AllThingsD » Mint

CaptainU Builds the Mint.com for Student Athletes

Drake Martinet — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:15:37 +0000

One sure path to making money on the Internet is to find a business that people can get emotional about — that is, enough to type in their credit card number.

CaptainU, a start-up that serves the families of young athletes, may have found the most emotional business of all.

The San Francisco-based company has positioned itself between student athletes and the college teams that might recruit them, in much the same way that financial Web app Mint.com placed itself in between people building their financial goals and the banks and credit card companies seeking new clients.

But don’t call CaptainU a recruiting service — that might run it afoul of the NCAA.

CaptainU users sign up and then build a profile that includes the student athlete’s statistics, team affiliations, training camp attendances and GPA.

The site also provides templates for tracking statistics, displaying highlight videos and all the other ephemera college coaches might look for when recruiting.

But, according to co-founder Mike Farb, CaptainU’s real service — like Mint’s — is about helping users make decisions with more information.

Once they decide they want to play at the college level, “students really need a road map for what they should to do, to develop athletically and academically,” Farb said. “Today, most families just rely on high school coaches and other parents.”

What CaptainU provides, after analyzing all the data added to a profile, is a realistic set of goals and prescriptions for achievement.

Want to play lacrosse at Duke? CaptainU can tell you what GPA you should shoot for, whether or not you are on the right traveling lacrosse team, and which coach you should get in touch with.

Farb, like other founders wary of nailing down claims of early traction, wouldn’t share user numbers in detail. But he acknowledged that CaptainU currently had “hundreds of thousands of users.”

Users can sign up for a free “rookie” profile, or trade up for an expanded services profile, which runs between $20 and $40 per mont — pricey, but not when compared to something like a bag full of top-tier hockey equipment.

Farb said that he didn’t think the financial future for his bootstrapped company, which is looking to raise an A round of funding, was in paid user accounts.

“We can now connect families with videographers in every state, so that they can get highlight footage taken,” he said. “We want to provide the same connections for private coaches, camps, and anyone else who provides services for athletes families.”

The plan for CaptainU is to become a platform for all of these partners to connect and transact business with the start-up’s growing user base. CaptainU takes a small cut of each deal, and charges admission for trainers, camps and other service providers to be listed on the site.

This “platform play” isn’t new, but Farb said that growing the sales and marketing staff, which CaptainU organizes by sport, is the next step.

“After all, how many former college athletes do you know that end up in sales?,” he asked and then answered. “All of them.”

Here is the video of an interview I did with Farb:

[ See post to watch video ]

visual.ly Wants to Bring Nifty Charts and Graphs to the Rest of Us

Liz Gannes — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:15:32 +0000

The personal finance start-up Mint famously built its user base by posting engaging topical content on its corporate blog. Some of its most successful posts were infographics — some 130 of them — which garnered 30 to 40 times the page views of a comparable article.

That’s according to Stew Langille, former VP of marketing at Mint, who says the success of those infographics helped spark a data visualization renaissance on the Web (as well as the creation of far too many less rigorous “info posters”).

Now Langille has co-founded a start-up called visual.ly to build a community, market and tools for infographics.

Visual.ly is kind of similar to Scribd or SlideShare, but for infographics. They may be less popular and universal than PDFs and PowerPoints, but since infographics can be works of art and can also be quite hard to build, Langille thinks he has ample opportunities for premium businesses.

Later this year, visual.ly will release Web-based “prosumer” tools for editorial, marketing, student and other users to create their own shiny infographics. It also plans to give professional data visualization folks the opportunity to sell stylized templates for other people to use in their infographics.

Though infographics may seem kind of niche, what’s particularly neat about the ones visual.ly creates is that they can be interactive, and can be quickly rejiggered with new data. So a financial news site, for example, could automatically generate graphs for users to see how the Dow has changed this week. (Here’s an example of an interactive chart visual.ly created for CNN.)

The idea is for visual.ly to be more flexible and easier to use than alternatives like PhotoShop, Illustrator or Tableau. More serious users will have to pay something like $100-$250 per month, Langille said.

For today, though, visual.ly is just opening up its community — which is already seeded with 60,000 members and 2,000 infographics — to allow people to view, upload and embed infographics. It also created a fun Twitter visualization tool with Infochimps and Alchemy for users to see visual.ly in action.

I don’t know how easy it will actually be to create charts and graphs in visual.ly, but I can imagine that the first kids who use these infographics for school reports, the first local news sites that start churning out living stats. and the first interns who add visual.ly to their bosses’ PowerPoints are going to get some serious kudos.

Visual.ly has seed funding, was incubated at 500 Startups, and is now raising a Series A round, Langille said.

Exclusive: What's Former Omniture CEO Josh James Been Doing Since Leaving Adobe? Raising LOTS Of Money (Updated)

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:30:13 +0000

It’s not unusual for founding CEOs to hang around only for a little while after their companies have been acquired. Even so, Josh James, the founder of the Web analytics powerhouse Omniture, seemed eager to hit the road faster than most. After Adobe Systems acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion in September of 2009, James resigned the following July.

What’s he been doing since then? Gearing up for another venture, I’m told. Some time last year, James, flush with the $80 million and change he made from Adobe as one of Omniture’s biggest shareholders, hit the eject button on his gig as an Adobe exec and acquired/bought out Corda Technologies, a business data dashboard start-up based in Lindon, Utah. Corda forms the basis of James’ new venture, but its vision is substantially bigger, I’m told.

Until recently, James has been bankrolling the venture out of his own pocket. But in recent weeks he’s been raising money for a seed round. And as seed rounds go, it’s unusually large. I don’t know a precise amount, but it’s somewhere north of $5 million and less than $8 million.

I’ve confirmed that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital fund run by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Opsware–the software company they sold to Hewlett-Packard–have ponied up about $1 million, betting that James can strike gold once again.

Corda specializes in pouring all types of company performance data into a dashboard for executives. It will have a new name, still undecided. In fact, the Corda Web site doesn’t even mention the fact that James has acquired it. Still, James has started assembling a team in Utah.

His acquisition of Corda and his an offer to hire a former Adobe employee caused a legal spat between James and Adobe, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune. Adobe claimed that James violated non-compete agreements he signed when he left the company in buying Corda and ~~hiring~~ trying to hire away a former Adobe employee. The Utah case is over, ordered stayed by a judge, while a case that James and Corda brought in a Santa Clara County court in California against Adobe alleging unfair competition is still pending.

Update: Since I first published this story we’re learning more about who’s investing in this still-unnamed Josh James-helmed venture. A source familiar with the matter says that aside from the $5 million-plus seed-round, which should be announced officially within the next few weeks, James is already pretty far along in the process of raising a Series A round that will be announced later in the year. A source familiar with the situation says that Benchmark Capital–which has backed companies like Mint, the personal finance site acquired by Intuit last year, and others as varied as eBay, Instagram and Jamba Juice–has committed up to $30 million to the new company.

A Second Update:I’ve just confirmed that Ron Conway’s SV Angel is investing in the seed round.

"Super Angel" Aydin Senkut Talks About VCs, Start-Ups and Shaking Up Tech Investing

Kara Swisher — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:11:12 +0000

While in Vancouver last week, BoomTown got some time to chat with Aydin Senkut about his recent announcement of a new $40 million investment fund, which is part of a “super angel” trend in Silicon Valley.

In many ways, the concept of a super angel was pioneered by well-known tech investor Ron Conway, whom Senkut mentions in the video interview I did with him, below.

But now the market is getting very crowded, with a $30 million fund being raised by Dave McClure just one of many similar efforts by others, from Chris Sacca to Michael Dearing to Conway himself, again.

Apparently, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, these super angels have some kind of mysterioso “magnetic” effort–which means entrepreneurs like them and other investors pay mind.

Also, they compete with VCs, which–IMHO–simply means more VCs of different shapes and sizes. Oh joy!

In all seriousness, via Felicis Ventures, Senkut has been a serious regular-size angel investor for many years, since he left a post at Google (GOOG), with wins that include Mint, which sold to Intuit (INTU), and the Google-acquired Aardvark.

Here’s my chat with Senkut, which touches on all these topics and more:

[ See post to watch video ]

Goalkeeping Gets Easier at Mint.com

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:47:27 +0000

When most people hear the word “budget,” they groan about all the numbers and spreadsheets involved in setting financial goals. Instead they procrastinate and continue spending without any specific savings goals. Case in point: I recently postponed a meeting with my financial planner because I didn’t have the energy after a long business trip to work through my finances.

[ See post to watch video ]

Now Mint.com, a website that already offers user-friendly options for studying how one’s money is spent, has introduced an easy way to set budget objectives, link them to accounts and learn specific steps on how to reach those goals. The goals can even be personalized with digital photos, like an image of the car you’re saving up to buy. And this service, which launched Tuesday, doesn’t cost a cent.

I’ve been testing Intuit Inc.’s free, updated Mint.com service, specifically focusing on its new Mint Goals feature. The idea of adding goals that tie into real accounts has been a long time coming for the finance-management website. Mint previously offered a Planning section on its site, but it required too much manual input, including setting up personal budget categories, and guesswork about how much one should spend.

The Goals feature uses pop-up windows where users can quickly input data, like annual salary, to get estimates on how much they can afford to spend on things like a vacation, as well as how much they need to save for that vacation. Monthly savings estimates can be set to aggressive savings plans or conservative ones with just a mouse click.

Finances in One Place

Mint.com has been around for almost three years and is already used by millions of people. Its proprietary algorithms encrypt data so people will feel confident enough to input their usernames and passwords for their online financial accounts, allowing them to see all of their financial activity in one place. These accounts include those tied to credit cards, banks, retirement savings and others. Mint is known for displaying colorful visuals like pie charts and graphs, so it’s easy for people to see where they’re spending their money or how it’s being invested.

Mint.com’s new Goals tab (top right) offers users a choice of eight popular goals and one to customize. Colorful thermometers (top left) show how much progress was made toward a goal. Details of a particular goal (above) and a “Next Steps” checklist of tasks to complete.

Mint Goals is a new tab on the Mint.com site, and clicking on it directs users to a group of eight popular goals and one that can be customized (more will be added over time). The preset list includes goals to get out of debt, buy a home, buy a car, save for college, take a trip or save for retirement. A digital checklist in each goal called “Next Steps” gives people serious, doable tasks to complete, so they can actually make progress toward a goal in ways other than just putting money aside. This instant gratification saved me from doing a lot of calculating.

The Best Account

When you set up a goal for the first time, Mint suggests what type of account would work best for saving toward it. Examples include a 529 savings plan for people who are saving to put their kids through college or a Roth IRA for retirement savings. Mint will also tell you the provider with the best interest rate.

Unlike some other websites that encourage saving, like SmartyPig.com, Mint isn’t a bank, so you’ll have to leave the Mint site to create accounts and manage money transfers rather than starting them right on the site. Aaron Patzer, the company’s founder and CEO, expects the site will enable setting up savings accounts and money transfers by the end of this year.

Each goal includes the overall amount of money intended to be saved, today’s balance, planned and projected dates for reaching the goal and how much has been saved this month (like $200 of $750). I liked looking at Mint’s colorful thermometers, which quickly showed me how I was progressing in a particular goal.

For example, the Buy a Home goal checklist includes steps like finding a Realtor, getting homeowner’s insurance and getting prequalified for a loan. A panel beside each of these items also offers an educational explanation of what these steps really mean. Many explanations include links to a blog called MintLife, where blog posts from Mint employees and some freelancers offer deep explanations about financial questions.

Ads With Context

The Goals feature comes with contextual ads, which help it remain free. One checklist item suggests opening a high-yield savings account and also offers links to the Discover and American Express websites, which offer the accounts. If you’ve started a Mint Goal to save for a trip to Iceland, travel insurance is suggested, along with Web links to sites that sell trip insurance.

While these links might allow people to get started right away on a particular task, they also beg the question of whether these are the best options for users—or just the biggest advertisers on Mint. Mr. Patzer explained that companies for these ads are chosen according to what’s best for the user and are selected from a list of savings options ranked by the site’s editors.

Goals can be linked to several of your accounts on Mint so they’re updated with real-time data. A long-term retirement goal can link to a 401(k), brokerage account and retirement account. If the stock market takes a dive and money is lost in an account, that loss is automatically reflected in the overall goal’s balance. If you tie a savings account to a goal to save for a house, every dollar added to that account (on the bank’s end) is automatically reflected in the goal.

Mint already gave people a visually engaging way to know more about what their money is doing, but Mint Goals give people a real reason to come back to the site more often.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Learning About Everything Under The 'Cloud'

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:05:12 +0000

The digital world loves to revel in its own jargon, and one of its most popular phrases today is “cloud computing.” You see the expression everywhere new uses for the Internet are discussed. But what do techies and companies mean when they refer to doing things in “the cloud”? They aren’t talking about meteorology, and all they see when they use the term—which is always singular—is sunshine, not rain.

[ See post to watch video ]

To help you navigate through the talk about cloud computing, here’s a very basic explainer. It doesn’t cover every detail current among Internet experts. But I hope it gives regular folks a better understanding of the “cloud” products and services being offered them.

At its most basic level, the “cloud” is simply the Internet, or the vast array of servers around the world that comprise it. When people say a digital document is stored, or a digital task is being performed in the cloud, they mean that the file or application lives on a server you access over an Internet connection, via a Web browser or app, rather than on “local” devices, like your computer or smartphone.

This isn’t a new idea. For years, there have been services that would back up your files to a distant server over the Internet or keep your photos online. And Web-based email programs, like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, are familiar examples of cloud-based applications. These programs live on servers, not your PC, and you access them through a Web browser.

What’s changed is that, in recent years, large-scale Internet-based storage has gotten cheaper, so it’s possible for programmers to create more-sophisticated remote software, and the speed and ubiquity of Internet connections have improved. Also, some users have expressed a desire to share and collaborate in easier and richer ways than emailing files. Cloud-based services let many users view, comment on, and edit the same material. All this has given a boost to cloud computing.

On top of that, computers are changing in ways that make cloud services more desirable. Your little netbook may lack the huge hard disk needed to hold all your music or photos, but there are ways to keep this material in the cloud and access it at will. Your smartphone can’t run all the sophisticated programs, or store all the files, that your PC can. But, if it’s connected to cloud storage and cloud-based apps, it can do much more than its hardware specs suggest. And, with cloud file storage and apps that run on remote servers, you could conceivably travel without any computer. A borrowed PC, tablet or smartphone might be all you need to log in and do real work.

So, in recent years, a flood of cloud-based products and services have appeared to store and share files; to keep information on all your devices synchronized; and even to perform tasks like editing photos, or creating and editing long documents or large spreadsheets.

For instance, I wrote parts of this column in a private test edition of a cloud-based version of Microsoft Word that the company will release soon. In fact, Microsoft (MSFT) will be making its entire Office suite available free in the cloud. Google (GOOG) and others already have such cloud-based productivity suites. Another example: Many of the 200,000 apps for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone are merely small programs that tap data or services stored in the cloud to provide everything from restaurant choices to driving directions.

There are other good examples. At Picnik.com, you’ll find an elegant, versatile cloud-based photo editor that can work on pictures from a wide variety of Web-based photo sites as well as those on your own hard disk. At Zoho.com, you’ll find a cornucopia of cloud-based apps that interact with both the Web and your local hard disk. You can track your finances using a cloud-based program called Mint, which is available from a PC browser, or from an iPhone or Android-based phone.

Of course, clever readers will have noticed that this trend toward cloud computing has an obvious flaw. If you aren’t connected to the Internet—or are saddled with a poor connection—you could be left high and dry when you want access to an important file stored remotely, or need to use a cloud-based program. Google, which is building an entire cloud-based operating system, and other companies have come up with ways to store some remote material on your local device. But these solutions aren’t yet comprehensive, so wise users will make sure that the tools and files they need most are still available on their devices.

Some products get around this by offering hybrid cloud and local services. One of my favorites in this category is SugarSync, which backs up key folders you select to the Web and synchronizes them to the hard disks on your PCs or Macs, so you always have the freshest copies handy, whether you have a connection or not. Another problem is privacy. Many of these cloud services have good security, but prying hackers are relentless and smart, so consumers should be careful about what they store in the cloud. You may not care if a family photo is swiped, but your Social Security number is a different matter.

Cloud computing is here, and growing, and quite useful. It will only get better and better.

Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Mac Quicken Gets Deductions for Iffy Upgrade

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:04:27 +0000

Despite all of the success Apple (AAPL) has had with its Macintosh computers, the Mac has lagged behind Windows in personal-finance software.

The most popular program in the category, Intuit’s Quicken, comes in a Mac version. But it isn’t as good as the Windows version, dates from 2006, and requires an often tedious and flawed process for converting your data from the Windows version.

[ See post to watch video ]

As a result, many PC owners who consider buying a Mac but rely upon Quicken resist switching. Or, they resort to work-arounds, such as installing Windows on their new Macs or keeping around an old PC—solely to run the more robust Windows version of Quicken.

This week, Intuit (INTU) hopes to alleviate this situation with an all-new $60 version called Quicken Essentials for Mac, or QEM for short. The company describes QEM as the first version of Quicken developed specifically to run on a Mac, as opposed to being copied from a Windows product. It also says the product was influenced by a Mac-savvy team from Mint, a Web-based personal-finance service Intuit acquired late last year.

I’ve been testing Quicken Essentials for Mac, and have seriously mixed feelings about it. In general, it worked well and kept its promises, and it largely solves the crucial data-conversion problem. Unlike its predecessor, Quicken for Mac 2007, it looks and feels like a modern Mac program. It also can download transactions from over 12,000 banks, brokerages and other financial institutions—about triple the number supported by the prior Mac version and double the number supported by the base version of Quicken for Windows.

However, this program is still no match for the Windows version in the breadth and depth of its features, and is even a step backward in some features from the old 2007 Mac version. It is really a stripped-down version of Quicken, for basic tracking and managing of your finances. It isn’t likely to satisfy hard-core family financial planners, especially those who like to keep an eagle eye on investments or create detailed budgets and reports.

Most important, Quicken Essentials doesn’t display, or even allow you to enter or edit, individual transactions in investment accounts. It only shows a snapshot of the current status and value of the overall investment account and of the securities or funds it holds. It also lacks a bill-paying feature. And it can’t export your data to Intuit’s popular TurboTax program. Even the much-maligned older Mac version could do these three things.

While QEM is easy to use and has colorful, understandable charts and graphs that show your financial situation, its budget and reporting capabilities are rudimentary, and it has no planning features for helping you reduce debt or save for retirement.

The new team from Mint, now in charge of Intuit’s Personal Finance group, concedes that QEM lacks some important features, but says it hopes to add detailed investment-tracking and bill-paying to a future edition.

The company claims the new QEM will satisfy the needs of users who aren’t deeply into investment management or planning, or who are new to personal-finance software.

For my tests, I entered my own various bank, credit-card, retirement and brokerage accounts, and the program was able to automatically download transactions for my checking and credit-card accounts, and snapshot views of my investment accounts, in most cases. In a few instances, I had to go through an intermediary step of downloading a file from a bank or brokerage Web site, and then importing it into QEM.

Quicken Essentials can update each account separately, or all your accounts at once. But I couldn’t find any way to schedule automatic downloads of data.

The company boasts that one of its big advantages is that it automatically categorizes transactions you download. It knows a purchase at Safeway is probably “groceries.” It remembers these for the future, but won’t retroactively apply the categories to past transactions.

To me, the biggest plus in QEM is its greatly improved conversion ability. I was able to successfully convert files from Quicken for Windows, Microsoft Money and the older Mac version using sample data from those programs provided at my request by Intuit, since I don’t use these programs and lacked my own data.

Each conversion took 30 minutes or less. The process requires you to export your data from the other programs and then use a special conversion utility that comes on the QEM disk. You then import the files created by the converter into QEM. For conversions from Money, you need to have the program installed on your PC.

Some information, such as individual investment activity, and various reports and plans that QEM doesn’t support, won’t transfer. And, after the conversion, you have to reenter your log-in information for banks and brokerages.

Overall, I consider QEM just a start in bringing a better version of Quicken to the Mac. Devoted users of Quicken for Windows will likely still resist the Mac, or be forced to resort to work-arounds so they can keep using the Windows version.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

First Round Capital Forces Its Start-Ups to Sing for Their Supper (and Your Holiday Card)

Peter Kafka — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:50:42 +0000

Some of you really enjoyed last year’s edition of the First Round Capital holiday card, which featured the VC firm’s portfolio companies “dancing” a la 2008′s “Where the Hell is Matt?” viral video.

Alas, I don’t think this year’s version is nearly as entertaining. But Susan Boyle fans, who include at least one of my bosses, may get a kick out of it.

Also, people who like watching Web darlings like Xobni, Mint and Get Satisfaction try to warble along. By the way, anyone want to tell us what “stealth” company Swipely is up to? Looks credit cardy.

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

Intuit Acquires Mint for a Mint [CONFIRMED]

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:09:17 +0000

The TechCrunch 50 hasn’t even begun yet and already it’s making news. Online personal finance site Mint, which took top prize at the event in 2007, has evidently been acquired by Intuit. Price: A reported $170 million.

A nice, easy exit for Mint, which might have been the next Intuit–had it stayed the course and remained independent. But above all, a savvy move for Intuit (INTU), which has neutralized a growing threat to its Quicken Online and absorbed Mint’s 1.4 million registered users and their $47 billion in assets. Seems that “doesn’t-make-me-scoff-out-loud business plan” that Kara Swisher once noted, worked out quite well for Mint.

Below, Swisher’s January 2008 interview with Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer.

UPDATE: Patzer has confirmed the acquisition from the TechCrunch 50 stage. The price is indeed $170 million.

[ See post to watch video ]

Mint Guy Aaron Patzer Speaks!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:03:26 +0000

OK, we’ll admit it–we just like the steady and non-hypey persona of Aaron Patzer, whom BoomTown has officially and forever dubbed “Mint Guy.”

While he is not exactly minty fresh–in fact, the founder and CEO of Mint is much more circumspect and cool than any 26-year-old I have met recently–Patzer does stand out in a sea of over-touting Web 2.0 entrepreneurs as someone who might actually have created a business with some substance to it.

Rather than offering dopey widgets that let you throw food at each other or yet another version of a social network or the umpteenth music download-share-compare whatever, Mint feels different.

The free Web-based service is aimed at a younger demographic interested in finding a way to manage money better, in learning about their spending habits, in being alerted to unusual activity and even in saving some cash by finding better rates on things like bank accounts and credit cards.

It might sound crazy in these frothy Web times, but the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up certainly has the potential to be actually useful and relevant to consumers and has a doesn’t-make-me-scoff-out-loud business plan that focuses on lead generation for sponsors.

Mint now claims 100,000 users since its launch last fall and is expanding its features to allow users to track investments, student loans and mortgages soon too.

Mint has not escaped the bubble, of course, having received about $5 million in funding from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital and a number of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway and former Yahoo exec Geoff Ralston. That’s a lot of money for a company with a lot of possible pitfalls.

While there are a few Web competitors, such as Wesabe, the biggest challenge is that Patzer is taking aim at desktop software packages like Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft’s Money. The pluses of those solutions is that users feel more secure when financial data lives locally than they might loading it up to the Web.

More significantly, giants like Intuit are moving services online too, as with the recent Quicken Online, which makes for a mighty foe to Mint.

Still, Intuit has been woefully slow online and Patzer is obviously nimbler. And he counters that he is using heavy-duty encryption, as well as a number of methods to keep data anonymous, which make the information safe.

Well, we’ll see how it all turns out, as everyone is going to have to battle security concerns and convince people to trust them with important financial information on the Internet. But, it is clear that it is an interesting space to watch.

And, better still, it is–thank you, thank you–not a food fight.

Here is the video I shot with “Mint Guy” Patzer during lunch this past week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Mint was showing off its service a bit:

[ See post to watch video ]

Day 2 at the TechCrunch40 Conference: More Video, More Snacks, Mint Guy

Kara Swisher — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:17:46 +0000

Our John Paczkowski of Digital Daily continued to brave the potential for falling ill from start-up fatigue from his hysterically funny live-blogging of Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, while BoomTown continued to wander the halls in search of snacks and a safe haven from PR minions.

To no avail, although we did have a great debate with Techmeme‘s Gabe Rivera about the ethics and rules of blogging and (sometimes lack thereof). Conclusion: We did not always agree, but Rivera is one smart cookie. (Also, the actual cookies and churros at the conference were mighty tasty.)

In this video, we talk to some folks, including the voluble Calacanis and the guy from Mint (whose expressive eyebrows actually rival those of John Paczkowski, also in the video), the start-up that won the conference’s best-in-show $50,000 grand prize.

Also: BoomTown will soon be trying out a new camera a la that annoying hat-camera guy, so get your Dramamine ready.

[ See post to watch video ]

TGIO: Mint Wins TechCrunch40

John Paczkowski — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 03:05:37 +0000

Of the 40 companies who presented at TechCrunch40 over the past two days, the judges determined Mint to be the best and awarded the online financial-management service the conference’s $50,000 grand prize. Not all that surprising, really. Chatter in the conference lobby had the company pegged as a favorite to win early on and, let’s face it, the competition wasn’t exactly fierce …

TechCrunch40 Day 2, Round 1: Productivity and Web Applications

John Paczkowski — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:55:32 +0000

Today, the second of the two-day TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco (sponsored by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis), began with a panel on productivity and Web apps. (For a rundown of the presentations of all companies involved, check out Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blogger Eric Savitz’s report.)

Here’s an abbreviated summary (some of it gleaned from company Web sites) of the presenters:

Xobni–”inbox” spelled backward–aims to “take email back.” Basically, it’s offering a new way to view email: users get improved organization, faster search and better navigation of their mail. Xobni creates an information profile for each correspondent, providing relevant historical information.
Orgoo. Company bills itself as “your personal communications cockpit,” enabling users to organize in one place their email accounts, IM accounts, video chat, video mail and SMS. Orgoo will be free (launch by end of calendar year), with nothing to download from the Web; it will be downloadable on mobile devices, and can be accessed from any Web browser or mobile phone.
App2you: This custom Web-application creator lets developers create web apps without having to perform database coding or designing. Users simply sketch their pages from scratch or choose a template from app2you’s gallery and then modify it to suit their needs. Once the pages have been outlined, app2you creates a hosted, database-driven Web app using patent-pending technology. App2you intends to generate usage-based revenue from fees for enterprise applications and ad-based revenue from non-enterprise applications.
Mint: Anonymous and secure money-management service. Unifies disparate bank and credit accounts in a single UI. Company claims that Mint does in an hour what Quicken does in 29 hours. Service updates daily with your latest financial info, alerting you to looming overdrafts, etc. Also indexes and categorizes all your transactions. How does it make money? Seems there’s a “save money” tab that identifies banks offering lower interest rates, utilities offering rebates, etc. Presumably, there’s some sort of kickback arrangement here.
Kerpoof: Company hopes to change the way kids use computers. Goal is to be top destination site for kids. An active site as opposed to the more passive ones that exist today. CEO cites popularity of Neopets and Club Penguin. Kerpoof is browser-based, offering kids tools to create pictures, coloring-book pages and movies they can save and share with others. CEO claims movie tool actually teaches kids object-oriented programming. Movies are created by selecting pre-existing clips and audio tracks. Demo of a short film created last week by an 11-year-old girl.
Judges panel:
What was your favorite?

Digital pioneer Esther Dyson likes Mint (interesting, since I believe she’s an investor in Wesabe).

VC guru Guy Kawasaki likes Kerpoof. Also likes Xobni, but says he hopes it didn’t pay for the name because “that’s a dumb-ass name. If I were an investor and heard you paid money for that name I’d shoot you.”

(Dyson and Kawasaki are setting a much more engaging tone today.)

Arrington likes ‘em all. Asks Kerpoof CEO “is object-oriented programming really that easy?”

Kerpoof CEO says yes.

Dyson says no, not according to the true definition.

Kawasaki says company is making a marketing mistake by even using the term.

Dyson asks everyone for a two-word explanation of how they make money. Answers: Lead generation, advertising, then “pleasing the user,” which draws laughter all around.

Someone asks how Kerpoof can compete with successful social-network-based sites like Club Penguin. Kawasaki says that as a father he would much rather have his kids using something like Kerpoof than consorting with 60-year-old pedophiles on kiddie social networks.

Arrington notes that today’s judges panel is much harsher than yesterday’s. Follows up with question: “So which company sucks the most?” (Now that’s a great question. Too bad no one answers.)

Dyson asks how Mint can track transactions from all companies, even small local ones. CEO says company has a massive, constantly updating database of merchants.

(If there’s a TechCrunch40 2, it should have a permanent panel comprised of Kawasaki, Dyson, Arrington, Yossi Vardi and Ryan Block [the last two from yesterday's session]–a far more engaging and entertaining group of folks.)