Mint is Techcrunch40 winner - walks home with $50,000 TechCrunch award

Winner of TechCrunch40 conference is finally announced. It is Mint, which lets you manage your personal finances. As per TechCrunch, it not only manages your finances, but also helps you save money by searching for better deals on bank acounts, credit cards etc. online. It supposedly uses very strong encryption to safeguard your data.

In their own words

Mint allows you to view all of your banking and credit card transactions side-by-side, making identifying all of your transactions much easier and faster than ever before.

How does this help you? We make it easy for you to track down erroneous charges or bank fees, and keep a closer eye on your money.

Mint even lets you label your transactions so you know what bills you need to split with your friends or roommates, know which ones need to be reimbursed for your company, and more.

As per TechCrunch

“Mint is a personal finance application that lets users track and monitor their financials in one place without the need of routine maintenance or accounting knowledge. Their application tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending. Mint’s patent-pending technology automatically categorizes transactions, so users know with precision where they are spending money, what their bank and credit balances are, and how much interest they have earned.

Scoble’s blog readers are really sharp, he says

What’s interesting is that two days ago I asked who would win and within minutes one commenter here said he thought Mint would. More proof that my readers know more than I do?

So Mint’s win was kind of expected. But Dave Winer reports that

Fred Wilson writes to say Mint is not a new idea, that Wesabe, a company he has invested in, has been offering a similar product for over a year. He also sent a pointer to their Security and Privacy FAQ, a very inspiring document.

Mint will be a company to watch for in the consumer productivity space. I expect Mint’s competition to show-up in coming weeks, as this is untapped space or we will discover other players in this space in next weeks Demo conference.

Based on what I have seen so far, Mint should be acquired by one of the personal finance companies very soon, that is if Google doesn’t acquire it first and enters this new personal finance space as well.