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

I had a beta invite but didn’t ever get around to using it, but maybe that was a mistake.

Best of luck to them!

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

Am I the only one thinking that they are going to have a hard time getting people to give up access to all of their sensitive information. I just don’t see people doing it.

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

It is an extremely useful tool. Right off the bat, using it for only 15 minutes this morning after I first read about it on Techcrunch, I had my 4 bank accounts & credit card in the system, everything was categorized, and it had suggested I ditch Comcast to save some money…

This blows MS Money out of the water is ease of use & usability.

Now if only it had built in billpay……

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/

agree cero…I know some people compare the security with paypal…but its not even close…paypal only gets your bank account #, with this thing they get your username, passwords…the whole shebang.

The only way I see this working…is if they partner up with all the big banks…and provide a ‘powered by mint’ feature for the banks…that way if you have bank accounts with 2 participating banks you can share your info.

They should have went with MediaTemple. =)

@Wordhugger: i agree even this morning they were a bit slow… but now, forget about it.

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.

wow, this is the best of the techcrunch 40! anyone remember yodlee? cashedge? financial engines?

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?

It’s bad enough already that most links these days are to crunchbase, but stories still typically contain a link (buried somewhere) to the company’s web site itself. This story doesn’t even have that.

I’m sorry it’s just a bit annoying sometimes

I think it would be better if you provided both a link to the company site and a link to crunchbase right next to each other, like:

Blah blah blah Mint ( _website_, _crunchbase_ ) blah blah blah…

Just a suggestion.

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.

since mint is down…yall might wanna check out spendview.com..they were at the demo pit in the same space as mint…i heard they are only like 3 person team compare to 5 million dollar mint…i think they have almost all the stuff mint has….wonder what happen to the 5 mills??

my 2 cent

KD

ps. i m hearing the award was an inside job?????

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

this is online hemlock. think about it. are you really so ready to monkey around with a web2 site that you are willing to give them the KEYS TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT???

they may or may not be as secure as your existing bank’s site. your bank’s site has been attacked, and improved for years. mint is a web2 beta. in any case you are simply increasing by one the number of people who can basically cause your life to be ruined.

were i the CTO of any of these major banks, i would block mint.com outright, and issue letters to users whose accounts are being queried that if they continue to engage in willfully insecure behavior, the balance of their accounts will be returned to them in the mail by certified check and those accounts closed. with all of the other insane security issues these people have to deal with on the web, the last thing they need is account access sitting on a server of dubious origin. i’ll count quicken in that too, with the exception that quicken can likely afford an insurance policy to actually make good on any losses suffered due to security screwups.

and in any case what the hell does it do? my bank already categozies all my credit card (i buy everything on cc to get miles) purchases into categories. what else do i need? a graph? why?

all of these financial apps are idiotic. no one changes their behavior because of a graph. if you blow money on crap today, you will blow it on crap after you have made pretty graphs.

nice app

rc

trading tennis blog

This should be interesting - I’m going through the process of choosing between MS Money, Quicken, and the free online stuff right now.

+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”

Hey Travis…let us know what u decide and why..i myself is looking

KD

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.

i make about 4000$ a day thanks to a blog i found on the
net do you think i need this?

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

Strange, the panel after the mint group was not “all about mint”, in fact I thought mint had a fairly luke warm reception. The demo was well done and the product looked nice, but the winner of the whole thing ? nope, don’t think so.

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.

it’s too bad that the site is down, but all you eager beavers can feel free to send *me* your personal bank account information.

i’ll tell you what you’re spending too much money on, and suggest financial vehicles for you to make and save more money, and i’ll barely transfer anything out of your accounts. promise!

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!

It looks really nice but unfortunately I discovered that is was US only once I’d already signed up.

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

They deserve everything they get. Top quality service.

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..

I have been a beta tester for a little while and although I have mixed feelings. I wasn’t given any suggestions to save money, things were categorized nicely, It was easy to use, sent me important emails, but in the end it really hasn’t changed my life.

In the end I feel like I know what I”m spending and I know where I waste money. I don’t need some frickin web app to tell me this. Will they make some money probably will they be successfull, well, that depends if they are able to leverage sensative data (hard to do, people don’t want to give up their sensitive data) similar to lowermybills.com and have more insite on the users data and spending habits.

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.

Congratulations Mint!! Great to see a financial app take home the big one.

A bit of history: The first financial data aggregation site launched in 1999, it was called VerticalOne and was later acquired by Yodlee. Eight years later, the concerns about entering username/passwords into relatively unknown websites are still major stumbling points, along with ease of use.

Mint, Yodlee, Wesabe, Intuit, Jwaala, Geezeo and others are getting the ease of use down. And partnering with banks could reduce the security concerns considerably. We are on record predicting that 10 years out about 30 million U.S. households (25% penetration) will use online personal finance 10 years from now.

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

the trading tennis blog is a much better tool than this

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.

Tried to add two accounts, both failed. Not exactly a site you want to hand your credentials too if they can’t safely handle a surge in traffic.

They lose.

@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.

This product is useless. You have to be pretty stupid not to know where your money is going. Why would you risk giving up ALL of your personal information, even giving paypal the credit card number is bad enough! And someone said they should partner with the big banks, that won’t happen either, there is no big enough incentive for them to do this!

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.

isnt this what matt coffin was thinking originally with lowermybills and didnt that get commented on at crunch? they should get that guy and try to acquire customers big time now that mortgage ads are less prevalent

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.

I am a beta user and Mint is mint. Wesabe blows. Mint is going to be the leader of this sector.

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.

#34 while I agree with your post there is one way to gain traction faster.

Having “legitimate” financial institutions as Partners most definitely validates the model as well helps in user adoption. The problem is that getting one of these institutions to bite will be a task of considerable effort and most importantly time. I know because I was part of a company that faced this challenge back in the dot bomb era.

The ONLY way to get faster credibility is to create a tier 1 advisory board. The board would be made up of people with similar backgrounds as the following: (examples below). Of course make sure you have lots of stock options available too.
* President/Founder of top tier internet brokerage firm (i.e Schwab or eTrade)
* CTO of Sungard type company
* Retired CEO’s of large banks
* EVP Operations of Fiserv
* Retired COO’s of large banks

but, before you go down that road maybe you should let everyone know who is on your current management team (there is no page on your website). Most people when looking to make a decision to use these type of offerings first look at the management team, followed by which people are putting their names(credibility) on the line. The fact that you have some investors that for the most part invest in web2.0 companies doing mash-ups is nice, but, does NOT give one the sense of security needed.

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

@33 I’m a techcrunch commenter. Doing any research before commenting is contrary to my entire existence.

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.

Wow - can you imagine how bad it would suck if YOU won the TC40 and YOUR site crashed when everyone went to check it out?

I feel bad for these guys/gals. They obviously have a great idea (maybe the best at TC40, maybe not)…probably great implementation…but not ready for the rush…I feel sooooo bad for these guys/gals…of course it is their fault…but damn…stop for a minute and put yourself in their shoes right now.

@39: e trade has been around for awhile and they just announced a huge security breach this week…so their time in rate meant nothing.

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

About Privacy and Security,

Read this: http://www.mint.com/privacy.html

They don’t collect any personal information, so its completely anonymous.

All the account aggregation is done through Yodlee, a backend service that is used by most of the major banks. Logging in through Mint should be the same as logging in through the Bank of America site. Your username/password is sent to Yodlee, and Yodlee sends your account info to be analyzed by Mint.

They use the same SSL encryption that all other online banks use to protect your username/password while it is being transferred.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Mint, but I beta tested it and have spoken with the employees numerous times.

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.

Apart from one or two, TC40 companies lacks real usefulness and lack real innovation. If MA is trying to be a bird spotter (as Mike Moritz
Puts it) in finding the next AAPL, GOOG, way too far to go. Demo is much much better in selecting the chosen few.

As a barometer, let us wait and see in the next 12 months how many of them will be successful exits

Any way fantastic effort and a good show.

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.

I’m intrigued–signing into both my bank account and credit card account gets annoying. Hopefully their traffic issues will get resolved and I’ll be able to check it out tomorrow.

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?

I think the panelist must have smoked a bit too much mint leaves.

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.

Signed up a week ago for http://www.expensr.com, which was on the cover of Business 2.0 as a disruptor….pretty touch competition for both I guess…one gets TechCrunch, one gets Business 2.0….they seem quite similar. Mint is prettier though.

People would guess. They use information to buy weeds.

Mint seemed like an OKAY app. I did see their competitor in the demo pit spendview.com who seemed just as impressive, they were handing out invites on their cards. I think the invite code was tc20. I looked at it and the interface is really nice. Check em out…

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…”

This is a very cool product, i hope that there are more companies companies like yodlee which allow access to banks information in my country. Such a product will be useful in any part of the world.

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.

Interesting that TechCrunch40 and the recent Seedcamp in Europe both chose personal finance apps (winner at Seedcamp was Kublax, not yet live).

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

Of the 40 companies who presented at techcrunch 40 over the past two days, the judges determined Mint to the best and awarded the online financial

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.

@Brent (#60) - no, Mint is unique among these sites for integrating directly into banks’ websites, not requiring a flat-file import. very diff proposition & much more persuasive.

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?

Mint is a nice piece of work and they have made a huge impact on the way people approach managing finances. Mint however is still full of bugs and lack some of the legacy features of most financial software (like adding custom categories).

It’s “Ways to Save” feature is a great way to augment the cost of the development so users can join for free.

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…

I see possible trust issues with this web application.

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

Great app, I only wish that they supported Canadian banks…

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.

how is this site better than geezeo?

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.

I just signed up for Mint and think it’s pretty incredible. And since no one else seems to have provided the link to their page on the security features they’ve implemented, I will…

http://www.mint.com/safe.html

Seems at least, if not even more, secure than many banks, and far more security features than any Web2.0 site I’ve ever seen.

@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.

For everybody concerned about security… From Mint’s website
http://www.mint.com/safe.html

————————————————————

# All data storage is encrypted. Not only are our hard-drives encrypted, our servers are in a secure facility protected by biometrics palm scanners and 24/7 security guards.

# SSL prevents eavesdropping. Communication between your browser and Mint occurs using 128-bit SSL, the highest industry standard. This prevents hackers from being able to listen-in on or “tap” a conversation. Data is delivered to you and you alone.

# Bank-level standards are used. This includes encryption, auditing, logging, backups, and safe-guarding data.

# We hack our own site. Mint runs thousands of tests on its own software to ensure security. We scan our ports, test for SQL injection, and protect against cross-site scripting. We also update and patch our software all the time.

# Mint uses industry standard secure account aggregation. Mint uses Yodlee to connect to your financial institutions. This is the same back-end aggregation system used by Bank of America, Fidelity, and Microsoft Money. Yodlee’s security practices have been audited by the NSA, Visa, Mastercard, and numerous major banks.

# Mint is independently verified secure. You don’t have to take our word for it. Mint has been audited by Verisign, as following the industry security practices. Read the full Mint.com Privacy & Security Policy. Data Use Overview

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!

To @Kevin Darr , @Jeff Kaye

Spendview doesn’t even have a corporate profile on their site, how am I going to hand over my finance/passwords/personal information to such a company? They need to put up a contact page, where they are located, their corporate profile and phone #/address. All they have on their about page http://spendview.com/aboutus.aspx … seriously… its a hard sell

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.

Congrats. Great presentation at TechCrunch

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.

At their party Monday night I thought they just made delicious mint mojitos, but this personal financial application seems pretty cool too.

“I didn’t know there was going to be an open bar. And the guy really knew his stuff! He made me a mojito. I don’t think it’s a gay drink. MO-HEEE-TOO”

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

Sounds like the best down to earth idea for a start up compared to the other competitors. Congrats to Mint and all of the other companies who participated.

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…)

Seems like many people are accessing their site. Their website seems to be unusually slow Congrats to Mint.

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.

congratulations to Mint and the team

$5 million in funding - Minty Fresh, eh?

Mint looks good on the outside but on the inside it’s slow as hell. Maybe it’s because of the initial rush to sign up and the boost from Shoemoney/Digg/Techcrunch.

I had problems adding accounts. They couldn’t be accessed. Some accounts duplicated and when I deleted one duplicate it deleted the other as well.

I’m going to step back and wait a few days. Right now the site is sloooooow. Mint should have seen this coming.

@rc:

link or it doesn’t exist.

Congrats Mint. Interesting to see how people take to giving their confidential credentials to this service

$50K, that’s all?

Zinosociety (a small angel group in Seattle) gave $150K out at their forum: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.....source=rss

Specks, yes things are slow right now. Usually it takes 30-60 seconds to add accounts and that’s dragging to 5-10 minutes or more. We did some major scale testing last week, but we’re getting thousands of sign-up requests an hour - about 5x what we anticipated at peak.

We’re working around the clock…

Aaron Patzer, Founder of Mint.com

I have been using Mint for a few weeks in the extended private beta and have been surprised at how useful the service is — to have all transactions consolidated on one place allowed me to easily track my spending behavior and make some important changes. One example is I was paying more late fees than I realized, so we set up direct bill pay for those accounts which will save us some real money each year. The other feature that is great is the alert feature that lets you know when payments are due, late fees are incurred or larger than usual transactions happen. Unless you have an bookkeeper or spend hours on Quicken each week, this is an easy way to monitor your financial behavior.

The product definitely has some glitches (categorizing some transactions, finding some accounts, site performance, etc) that need to be worked out but I have noticed progress since I started on the beta. I thought TC40 was for early stage companies showing their product for the first time, so it is understandable (but too bad for them) that the site is down some of the time as they probably didn’t plan on winning the award.

I’ve been wanting to check out Mint for a while now. The UI looks very nice form what I’ve seen.
However, I will NOT be giving my bank’s username and password information to anyone but my bank. I don’t care how secure they have made it.
I use my own app, http://www.trackyourbudget.com, to see where my money is going. It’s really easy. Keep your receipts and enter them when you get home. It takes 2 minutes.
I just don’t see the advantage of hooking up to my bank.

With these banking sites, it seems like it’s really all about trust, because regardless of any guaranteed protections, you still have to trust the people you’re dealing with. I feel like I could trust wesabe because of the track record of the founders, and the fund that’s backing them. I feel like I could probably not trust this company, not only because they totally ripped off Shaun’s mint analytics tool (I hope he has some kind of trademark protection…), but because the whole thing seems shady. If they had 5mil in the bank, I wonder how much the mint.com domain name cost. I’d rather have that money be spent on security technology. It all feels very delusion 1.0 to me, but I guess we’ll see how it plays out.

Long live the original Mint.

Here is my final conference coverage and thoughts on Mint’s win:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....t-thankyou

I am trying to figure out how Mint might work with a personal finance tool like Quicken? I don’t see anything on their web site about whether you can import from Quicken — or how this might replace or be used in tandem. I track all my accounts in Quicken and budget (albeit not with Quicken’s very poor budgeting tools, but by just inputting income and expenses 6 months ahead of time)

How is Mint better? Different? Complimentary?

I saw the post by Bigair claiming that you can’t track late fees, payment due dates etc. on Quicken unless you spend hours a week. I don’t spend hours a week — in fact I send 30 min ever couple of weeks and get pretty good money management from Quicken. Are there things I hate about Quicken — absolutely. Are there things that could be improved? DEFINITELY! But where is the FAQ on MINT that talks about how MINT does things better or different?

Before I let go of 5 years of personal financial management that I have done via Quicken I need to know more. Please don’t get me wrong — I am NOT some Quicken fanatic. Quicken leaves a lot on the table — and does a very poor job in the budgeting side of things — BUT at the moment it works and is secure. I would LOVE a better solution — sell me on why this is better (marketing copy on the Mint web site could do a MUCH better job)

HOLY CRAP! No SSL on the login? Did they not know they can move the login to a different page and not have to worry about the processing load on the server of an SSL homepage. LOL.

Is TechCrunch only interested in the US? How can an application which has no value in the rest of the world win? Or is this simply a prize for the most polished presentation?

How does Mint compare and contrast to Wesabe?