Mint.com, the financial service we first mentioned at TechCrunch40 in 2007 (wow, that seems like a long time ago), announced that they have launched a new native app specifically for 9 and 10 inch Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich.

This new app, available in the Android Market, will join the previously available versions for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones. Curiously, there is no mobile web version (that I have been able to find).

7 inch tablets should work, but this new app is not specifically optimized for them. No word as of yet, when this new version will be available for the very popular Kindle Fire since there is already a version of Mint in the Amazon app store.

For the unfamiliar, Mint is an app/web system for aggregating and managing all your disparate financial accounts and then graphically expressing that data for easy, “at a glance” understanding of your expenditures.

With the exception of some slight usability tweaks (like reordering some modules) and a few subtle font changes, this latest version offers no new functionality. What it does do, however, is make the service available as a native app for the growing number of Android tablets out there.

“In the next few months, Android tablets are expected to hold more than 40 percent of the market share,” said Aaron Forth, general manager of Intuit Inc.’s (Nasdaq: INTU) Personal Finance Group. “As tablet use rises, more mobile-savvy people will look for ways to manage their lives across multiple devices, so we developed our Android tablet app to bring simple money management tools to their fingertips.”

Making the service available in as many emerging channels as possible is a credible strategy — a wise move for any financial service these days — but beyond those projections, Mint.com has some interesting statistics to back up this approach.

Ken Sun, from Mint’s parent company Intuit, revealed as much to me by noting in a quick Q&A that 40% of Mint’s registrations are completed on mobile devices. Additionally, 30% of Mint’s user base are “mobile only” users, so it makes a lot of sense to distribute the functionality where user activity is increasing.

In any event, the graphics and charts appear to look as nice as they do on other platforms. This is sure to make any XOOM or Galaxy Tab wielding Mint user a happy camper today.

Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, has a new project that he is spending half his time on (he continues to spend the other half as VP of Product Innovation at Intuit, which acquired Mint two years ago for $170 million). His new project is called Swift, and it is his vehicle (if you will) to exlore the feasibility of building a personal maglev vehicle transit system.

“The goal is to see if I can develop a new transportation system to displace cars in most urban and suburban settings,” he told me recently, “with the goal being 5x the speed, and bringing the cost of maglev from today’s costs of $50m / mile down to $4-5m / mile, which would be the same as adding one lane of asphalt/concrete road. Not sure if it will pan out, as I’m deep in the science and simulation phase.”

After a lot of analysis and setting up some simulations, he figures that he can built a system with two-person “pods” hanging underneath maglev rails which will operate at the equivalent of 800 miles-per-gallon, at 3 to 4 times the speed of regular cars. But even that will not be enough to displace cars. He’s concluded that the numbers don’t pan out. And he just shared his findings in an extensive blog post. It has all sorts of details on his concept and how it would work, but here is the conclusion:

While a 3-4x velocity improvement, 800+mpg energy efficiency, and 3-4x reduction in cost over light-rail systems, it’s not enough to displace cars. The future of transportation is still the concrete and asphalt road, for the simple reason that at $17 per tonne of asphalt versus $900 per tonne of steel or $10,000 per tonne of copper, roads are the only thing cheap enough to be ubiquitous in lower density areas. Not even the ultra lightweight track of Swift looks cheap enough to displace roads outside of dense urban areas where, because it uses a much smaller rolling stock (number of vehicles) and can have higher throughput, mass transit is likely a better approach.

If roads are the future, then so is the self-driving car, functioning like an on-demand taxi system, connected into a centralized traffic database to avoid congestion and minimize time, and driven by computers in a platoon formation of 5-10 cars to minimize aerodynamic drag by up to 35%.

It is quite possible the same system-level traffic engineering algorithms developed at Swift can be used in such a self-driving system. That said, Swift PRT as a maglev concept will be abandoned. No track-based system (not maglev, not light-rail or metro systems) can compete with the cost and ubiquity of roads for population densities below 5000 people / km2.

It looks like those self-driving cars Google is developing might not be such a crazy idea after all. I hope Patzer figures it out. These are exactly the kinds of big, world-changing ideas startup founders should be tackling.

Intuit’s “Quicken 2007 for the Mac” users have a problem. The personal financial accounting software is not going to work under Lion, Apple’s new OS 10.7, due to be released as early as Wednesday. Intuit suggests three solutions. But each has its own flaws, especially if you want to track investments, reconcile your financial statements or not have to buy 3 software programs or a PC. There are non-Intuit alternatives out there, each with their own fan base. None of them match Quicken 2007, a far-from-perfect but still very useful, powerful program.

Software is supposed to get better over time, but for Mac home accounting users, that’s not the case. One of the very first killer ‘apps’ for Apple computers was VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program used by some to balance checkbooks, track credit cards and determine net worth. We’ve come a long way since then, but for Mac users looking for a traditional and full featured personal accounting program, there is no easy solution.

Quicken 2005, 2006, and 2007 won’t work in Lion because Apple has dropped support for Rosetta. You can’t blame them. Rosetta was software designed so PowerPC-based programs can run on Intel-based Macs, starting in 2006. Rosetta was just supposed to bridge the gap until developers had time to re-write their software for Intel-based Macs. But, Quicken 2005, 2006, and 2007 weren’t updated and still require Rosetta.

After a gap of 3 years, Intuit came out with an Intel-based program, “Quicken Essentials for Mac.” It’s one of the options Intuit is pushing for users of the older software. There’s even a limited time 50% discount. While this might work for some, “Essentials” is really “Just The Very Basics”. Even Intuit admits on its website, “this option is ideal if you do not track investment transactions and history, use online bill pay or rely on specific reports that might not be present in Quicken Essentials.” Next. TUAW’s site had the best imagery, showing Quicken Essential being flushed down the toilet.

Intuit also suggests users could switch to Quicken Windows. The Windows product has always been a more robust and stable version. But few Mac users are not going to buy a PC just for Quicken. While running a PC virtualization program like Parallels or VMware Fusion on the Mac is possible, it can be a frustrating experience. And you need to buy and troubleshoot three programs: Windows, the virtualization program and Quicken. No thanks. Re-booting your Mac in Windows each time you want to use Quicken is a non-starter as well.

Intuit’s third suggestion is former TechCrunch 50 winner Mint. Intuit purchased Mint in 2009 for $170 million. Before the acquisition, it was growing like gangbusters. Last December, TechCrunch reported on concerns Mint was losing some top executives and users weren’t happy. The company responded saying there was “no glut of departures” and it was working on iPad and mobile apps. There’s still no native iPad app.

From a user perspective, Mint does offer a free and new way to manage your money. According to Mint’s website, over 5 million people use it. But for some users who liked the features of Quicken, it’s not the answer. You can’t import your old Quicken data to Mint. In fact, you can’t enter any transactions in Mint. That’s a feature not a bug.

Instead, you enter your account info and Mint pulls in your transactions automatically. This feature can be a big plus, but there is no ability to reconcile your credit card and bank statements – a pretty basic requirement for many. Because the transaction data is read-only, you can’t make your own adjustments or include a cash account. It’s also works in the cloud. While another great feature for some, others want to keep their financial data offline, despite assurances of privacy and security. (Ok, all your data is online already, but it’s not bundled together behind one login.)

There are several non-Intuit programs trying to take advantage of the situation. One of the most popular options, iBank, proudly advertises it’s “Ready for Lion” and fully compatible with Mac OS 10.7. I found the UI a bit awkward. While it did import my Quicken data files, the investment section is weak and the report customization is poor.

Another frequently mentioned and popular alternative is Moneydance, also “fully compatible” with Lion. It has some good features and does a lot right. But I found the interface very quirky. For example, you can’t add categories on the fly. Reports could not be customized. The budgeting setup was confusing and lacking. Moneydance is written in Java, so it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux. But a Java app might be a turnoff for some.

There are a batch of other basic programs available but they don’t match Quicken 2007′s features either. This list includes Checkbook Pro, iCash, Liquid Ledger, and SEE Finance.

Other options include Quickbooks by Intuit or AccountEdge. But they are designed for business and are missing many personal finance software features like tracking stock market investments.

Of course, Quicken 2007 users don’t have to upgrade to Lion. There is no requirement to upgrade right away. But then you won’t get to take advantage of Lion’s cool features. And sooner or later, you will need to upgrade. Hopefully by then, new developers will emerge or the current offerings will get better.

Update: Intuit’s Small Biz Twitter account has responded to some readers tweeting this post saying “I’m sry we dont have a lion compatible version currently, we’d like 2 B able 2 offer a solution 2 every 1.”

Running in some form of beta since December 2009, the startup, which is funded to the tune of £2m, provides an online service for consumers to manage their finances via a dashboard that aggregates data – balances and transactions – from online bank accounts and credit cards etc. It’s powered by Yodlee, as was Money Dashboard’s, ultimately unsuccessful, competitor Kublax.

Money Dashboard’s features include the ability to track and categorise spending, and set budgets, along with email alerts to warn users if they exceed their set budget or are about go into overdraft. And in future, says the company, it will also be possible to alert users to suspicious transactions on their accounts.

Talking up the market opportunity along the lines of ‘never let a good recession go to waste’, Money Dashboard’s founder and CEO Gavin Littlejohn makes reference to the fragility of the economy and the UK government’s “austerity measures”.

In a canned statement, he says: “Money Dashboard is a product that will take a lot [of] the fear and hassle out of managing on a tighter budget. Since we are independent of banks and building societies, our priority is always the consumer and helping them to make the most of their finances.”

Those big bad banks.

Although it’s true that the User Experience of online banking and other web-based financial products could certainly do with being dragged into the 21st Century.

To date, 10,000 users have taken part in Money Dashboard’s public beta and, interestingly, the service will remain free now that it’s fully open. The revenue model is instead to try to up-sell financial products via its “Ways to Save” pages from which the startup will get a kick back from any sales.

As noted, Money Dashboard has raised £2 million of funding from business angels and from investment firm Par Equity. The company says more funding will be soon “injected” primarily to up its marketing arsenal, which makes sense now that the product has finally fully launched.

But things may not be going gangbusters at the company these days. We’ve learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups.

Granted, it isn’t unusual for personnel to leave after an acquisition. Startups thrive on being nimble, and the umbrella of a large company and a new corporate infrastructure can slow things down. We’ve heard from one insider that Intuit has handled the acquisition quite well in terms of giving the company resources. The issue, it seems, has been in the execution — Mint just hasn’t pushed out many projects in the last year.

The big ones were an Android application, a launch in Canada, and a ‘Goals’ feature that helps you budget your income so that you can save up for that vacation or big-screen TV. Those aren’t bad features, mind you, but they don’t seem too groundbreaking. “Momentum has slowed down,” is how one insider put it.

It seems that some Mint users aren’t pleased with the way things are going, either. As a litmus test Mint polled its Facebook audience in November to ask what they thought of the post-acquisition Mint. Most responses have been negative, with numerous comments complaining of bugs and slow sync times between a user’s financial institutions and their Mint accounts.

Reached for comment, a company spokesperson said that there is “definetly no glut of departures”, explaining that the team has grown much more than it’s shrunk, and attributing any “key shifts” to long-time Mint employees taking advantage of the hot job market. The spokesperson added that Mint has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support international growth, and will be increasing its presence by adding two new countries next year. The company also plans to launch an iPad application and other mobile apps.

Both the web interface and the mobile version, which is available for most mobile phones such as iPhone, Android and Symbian, allow you to input all of your expenses manually and sync them in between. In comparison to other startups in the space, however, Toshl has not yet secured any partnerships with banks.

One of Mint’s keys to success has been compatibility with most American banks. By allowing users to link their debit and credit card accounts to their Mint accounts the hassle of manual input is eliminated and, therefore, enabled the service to scale. As one can imagine, Europe still bears an immensely incoherent financial system, aside from the Euro as a united currency. Thus partnering with banks is an incredibly difficult task, and can only be accomplished country by country. Few banks are pan-European and after the financial turmoil getting access to customer data and bank accounts is understandably difficult.

Toshl is currently self-funded and is a spin-off of a well running Web agency in Slovenia. At Le Web, Toshl’s User Interface Lead Matic Bitenc told me that they are in talks with various Slovenian banks and are preparing their mobile roll out for the remaining platforms.

Its success, however, is highly dependent on whether the company manages to break down walls and partner with banks in multiple European countries.

Marc Hedlund, co-founder and former CEO of personal finance company Wesabe, has penned a refreshingly honest and open take on why he thinks the startup lost to rival Mint.

The latter launched later than Wesabe (and won the top prize at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007) and was later acquired by Intuit for $170 million, while Wesabe had a less stellar exit and hit the deadpool last June.

Hedlund takes the blame, but also counters some of the things that have been cited as reasons for Wesabe’s demise for being myths, such as the fact that Mint was first to market, that the company wasn’t making any money and that it boasted an inferior name and design.

An excerpt:

I am, of course, enormously sad that Wesabe lost and the company closed. I don’t agree with those who say you should learn from your successes and mostly ignore your failures; nor do I agree with those who obsess over failures for years after (as I have done in the past). I’m hoping that by writing this all out I can offload it from my head and hopefully help inform other people who try to start companies in the future.

You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment.

Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.

What we’ve got here, ladies and gentlemen, is a must-read.

Good discussion about the post over at Hacker News.

Like Mint, Offermatic is a front end user interface to Yodlee’s robust financial network. And the service digs through your credit card transactions just like Blippy does (although they aren’t posted for the world to see). And like Groupon, Offermatic is pushing special offers to users.

The result is something unique, though, and some people may love it. Here’s how it works: You register your credit cards with Offermatic via the Yodlee back end (which is secure). Offermatic then downloads your individual credit card purchases and matches offers from advertisers relevant to your purchase history. If you buy something at Home Depot, for example, you may get a $30 off coupon from Lowes. You’ve spent money on textbooks and you get a special offer from Chegg. Etc. All offers will be 40% – 90% off normal retail, says Offermatic.

Offermatic also offers users actual cash just for registering credit cards. Each month that any of your credit cards has at least 20 transactions and $1,000 in total charges, you’ll get $1.25. You can theoretically make up to $15/year on up to each of four credit cards. The company says they’ll pay that out via check or paypal.

The service hasn’t officially launched yet and it isn’t clear how much, if any, outside funding they’ve received. Normally that might give users pause before entering in sensitive financial data on the site. But we’ve seen how eagerly you people jump on new services like Blippy without a care in the world, so do what you will. The fact that Yodlee is running the back end certainly makes us more comfortable about Offermatic, too.

What the deuce? This looks like some sort of Swiffer/robot cyborg that mated with an Apple power supply. Apparently the Mint floor cleaner is available for $249 and is now on pre-order. The sweeper dusts and wet mops floors and you can add Swiffer cloths to it.

It’s much smaller than the Roomba and I’d actually wager it’s a bit more handsome. This is truly an exciting time for the terminally lazy!

Click through for a video of the Mint in action.

via Gizmag

Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus).

The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.

Winners of the raffle do not get to become Best Friends Forever with the founders. But they will get one intense mentoring session each.

We track a lot of acquisitions on CrunchBase.  At the beginning of 2009, acquisitions were at a standstill.  But as the economy begrudgingly roused itself from recession, the deal flow started to pick up in the summer, and then rebounded more in the third quarter.  There are still a couple weeks left in the year, and a lot can still happen, such as Google buying Yelp for more than $500 million.  But with the year wrapping up, we put together an initial list of the top technology acquisitions of 2009.

We’ll update the list if necessary at the end of the year (for instance, we don’t include Yelp in our list because it is not yet final), but it is not likely to change by much.  Out of $64 billion worth of technology M&A Crunchbase tracked in 2009, about $54 billion went to the top 30 deals ((see table below).  These are only technology deals (Web, software, hardware, mobile) and do not include cleantech or biotech (nor do they include other industries Crunchbase tracks as well).

The largest announced deal, Oracle’s $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems, is still awaiting regulatory approval.  But it set the pattern for bottom-fishing during a financially difficult year.  Hewlett-Packard picked up 3Com for $2.7 billion (No. 9) and Intel bought Wind River for $884 million (No. 16), while Microsoft unloaded Razorfish for $530 million (No. 23).

Some of the more significant deals in terms of potential market impact include Amazon’s $1.2 billion shoe-buying spree with Zappos (No. 14), Google’s $750 million acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob (No. 20), and Cisco’s $590 million Pure Digital/Flip Video deal (No. 21). And social gaming saw a lot of activity this year.  Two days after Electronic Arts bought Playfish for $400 million (No. 27), competitor Playdom raised money at a $260 million (pre-money) valuation.

Other notable deals which didn’t make the top 30 include American Express paying $300 million for Revolution Money (which would have put it at No. 35), Intuit’s purchases of Mint (No. 45) and PayCycle (No. 46) for $170 million apiece, Google’s $106 million acquisition of On2 Technologies (No. 57), Facebook’s $47.5 million purchase of FriendFeed (No. 86), MySpace’s $20 million deal for iLike (No. 133), and Apple’s $17 million for LaLa (No. 143).

The top 30 tech M&A deals are below:

So where does this data come from? To your everyday consumer, Mint is great for a lot of things — it can help you manage your budget, find deals on credit cards, and plenty of other other good stuff. But Mint can also look at aggregate spending trends to see how the economy, and even individual retailers are doing. Mint didn’t do much with this merchant data for a long time, but last August it leveraged it to show how grocery stores were weathering the downturn (unsurprisingly, high end stores like Whole Foods took the biggest hit). They generated a report for Black Friday, and have used similar methods for today’s infographic.

Of course, this data has much more lucrative potential uses, and you can be sure that Mint’s new parent company Intuit is exploring them.

The government keeps stats on all of these “marginally attached workers” and people “employed part time for economic reasons” (rather than by choice). If you add all of those people in, the total unemployment rate in the U.S. is 17.2 percent, compared to 12.6 percent a year ago. The only good news is that number is down from 17.5 percent in October.

To explain all of this (and I guess to remind people why it’s important to budget in these trying times), the folks at Mint prepared the video below. Despite its attempt to be lighthearted, it’s probably the most depressing cartoon you’ll see all month.

Sometimes people get creative with their titles - Jason Calacanis was called an Entrepreneur In Action during his stay at Sequoia Capital in 2006-2007, but his job was essentially the same.

Bessemer Venture Partners is expanding the idea further, and are adding what they’re calling a Designer In Residence. Jason Putorti, former lead designer at Mint (now a subsidiary of Intuit), is the guy they hired for the job.

Jason will work with Bessemer’s portfolio companies to help them build “simple, intuitive and engaging web sites,” said Bessemer partner David Cowan.

Some of the Bessemer startups that will now have access to Jason include Yelp, Hunch, Yodle, LinkedIn, Smule and Wix. For some startups, this may be a reason to go with Bessmer in a competitive funding round.

Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.

“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.

It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts).

Quicken Online has roughly 1.5 million registered users, but only about 100,000 are active in any given month. In contrast, Mint has about the same number of registered users (1.7 million), but nearly 700,000 are active every 30 days. “The biggest opportunity for us is to reactivate those users who thought that maybe Quicken Online wasn’t for them,” says Patzer. (Read his account of how he built Mint over the past two years after winning TechCrunch40).

Other than Quicken Online’s users, is there anything that he’d like to keep? Patzer can only think of one feature Quicken Online has that Mint doesn’t and which he wants: the ability to manually enter cash transactions or record checks which have not yet cleared.

The fact that Intuit put him in charge of Quicken’s desktop products as well as its online services says a lot about where it thinks the future of that business is going. The growth is definitely in the online portion of the business. And now Intuit can start cross-selling Mint from its Quicken desktop products, as well as TurboTax. Some consumers, however, will always prefer the perceived security of a desktop app when it comes to their personal finances, which is why Patzer is starting to think about ways to store some information from Mint locally by using something like Google Gears, Adobe Air, or Microsoft Silverlight.

Building hooks into TurboTax will present other opportunities beyond simply signing up new members. When a TurboTax user decides to sign up for an IRA to save on taxes or want to know what to do with their tax return, Mint can present the best rates and offers from competing financial institutions and earn a hefty fee for finding one of them a new customer.

Patzer has other ideas for connecting Mint and TurboTax as well: “What I want to do is to take your stock transactions and everything you’ve tagged in Mint as a medical expense or business expense and push that over to see if you should itemize deductions. If we pull in your 1099s and deductions, we have done half your taxes for you. We could reduce the time it takes you to do your taxes to 20 minutes or less.”

The next step after that would be to get into financial planning for big life goals such as paying down debt, saving for college, buying a house or car, or saving for a home renovation or a big vacation. He wants Mint to be at the center of every major financial decision a person makes.

When he sold to Intuit, he took some flak for not going it alone, but Patzer believes he made the right choice because he can build a bigger business much faster at Intuit. He wants to keep pushing online, as well as mobile, desktop apps, and international (which is hard to do in finance with a 38-person startup). Mint already has a popular iPhone app which has been downloaded more than 350,000 times, and is now working on an Android app.

But the biggest reason Patzer sold is because Intuit will help Mint get to scale faster. Mint’s value is in the personal financial data that it tracks, and that data will be much more valuable with 5 million active users than with under one million. Getting to 5 million and 10 million and beyond is the game. And however popular Mint was among younger, Web-savvy consumers, some people were never going to trust it with their financial lives. About 25 million people a year already trust Intuit with their taxes, half of those online. That’s the most sensitive financial data a person has to give. If you already trust Intuit with your taxes, making the jump to Mint becomes a lot easier for those who might have been hesitating before.

Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley.

Some readers requested to see the presentation deck as well, so here it is. Patzer shows how he raised and spent money, and generated revenue, throughout the lifecycle of Mint, from the very beginning to the $170 million acquisition. He also showed historical slides from early presentations to investors and compares those to the actual results.

I’m also re-embedding the full video below.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6960507&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way.

But not anymore. Last night I saw a 45 minute presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus. The event, which is put on by TheFunded and Vator.tv, put a handful of new startups on stage to show their stuff and compete for a top prize. Between pitches, Patzer took the stage and told the story of Mint, in detail. His company just sold for $170 million to Intuit.

Patzer takes the audience (and now you) from the beginning of Mint, and gives some incredibly useful device. He talks about the early days of Mint, where he lived on $30,000/yr and hired engineers at just a little more salary by offering them significant equity. He also says that, as a rule of thumb, every engineer in a pre-revenue startup adds $500,000 in valuation. Every business guy lowers the valuation by $250,000, he half jokingly quipped. In its earliest days, Mint was burning $150,000/year, he says, for 2 founders and 1 engineer/contractor.

Patzer also spoke about financial modeling, keeping costs low throughout the life cycle of the company, and Mint’s revenue model. He also gives suggested goals and milestones for each successive funding round. One interesting fact – today Mint, which is free, generates $30/year/user from various offers and value added services.

There are lots of additional details, including, for example, various hidden costs in financings (mostly legal).

If you are a startup founder, you’ll want to bookmark this and refer back to it. It’s absolute gold.

Update: The full powerpoint presentation is here.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6960507&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise, the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget.

Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint, with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixster, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year.

The Budget by Mint widget and other YAP apps are already available on MyYahoo, but getting on the main Yahoo homepage potentially puts it on front of 118 million American users a month, versus 25 million for My Yahoo (comScore). The app ties into your Mint account, and shows pie charts and bar graphs of your budget, spending trends, and alerts. You can see the percentage of your budget that is going to taxes, shopping, dining, bills, and other expenses, and even share that with your friends if you are into that sort of personal financial transparency.

Mint launched two years ago at TechCrunch40, and was bought by Intuit for $170 million earlier this month.

Here is what the Budget by Mint widget looks like when it opens up in Yahoo:

Mint, which sold to Intuit earlier this week for $170 million, is Yodlee’s YouTube. That’s because, like YouTube, the core technology behind Mint wasn’t developed in house. It was licensed from Yodlee, who got paid very little for what they provided.

Yodlee, which has raised at least $116 million over its 10-year lifespan (a lot of that was written off in a recapitalization), is the leading provider to account aggregation for banks. If you log into your bank’s website and they offer you the ability to aggregate accounts from other banks and financial institutions, it’s likely Yodlee is powering it.

Very early in Mint’s life they signed a sweet deal with Yodlee to provide all that back end technology. Mint focused on the front end user experience, and did a great job with marketing. People who have knowledge of the deal say total payments from Mint to Yodlee over the last couple of years are around $2 million/year. So Yodlee made $4ish million off of Mint.

And Yodlee never thought to ask for equity in Mint in the early days of the company, so they didn’t make anything from the acquisition.

To make things worse, Mint gave a “substantial” amount of Series A stock to Hite Capital in exchange for the Mint.com domain name. That stock was worth a “couple of million dollars,” says one source, after the acquisition.

The final insult: Yodlee won’t even be able to collect those small fees any longer from Mint. Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.

To be fair to Yodlee, the situation isn’t quite identical to Adobe/YouTube. The specifications, called OFX, for transferring account information between financial institutions was created in the 1990′s and any company is free to build on them. There are a few competitors to Yodlee, but for the most part they dominate the market.

But what Yodlee didn’t forsee is that sometimes having an enterprise approach isn’t the best. Mint focused on design and user experience and sold for $170 million two years after launching. Yodlee, after a ten-year fight and more $116 million or more in venture capital, is still looking for an exit.

And don’t just call this luck. Mint founder Aaron Patzer has nerves of steel and knows how to leverage risk. The rumor is he turned down an offer from Intuit earlier this year for $130 million. I’m not sure many entrepreneurs would have been able to do that. But the bet paid off, and he and his investors made another $40 million.