As for Yammer, I see the benefits of having a closed company only micro-blogging/messaging platform. You could create your own with laconi.ca, too and keep it behind the firewall and pay no one.

One thing is clear, the style of communication is here to stay, and there is room for both open and closed systems. My twitter community and my yammer community has some overlap in people, but not in content. I can speak more openly about what I’m working on when I know only my co-workers will get it.

- Eric Marden

You can always email me direct with more details and I’d be happy to figure out what’s going on. We improve the algorithms from direct user feedback, and user action–whenever you re-categorize something or create rules.

Glad you like the design. I spend *a lot* of time on it.

As for TC, I’m as clueless as you are. I did not see any of the presentations which is what the award is based on. I will say that there’s a difference between a novel / innovative idea, and one that solves a real problem. Obviously there’s a lot of experimenting out there which doesn’t produce a winning business.

Thanks,
Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, mint.com

Thanks a bunch for your counterpoint to my post. It’s much appreciated.

I’d love to know more about what the Mint developers are working on. I use Mint, but again, the transaction matching has caused me troubles.

I think Mint is much more accessible than Yodlee and the auto-budgeting and other components are friendly and helpful.

I stand by my assertion that I think there are startups with a more original, innovative core product offering than Mint OR Yammer. I don’t think you should’ve been excluded from TC40, for example. I just really don’t grasp what criteria Michael & Co. are using to say you or Yammer were “better” than the others.

The new design looks absolutely *fantastic*, by the way. Keep up the good work!

–Chris Cardinal

Mint is the product of quite a lot of work and to say that it’s Yodlee with some gradients on it is really missing quite a bit. We have over 25 employees now working on the product. Yodlee is where we get the data from but there is a lot more to personal finance than just the data. Money management is not a new idea, but doing it right certainly is– and too many Americans, myself included, never bothered before because it was too much work. Mint strives to mostly automate the process.

I’m sorry you haven’t had an ideal experience. All I can say is it works very well for a lot of people, feel free to do a twitter search for mint.com. I also know that it’s only going to get better as a robust investment feature and a new transaction system are just around the corner.

As for this year’s TechCrunch winner and finalists, I have no idea what the criteria is. But I’m confident that every single one of the 50 finalists will be able to raise money after presenting.

Thanks,
Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, mint.com