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.

Techcrunch40 conference: All TC40 presenting companies and “what they do” is summarized here in one single page. Effort is made to keep it brief and simple, representing facts in layman’s language minus the marketing fluff and all other heavy mambo jambo. Shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to finish the page.

After reading short company reviews here, if you want to know more about a company, you can click on the profile link, which will take you to startup’s profile page at Crunch Base. Also included are the links to the live coverage at Techcrunch in detail towards the end of this post. Enjoy!

List of startups presenting at Techcrunch 40 conference -at a glance:

App2You lets you create do-it-yourself database driven web-based applications using a simple browser based interface. (profile)

8020 Publishing lets online communities actively participate in creating print magazines, crowd sourcing the print magazine creation process, and providing the logistics and editorial oversight. (blog, profile)

Cake Financial (blog, profile)

CastTV is a video search engine which help users finding and cataloging videos from the web. (blog, profile)

Ceedo lets you take your Windows desktop environment with you on mobile devices. Just connect mobile device to a Windows-PC and start working. (blog, profile)

Clickable (blog, profile)

Cognitive Code provides SILVIA, a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent application that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways - uses artificial intelligence. (blog, profile)

Crowd Spirit is all about Electronic Product Crowd sourcing - Define, design, invest, finalize, test, recommend electronic products and share product revenue. (blog, profile)

Cubic Telecom Cubic Telecom is a mobile startup focused on reducing roaming and call charges for overseas calls. (blog, profile)

DocStoc DocStoc is YouTube for documents. Upload, share and rate your documents with the world. (blog, profile)

eXtreme Reality (blog, profile)

Faroo is a Peer-to-Peer distributed search engine with a distributed index providing more democratic user centric ranking while sharing advertising revenue with users. (blog, profile)

Flock is a web browser which makes discovery and sharing of rich media (video, photos, blogs etc) easier while enhancing social networking experience. (blog, profile)

FlowPlay (blog, profile)

GotStatus (blog, profile)

Kerpoof (blog, profile)

LoudTalks is a push to talk free downloadable application, which allows you to talk to your friends or colleagues instantly with a single touch of a button. (blog, profile)

mEgo (blog, profile)

MetaPlace (blog, profile)

Mint (blog, profile)

MusicShake lets your create music without previous knowledge of music or expertise. You can create ringtones and personalized music. (blog, profile)

Orgoo (blog, profile)

Ponoko helps you convert your designs into real products, helps sell these products online or deliver directly to the customers. (blog, profile)

PowerSet (blog, profile)

PubMatic (blog, profile)

Spottt (blog, profile)

Story Blender lets your create video mashups from video clips, images and audio and share with your friends. (blog, profile)

Teach the People Lets you create communities for fun, education & innovation and share knowledge. Allows uploading of audio, video, docs and provides broadcasts, chat discussion boards etc. (blog, profile)

Tripit Tripit is a do-it-yourself online trip planner which lets your share your trip itineraries etc with friends. (blog, profile)

TruTap lets you IM from mobile phone, share pics etc across different Instant Mesaging (IM) networks. Requires app download to your phone. (blog, profile)

Viewdle allows monetization of videos by indexing and making embedded meta data searchable. Its facial-recognition technology enables better cataloging and more relevant search results. (blog, profile)

Wixi is a media sharing desktop which lets you store and share all your video, music and photos in one place. (blog, profile)

WooMe (blog, profile)

Xobni (blog, profile)

Yap lets you use your ordinary mobile phone to access applications by just talking into your phone, by providing voice-to-text translation services. You talk, they type. (blog, profile)

Zivity (blog, profile)

ZocDoc (blog, profile)

Techcrunch 40 Day 1 presentations:

TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search & Discovery

TechCrunch 40 Session 2: Mobile & Communications

TechCrunch 40 Session 3: Community & Collaboration

TechCrunch 40 Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

Techcrunch40 Day 2 presentations:

TechCrunch40 Session 5: Productivity & Web Apps

TechCrunch40 Session 6: Revenue Models & Analytics

TechCrunch40 Session 7: Rich Media & Mash Ups

TechCrunch40 Session 8: Entertainment for All Ages

Note that some links will become functional on Sept 18 once the demos. Please leave a comment if you find any mistakes or inaccuracies.

Techcrunch40 list leaked out before Techcrunch officially announced the list of presenting companies. Paul Boutin discovered the name of the companies on the banners they are hanging in the Palace Hotel where the conference is taking place (Sep 17-18). However list so far has only 39 lucky presenting companies listed

Here is list Paul posted. Most of links are already live.

Clickable
Flock
Ceedo
Cake Financial
DocStoc
CastTV
Cubic Telecom
CrowdSpirit
Cognitive Code
Mint
MusicShake
Ponoko
PowerSet
PubMatic
Teach the People
8020 Publishing
Faroo
GotStatus
FlowPlay
LoudTalks
Kerpoof
MetaPlace
mEgo
Orgoo
StoryBlender
Spottt
TruTap
Tripit
Viewdle
Zivity
Wixi
Xobni
ZocDoc
eXtreme Reality
WC
AppYou
WooMe
Yap

Mike had placed a strict embargo for all presenting startups, I guess to get exclusives. Did they really forgot about the banners or this is planned leak to generate additional buzz? If yes, then Mike’s plan is working.

Update 1: Valleywag is reporting that they are banned from attending Techcrunch40. Scoble says that the best news is flowing fast on Twitter, way faster than Techmeme. I disagree, I have been monitoring techmeme and it is updating regularly with very relevant content.

Update 2: Techcrunch finally posted the official list of Techrunch 40.

Unlike Twitter or Jaiku, Pownce is not a messaging service or a presence-announcer. Pownce focuses on your sharing stuff with your friends. That stuff could be photos, music, messages, links, events, etc. to your friends from your PC/laptop to your friends who are connected to you on Pownce.

Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) started Pownce with three other friends as an offering from their company - Megatechtronium.

I have been checking out Pownce. I am not impressed by the browser interface but the desktop application is much cooler since it is based on Adobe’s AIR. While we are still waiting for the Pownce API to be opened up, why are the feeds missing in a social-networking Web 2.0 application such as this? The ability to import the events into your calendar application is useful. If you shell out US$20/year, you are allowed file-sizes upto 100MB and no advertisements to bother you. Now, I don’t think that has enough pull to get paid subscribers.

Pownce is taking the lessons from Twitter seriously by adding members through invitations only. This will allow them to scale in a measured way. By the way, some folks you may want to befriend on Pownce are here. A nice feature about Pownce is that you can define sets of friends so that you can have your ‘islands’ of ‘friends at office’, ‘neighborhood pals’, ‘college buddies’, etc. No SMS or ‘moblogging’ feature is available, unless you actually access your web on your mobile phone to share stuff.

So, as you can see, Pownce operates in a slightly different space as compared to Twitter or Jaiku. We will examine these related spaces a little more closely in my forthcoming post.

Jaiku is the leader of the Micro-blogging pack: ‘The Presence Messenger’. Jaiku says that its “main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence. Jaiku is a phone book that lets you share your real-time rich presence from the phone”. The shared short messages are called Jaikus.

Though Jaiku was the first to allow threaded comments, there are still some rough edges. As of now, you cannot comment on somebody’s Jaiku through the mobile phone. Jaiku only allows short text messages, limiting the message length to 140 characters; so the funny part is that the comments can be longer than the post.

Of the two Jaiku founders, Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, Jyri worked at Nokia as a Senior Product Manager and brings Sociology background to the team while Petteri focuses on Bizdev and core technology. High profile Jaiku converts from Twitter include celebrities like Leo Laporte.

Jaiku believes in a federated model. For example, I can import my Twitter on Jaiku. Like Facebook - Jaiku and Twitter have both opened up the API, while Pownce is working on announcing their official API.

You can find my previous post on Twitter here. More on micro blogging in my next post.

Further Reading:

Marko Ahtisaari does a great job to convince you why he uses Jaiku
Duncan Riley makes a case for switching from Twitter to Jaiku
Kristen Nicole announces the iPhone version of Jaiku on Mashable
Robert Scoble interviews the Jaiku team in this interesting video
Emily Turrettini’s announces the start of Jaiku service on her blog

Update 1:

Here is another good post comparing mini blogging solutions

Disclaimer: This is a real blog. Not a 140-character SMS that broadcasts your reply to the ultimate question that the rest of humanity is begging you to answer: “What are you doing at this moment?”In other words, I’m not twittering or powncing.

Twitter has received a lot of publicity, which helps me tread a little lightly on the details. The idea was hatched on March 13, 2006. Who’s behind it? Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams (of Blogger fame). It was born in Oct 2006, quoting from Twitter blog:
Twitter was in part created because we thought the increasing amount of folks using the status message field in their IM client to indirectly communicate with friends indicated a potential need or market for a service built around that sort of use case.

Essentially, Twitter users send short messages of upto 140 characters that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones. You can either make it public (seen by all others who have a Twitter account) or to a select group of contacts that you choose. By April 2007, they had around 94k users, their popularity growing faster than the twiddling thumbs, leading naturally to some scaling hiccups. You can put the Twitter widget on your website so that your blog readers could know what you are upto each time you update it. You can integrate with your other IM identities from AIM, Gtalk, LiveJournal, Jabber, SMS Mobile Texting, and the Web Interface. Naturally, with a name like this, it has given rise to its own lexicon -Twettering, Twitterer, Twitterific, Twitterrhea, Twitterphobia and so on ….

Liz Lawley’s interesting post summarizes as: What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The service is free and its business plan, as per current trend, does not exist. Serious believers think that “you build it; they will come and a business model will emerge” works for Twitter. Its star is in ascendency, among its users are personalities such Robert Scoble and even John Edwards. This area of ‘mini-blogging’ has too many wannabes - Dodgeball (acquired by Google), Jaiku, the Status line of Facebook, and Pownce (Kevin Rose’s new startup).

In the coming post, I will be digging deeper and will analyze the social impact of ‘mini personal status broadcasting systems’.

Further Reading:

Jeff Barr is quite enthusiastic about Twitter
Fred Wilson shares a VC perspective, calling Twitter “the Status Broadcasting System of the Internet”
Alex Iskold expounds forth on the Read/WriteWeb blog
A counterpoint from Scott of Jangro
SF Chronicle coverage

When Peter Claydon and Doug Pulley founded picoChip, their grand aim was “to solve the tough problems of next generation wireless with a programmable platform.” Today, they are a force to reckon with in WiMAX.

picoChip is a fabless semiconductor company, focusing on the PHY (Physical Layer). They provide a programmable chip (sort of SSoC - a Software SoC) that can be used for WiMAX, WCDMA, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, 802.11, etc. This places them in a unique position of supplying to competing markets. They started in 2000, with designs on the 3G market, but today, their biggest slice is WiMAX. Considering that they are a ’sub-system design house’ they have teamed up with MAC and Radio providers to provide the complete solution. Their processor is a veritable power-house: for instance, the PC102 has 308 processors, each clocking 160MHz, communicating with an internal bandwidth of 3.3 terabits/s. Since all decisions on code/interconnects are made at compile time, it is a completely deterministic architecture. They provide the software (reference designs) and their toolchain hides the complexity of the underpinnings by providing a very simple interface. They even obviate the need to have an RTOS.

The remarkable flexibility of their processor-array is a high value-proposition (it is the only company that provides just a software upgrade from Fixed WiMAX SS/BS to Mobile WiMAX SS/BS running on the same hardware). Their innovative approach has earned them plenty of plaudits. They provide the shortest time-to-market path, lower BOM and prevent technological obsolesce. Success has been forthcoming: they have partnered with Korea Telecom to implement the WiBro service in Korea.

CETECOM, the WiMAX Certification Lab is using their design for certification testing of equipment from other vendors. For a VC funded company in such an area, revenues will take time to come in, although specific numbers are not available. Since non-technological factors could define the way this future will evolve, there could be pitfalls. Hopefully, with their approach and partnerships, picoChip’s future will be bright enough.

Further Reading:

www.picochip.com
picoChip discusses its role
WirelessDesignOnline article
The Femtocell option on CommsDesign
picoChip secures additional funding

Digislide has cool miniaturized ruggedized device which is 1 inch long and half inch wide, which allows you to project the 11×17 size image in ambient light. In darker environment the same device will allow you to project an image 6 feet diagonal in size – means a projector built in cell phone or next PS2, which is always with you, ready to use, anywhere, anytime. Nothing can stand in the way of an idea whose time has truly come.

The size of the projection device by Digislide allows is to be incorporated in small handheld devices. It supports SVGA, VGA and QVGA resolution. Digislide is already shipping products and has a unique patented technology; they presented at Demo 06 and were widely applauded in addition to winning Top 100 Global Innovator award. Digislide is seeking 9 Million dollars in funding for global expansion, R&D and execution.

I give them thumbs up with coming-up such innovation and can’t wait to lay my hands on the cell phone with Digislide projection embedded.

Further Reading:

Digislide coverage at MusthaveGizmos blog
A good article on Digislide at Presentationtek blog