 am

The panelists are choosing the best presenting company, not a company that they think will succeed and for sure not one that they want to invest in.

This will leave the ones that they each want to invest in to themselves and they will invest in it. may or may not.

But would they pick a company that they think they may invest in and share this idea with you all? probably not. this is just a 50K contest for a show, and thaz not their money. remember that.

a game is a game.

September 19th, 2007 at 3:40 am

Until banks officially recognise this service, Mint will struggle to gain traction.

They face a serious problem. As soon as your ‘give up’ your username/password to your online banking you are not covered. This is the same situation as not turning on your alarm in your house and not locking your car if it has an alarm. You didn’t prevent theft from occuring and thus your are not able to make a claim.

And unless this is a major revolutionary service and gains serious traction, bank will consider to say “we have never heard of Mint, you effectively just gave up your bank account and we don’t owe you any money”.

I don’t doubt that it could be a good service but this needs to come from the banking industry in the form of a secure API. And until then EVEN if Mint had their security handled by a top firm it wouldn’t change the banks views.

I would love to know how they addressed security at TC40 - anyone care to shed some light?

September 19th, 2007 at 4:30 am

http://forums.mint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=5
http://www.mint.com/safe.html

Instead of people just posting and claiming they have this service “figured out” without actually, oh, I don’t know, reading up a bit, just check out the links above and then have some discussion. I’m not saying it’s going to sway you, but at least you’ll have the facts rather than opinions-stated-as-facts.

Note: I am not associated with Mint in any way, shape, or form other than being accepted into their beta test not very long ago…

September 19th, 2007 at 5:08 am

@Brent: isn’t biz2.0 closing? Looks like it won’t be big competition for long.

September 19th, 2007 at 5:41 am

hmm..Google is watching. I would venture that in the next few months they will offer this service as well. After all, they know ALL.

September 19th, 2007 at 5:42 am

I’ve actually tried BroadClip - amazing site for legal downloadable internet music. Will integrate with ipods, cellphones. It is a vertical search engine for music like a Google. I thought there potential is imense in an arena that is growing.

September 19th, 2007 at 6:37 am

@79:

It doesn’t matter. They could have the most advanced security system in the world.

Until they become affiliated in some way with the banks, customers will not be protected if a hack occurs.

September 19th, 2007 at 6:54 am

Is there a similar online tool for UK financial institutions? It seems they have been very slow in allowing third party applications to access customers financial data!

September 19th, 2007 at 7:10 am

The site looks great but I think this is going to be a tough sell.

I worked for several major banks in their online banking groups. It was hard enough for a major bank to get its customers online to check a balance. Security was always a major concern but apathy is even greater. Only a very small percentage of online bankers care enough about their finances to spend any time and track it. We did an implementation with an account aggregrator and made it very simple to sign up. Take up was poor. How many people out there use Yodlee?

In addition, consumers who bank online are protected by Reg D, which protects consumers from fraud and unauthorized access. You’ve heard of it, banks are required to make you whole after $50 if your account was fraudulently accessed. If a consumer gives away their credentials without the bank’s endorsement, their compromising their protection under Reg D.

Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo etc. need to partner with the big banks if they want to have any chance. And even then they will have to convince consumers that it’s worth the time.

September 19th, 2007 at 7:35 am

The site looks great and from what is promised *should* be a great product - however I’ve spent 15 minutes try to add 2 accounts and the site kicks back errors and timeouts, even on my T1.

Maybe Digg/Techcrunch effect, I guess I’ll give it another 5 minutes later in the day and see if I can get it working.

September 19th, 2007 at 7:51 am

I checked out spendview.com since mint was down!!!! It looks like they have a decent offering considering they are much smaller than mint. What i liked was that it gives me an option of uploading the transactions manually and not give away all my financial information. You guys might want to check them out.

David

September 19th, 2007 at 8:01 am

Since I have one bank that I handle pretty much everything through, this is probably not going to be on my list of ‘web sites to check out.’

Anyway, I already know what I spend too much on: I go out to eat and I go to the movies too often. Big deal.

Not to deny this as a useful service to other people, though.

At any rate, none of the TC40 presenters, as far as reading the synopsis posted on here, seemed like killer apps. A few COULD be based on execution, but none are a totally new idea. Powerset has a good shot, XRT3D satisfies my ‘Minority Report’ fantasy, Fardoo is a really cool idea that only works if everybody is using it…

Also, AVATARS AVATARS AVATARS! I will be SO happy when people realize that ‘avatars’ are a FEATURE and not a PRODUCT! I am not going to a standalone web site to create an alternate version of myself, and I don’t think enough other people are interested in doing the same to justify several web sites dedicated to it.

(okay some of this belongs in the TC40 wrap up and not the Mint discussion, but since we’re talking about who was chosen and who wasn’t…)

September 19th, 2007 at 8:08 am

wow just re-reading the comments and doing a little googling it looks like these Mint guys *already* had $5 million in funding?!?

somehow you guys should have factored in the “needs money” part into making the final decision…obviously a company with $5 million in the bank is going to have a more mature product to demo than two guys working out of a garage on the weekends - not to mention a lot less need for a $50k booster shot. oh well, that’s business.

September 19th, 2007 at 8:18 am

$5 million in funding - Minty Fresh, eh?