Session five as follows, including our live notes. Commentary by Mark Hendrickson and Duncan Riley.
Xobni
Xobni products aim to improve the way users organize, search and navigate their email. Xobni creates an information profile for each person a user communicates with, and provides historical information that is relevant to what users are working on. Xobni displays contact information, threaded conversations, attachments, related people, email usage statistics, and information from the web.
Xobni creates a profile of all the interactions you have with your contacts. It appears to be a plugin for your email client - sits on the right-hand side of the client as you browse your email. Gives context to each message that you view; you can browse your messaging history with people, see their portrait, look at connected people (social networking), import calendar openings into email text, search your email by people and keywords. Xobni automatically extracts phone and email contacts from email messages.
You can also view upcoming appointments, to-do items, and a “stay in touch” area (a list of people who used to email you but haven’t in awhile - the “ex-girlfriend” feature).
Currently available for Microsoft Outlook, others soon.
Main points: view threaded conversations, find attachments, use email’s social network, and search email and people.
Several email accounts will be supported in 2008.
Orgoo
Orgoo offers a web based “personal communications cockpit” that is a one stop site for email accounts, IM accounts, video chat, video mail, SMS and voice. Orgoo is free, requires no downloads, and can be accessed from any web browser or mobile phone.
Starts by asking how many people have more than one email and IM account. In addition to these, we have chat, SMS, etc. Problem: no way to access and organize all these conversations in one location.
With Orgoo, you get all your email, IM, chat, and SMS more integrated into single location available through any web browser or mobile device.
You can send video to any of your email contacts, send messages from any of your email accounts, send IM messages in the same work area, hold a video chat session (public or private). You can also share files with each other and invite people into chat sessions using IM or email.
Aggregate all of your IM accounts into one (like Meebo apparently). You can take IM conversations and drop them into emails easily to continue conversations there. IM conversations can also be saved in folders and subfolders for archival purposes.
Search all your conversations, across all different types of conversations (email, IM, etc.)
All browsers supported, soon all mobile devices as well as a download. To launch in Q4 2007.
App2you
App2you is a custom web application creator that lets users create web apps without doing database coding or designing. All the app creators have to do is sketch their pages from scratch or by choosing a template from app2you’s gallery and customize it. Once the pages have been outlined app2you creates a hosted, database-driven web app.
app2you allows anyone to build a custom web application without any need for knowledge of code or programming. Goes beyond spreadsheets and database tables; available to everyone who can use Excel. Comes out of UCSD labs and their research.
Demo: building application that could theoretically be used to select TC40 presenting companies. Dragging and dropping types of fields into a custom form, changing their attributes. Can make forms you make to only people who log in or not (prevents duplicate submissions). You can list external reviewers who have access to the submissions to a form, or only a subset of these submissions. These external reviewers can leave comments about the form submissions.
app2you recommends fields to drop into the form when you’re building it. You can try app2you yourself on app2you.com. For free for hobbyist and interest groups, amenable to non-profits, too.
Mint
Mint is a personal finance application that lets users track and monitor their financial information in one place without the need of routine maintenance or accounting knowledge. Mint tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending.
Aaron Patzer (sp?) founder of Mint.com - talking to us about our money. Today, going to show us “revolutionary” way for us to organize our finances and save money on the way. Site will be available in about an hour, completely free and anonymous.
He’s taking us through a demo of the product now. Mint links with mid-level data security with over 3,500 banks, unions, credit cards. He’s adding his accounts live to Mint through the website. Just entering in the required info for each and hitting “login”. The system establishes a connection with the appropriate bank and brings in information from each. You can view how much money you have overall, how much you owe. If your balances dip too low, Mint send you an alert.
Mint will also send you bill reminders and notifications when your spending habits change significantly (begin spending too much money on restaurants, for example).
You can view how much you spend on shopping, dining, business services, travel, bills and utilities, etc. You can dive into a particular category and see how much you spend on groceries vs. restaurants, etc. All of the info is organized automatically. You can also view purchases from particular vendors (eg Amazon).
Mint will recommend ways to save money, personalized recommendations. It will give you a bank account suggestion with more interest, or a credit card that could be better for you given your spending habits. If you travel, it’ll find the right miles card for you, etc.
If there is a promotion from a company you pay bills to (Vonage, eg), it will let you know about this promotion so you can take advantage of it. Advertisements make you money in Mint by suggesting ways to save your money.
Mobile access available.
Kerpoof
Kerpoof is aiming to become a leading destination site for children through a suite of activities that are enriching as well as entertaining. On Kerpoof, kids can create art, stories, and animated movies using a simple 3D interface, and when done, can save it to their gallery, share it with others, and vote on their favorites.
Krista Marks, CEO for Kerpoof presenting. Aims to change the way kids interact with the computer. Most of what kids do today is mindless, a waste of time - Kerpoof wants to change this.
Goal: to be a site where fun is not separate from learning, but integral to it. Kids can create art through the site, write their own stories, create their own movies.
Parents are no longer buying software for their kids with the explosion of broadband - they are turning to websites for them. Neopets and Club Penguin are very popular, but are not as educational as they could be. At the same time, CS majors are plummeting. Bizworld saw this trend and came to Kerpoof to create software to educate children using the web.
Easy tool for kids to make their own picture scenes - cool effects when you add particular elements to the scene (add a moon and it becomes night, etc.). You can share your pictures with friends.
To make a movie, pick a scene then a backdrop. CEO claiming the movie creator teaches kids object oriented programming. You put objects in a scene and then make the objects do things (objects and methods). Looks like a basic Flash applet creator. Still, looks impressive. You can add music to the background. You can add multiple scenes to an entire movie.
If you want to add interactivity to a movie, you can have prompts at different points in the movie that change how the movie proceeds (makes it more like a game created by kids).
Kerpoof is live and freely available now.
Expert Panel
Esther Dyson asked about which one she would fund on the spot. She answers Xobni. Her problems though: asks about Eudora, or at least Gmail. (doesnt like outlook). Esther also says she would use Mint, despite being an investor in Wasabi.
Guy Kawasaki asked about which ones impressed him. He says he would meet with Kerpoof (he’s a father of 4). He would also use Xobni but calls it a dumb ass name (ouch).
Roelof thinks Mint has executed the product very well. He is also impressed with Xobni, but he worries about dependence on client. Brings up Plaxo as better in terms of its freedom from client. Xobni defends the company’s way about doing things by saying consumers don’t want to change their account habits.
Michael asked which companies he thinks will be acquired or exist as a standalone company in 5 years. He answers a “different question”. Says he likes all of the companies in this session. Says Mint was really well-done. Kerpoof CEO explains how she wants every third grade teacher to use Kerpoof to teach technical fluency. Esther a bit critical about how Kerpoof doesn’t have objects that interact with each other. Guy says Kerpoof shouldn’t put “programming” word in presentation; calls Kerpoof edutainment (a bit critical overall). Esther and Guy developing quite the rapport.
Asked about their business models:
Mint: lead generation
Kerpoof: subscriber fees
Xobni: vertical solutions
Orgoo (?): ads, premium services
Roelof asks about Kerpoof’s sharing capabilities; sees Kerpoof as a non-social service for the most part, wonders whether it should be more social. Guy says he’s okay with having it non-social (keeps things safer for kids).
Mint rep talks about Cake Financial, says they are about investments whereas Mint is about private finances. Minimal social aspect to Mint. Comment from the crowd saying that Mint has come at a time when technology is more right now then it would have been five, ten years ago.
Mike brings up SalesForce’s new Force release - suggests that Force might crush a lot of the companies at TC40 who are attempting to solve the same problems. app2you rep says they are not worried about Force because SalesForce’s product still requires a higher level of expertise and app2you is trying to make it more dead simple. Calacanis mentions how people problematically use Excel for workflow, they could use app2you more effectively instead.
Roelof mentions how it is hard to run a tools-based business. Make or break for these companies are not features but marketing and advertising - wants to hear more about this from app2you. Esther suggests along with Roelof that both Mint and app2you might confuse users or, in Mint’s case, not know about many business that may charge your accounts — might be too much magic involved that could ultimately fall through.
Guy wonders whether Mint should emphasis the saving money or the organizing finances aspect of Mint. A bit of disagreement over which is more important. Calacanis mentions that many less well-to-do people than those in the crowd will be drawn towards the saving money aspect of Mint.
mint seems interesting, but the place for better reporting is on my bank’s site…where they do the data entry/collection of each of my transactions for me. otherwise these apps tend to turn me into a data entry monkey, which tends to lead to missed transactions, abandonement, etc.
i am not sure how mint works but also any app that asks you to forward your account information etc is just suicide for users. i would go as far as saying that a bank should be able to drop account protection assurances for users who give account data to third party querying services…its that dangerous.
now take a superior reporting package and integrate it into the bank site i already use, and you have a winner (the upshot being you can actually *sell* the software to banks instead of begging for ad residuals)
Looks like you got the Xobni name wrong in the post - it does “sound” like Zobni, but it’s spelled with an X. As in, inbox spelled backwards. Not inboz.
xobni looks interesting, but i’ll have to wait for a ThunderBird version of it… or will the new MailCo thing from mozilla take care of that for me?
orgoo actually sounds interesting, first thing that has really caught my eye as something I would use. Seems fairly trivial for someone like Google or Yahoo to duplicate, though.
Xobni is terribly cool, are there any spam filtering capabilities or is it solely aggregation, organization and placement of all relevant email comm history only? I can’t wait to play with the email stats on the app and mess with the relationship diagrams. Will the diagrams be very good looking for data visualization or will they just be messy/amateur?
Orgoo needs to have an addition to the infrastructure for creating a centralized zone for placing ones reputation online. There aren’t many good reputation management services online and I see Orgoo evolving beyond just a Meebo-like existence
App2You is amazing - can you do a bit of development or is it meant to be as simplistic and clean as possible with very little coding/programming experience? I would also love to hear that it can take in data from many other places such as other applications, word documents, pdfs, etc? Would this ever be possible? What about adding in the functionality of effects such as Scriptalicious and other object-oriented javascript frameworks? I love the idea of overall simplicity like that given by this application but I can’t wait to play with it and see what it can truly do.
Mint sounds promising and a LOT of money could be made through advertising from banks and other financial institutions. Most web apps regarding banking and such never really have hit critical mass yet though. Possibly Mint may be different, esp with the ability to track transactions via certain online merchants, etc.
Kerpoof, not as interesting but possibly a new form of digital storytelling for children. After ClubPenguin’s success, who knows though. Will there ever be an addition to it of a child MMORPG?
can i get an orgoo invite from anybody, please?
I just started using mint from a beta invitation and i love it. It is exactly what i had in mind when i started looking for such a financial organizer.
I just started using mint from a beta invitation and i love it. It is exactly what i had in mind when i started looking for such a financial organizer.
Havent heard about the other companys too much, but im def going to give them a try.
iMarketingGuru, I think in this space, the “childless” blogosphere knows about ClubPenguin and little more but there’s a plethora of sites for kids. So many I wouldn’t even try to write a list. From the classics noggin.com o sesamestreet.org to startups like Kerpoof.
Some of these sites are quite amazing and with an amount of work behind that would put to shame many of the so-called web 2.0 companies.
I won’t try to judge Kerpoof by what I can see/do. I’ll put it to the real test this evening with my 5 years old
So far it looks engaging.
Xobni’s for outlook. Yuck.
Mint looked very cool to me - most useful thing I’ve seen presented so far. Let’s just hope it works as well as they made it look.
Xobni didn’t mention anything about spam filtering, as far as I can remember.
Good to see a lot of buzz building around the multi-billion dollar problem of email and information overload. We’ve written a blog post about the space and Xobni here: http://blog.clearcontext.com/2.....xobni.html
have we overloaded the mint name enough yet?
Mike is fantastic for creating Techcrunch and I am an avid reader so I don’t want to be too harsh. While he really gets Web 2.0, etc, from the consumer side he just doesn’t seem to get what is happening in enterprise software at all. Particularly his comments about Force.com being a game-ender for all other DIY apps builders is downright silly. It would be good to see coverage from someone at Techcurnch with a real understanding of the trends in enterprise software — so far the announcements around companies in this space are quite useful from a newsworthiness standpoint but the actual content smacks of niavite. Force.com represents a sea change in enterprise software, its not the end of anything.. this is a fantastic space to be getting into right now.
Anyone in enterprise SaaS knows that metadata driven multitenant apps platforms are the future, especially for any business software vendor targeting SMBs. There is no better way to quickly and easily expand into adjacent markets and beyond — those with the power to do so will quickly become a huge competitive threat against those who don’t Just about every enterprise software company will need a strategy to deal with this to compete over the next several years. They are not all going to just bow down to Salesforce and say game over, you did what nobody else can do. Far from it — hence, we are seeing new initiatives from SAP all the way down to new startups tackling this in a variety of ways.
Mike’s previous writeups tend to lump all of these companies together with mashup platforms and form builders, which suggests further that he doesn’t really get the differences between, for example, CogHead versus Wufoo versus DabbleDB versus Teqlo — night and day differences. Wufooo is for creating and sharing forms, not enterprise-ready business apps. DabbleDB has an amazing user experience and is a compelling replacement for Excel for small groups — but again, not a real business apps platform in any way comparable to Force. Teqlo is for mashups — not database driven enterprise business apps. On the contrary, CogHead is attempting to be a real business apps platform — this is an entirely different venture that is much more difficult to do right.
App2You is not in the same camp as CogHead or Force — it is more of a shared forms builder like WuFoo and DabbleDb with very limited real business apps capabilities. However, overall they are in a good space and tackling a big problem that many enterprise software companies will be required to solve. Hence acquisition material if they evolve and do it well.
If Mint sounds interesting, you should check out Wesabe. Similar concept, but the Wesabe guys are fanatics about security and privacy - see their Data Bill of Rights as an example. They also don’t use a 3rd party to connect to your accounts like Mint does (Mint uses Yodlee).
FYI - I have no connection to Wesabe, other than being a very happy user.
I’m surprised that nobody in the panel asked Mint about what they’ll do about the online version of Quicken that’s going to be launched later this year. Intuit has been doing leads generation in their apps for years and the Quicken name still brings fear to every personal financial app developer. Is Mint just hoping to pick up Quicken’s scraps like every other desktop personal finance app has done for decades?
Whoopie, you’re right that any application that requires you to enter data, or forward it (manually) from your banks is dead. Mint links directly and with bank-level data security to all your accounts. You set it up in 2 minutes, and from that point on it updates automatically every night.
Mint seems really useful. The only problem with it is getting people to trust a ‘no-name site/company’ w/their *very* personal financial data. We’ve already seen compnies like IBM, and most recently, Ameritrade lose customer/employee data through incompetence or being hacked.
What assurance can a small compny like Mint provide to potential customers that data wont go missing or even sold to outside parties…
Looks like Mint account data pulls are powered using Yodlee as the vendor (though they are not highlighting that fact).
Is that much different than going to the source and using Money Center for free from Yodlee (apart from the credit card and other offers, that is) if all you want to do is keep better track of money?
I was a mint.com beta tester and I can tell you that mint is easily the best finance application I’ve ever seen. It recognized accurately most transactions and auto-updates bank and account information. It’s still got some issues to work out, but the interface is slick and the SMS notifications (for a low checking account balance for example) are really nice.
debtkid
Per Bob #15 - would be good to get Mint/TC’s take on this:
Intuit building Quicken Online
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9759443-7.html
Xobni is awesome! Seriously, you should sign up for the beta and try it out.
According to us, Mint is a great FREE tool for managing our personal finances. Now it depends on us, the user community to adopt it and help it move forward with our support and feedback. If I can do all my money manangement free of cost and in an easier time saving manner, who needs Quicken. Thanks Mint!
Seems like mint is getting hammered. Tried adding a couple of accounts from different financial institutions and they all crapped out saying the institutions service was down.
BofA, eTrade and Citibank are all down? I don’t think so.
Ouch, name collisions.
Mint, the web analytics program: http://haveamint.com/
Mint, the money manager: http://www.mint.com/
Mint (the web analytics app) seems pretty popular. Might have been a good idea to google any prospective names before finalizing their brandings. Not only are the names identical, both apps have the same smooth sleek style judging by screenshots.
Oh well — might work out well for them.
Has anyone used both Wesabe and Mint? If so, how would you compare and contrast. Thanks!
Good morning to you all. In addition to Mint, we were also really impressed with Xobni during this session. I’ve been complaining for a while now that Outlook was far too slow and clunky, with no real upgrades made in years.
Xobni seemed like a dream come true. I loved the stats (mail received, mail sent, value, etc.) for each of my contacts, as well as, the fact that Xobni displays connections between contacts, recent messages with the contact and attachments all in 1 view. Very smart, intuitive and efficient.
Definitely going to download when I get back to Toronto and hope it lives us to the presentation.
Regards,
George Tsiolis
Founder
AGORACOM
Curious - why is my comment from September 18th, 2007 at 11:23 am still awaiting moderation?
I tried Mint yesterday after reading the TC post. When I saw the results, it looked very similar to two of my financial providers (Bank of America and Fidelity) already provide. Since I knew both these companies use Yodlee, I investigated further and found that Mint uses Yodlee. Mint mentions that they use Yodlee to say that they are secure and therefore they should be trusted. Here are my questions/comments:
1. Yodlee had its own moneycenter and I have an account as well with them. I hardly visit their site after I had set it up. Yodlee realized that the mass market is slow to adopt it and therefore has gone down the path of been offering private-labeled service of their’s through Insitutional companies for a while now. Why do I need Mint? What additional value does it add over what my bank and yodlee do already, other than a pretty site and a flash based graph.
2. They also mention patent pending categorizing technology - well I am not sure about that. Yodlee and as a result BoA/Fidelity provide the same. Is Mint referring to Yodlee’s IP as their IP?
Mint is clearly the best choice - I like the looks of App2You now but I’m not that interested in using the application. As for Mint, I think its future is rather promising, but there should be many more streams of income without detracting from personal privacy issues
absolutely loving Xobni - have been using for a week now.
I have been searching for a seriously good outlook plugin for ages.
Still not sure about their business model… ads (i hope not)… subscription (likely unfortunately).