We had a blast last week talking to startups and others at our FinovateStartup Conference. Anyone who was there, or followed the blog and/or Twitter coverage (see note 1) would have to agree there were dozens of new and interesting ideas presented.
But the bigger question is, what’s next? Will anyone ever use these new technologies, let alone actually pay for them?
Personally, I believe several of the presenting companies are likely to disrupt the status quo. And at least a dozen more have very strong prospects of becoming standalone, profitable businesses.
The rest will need to be deft at creating partnerships with existing brands in order to survive. But overall, the FinovateStartup Class of 2009 was very promising indeed.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are links to the articles from other bloggers and press:
Banktastic: Brad Garland and the Banktastic team have compiled the largest library of FinovateStartup content with 54 posts and videos covering the event and companies (link).
BusinessWeek (MBAblogs): Larry Chiang interviews FinovateStartup participants to create this article, What I learned at Finovate that I Could Not Learn at B-School
Celent blog: Celent’s Jacob Jegher provides a summary of the major themes and concludes there was not enough emphasis on security by the companies (link)
CNET (Webware) posted a series of three articles:
- Josh Lowensohn looks at the use of PIN codes to safeguard banking and commerce (link).
- In another article, Josh looks at the important issue of trust and online personal financial management (link).
- Finally, Rafe Needleman looks at Prosper’s re-launch announced at the conference (link).
Fincision: Wow. Mike Linskey gets double-gold-star, not only does he live-blog every demo, he manages to upload a picture of most. Amazing stamina! (link)
Iconoculture: Hans Eisenbeis explores the startups at Finovate in depth in a three-part series (part #1, part #2, part #3).
Investment News: Davis D. Janowski writes about the launch of SimpliFi and Mint’s new financial fitness wizard (link).
Javelin Strategy blog: Javelin’s Mark Schwanhausser is looking for the perfect PFM and is left wanting (link)
Lazy Man and Money: Not at all living up to his pen name, Lazy Man manages to capture the whole show in a series of five blog entries (post #1, post #2, post #3, post #4, post #5)
MobileSlate: Blogger Eric Chan wished for more mobile companies, and concluded, “(Mobile) was definitely on the minds of all the people that I spoke to.” (link)
Payments Views: Glenbrook’s Allen Weinberg managed to live-blog the entire day with a paragraph on every demo. Winner of the ironman trophy (link).
PC World: Yardena Arar looked at ten startups: Syphr, LowerMyAssessement, Lending Club, Mint, ZimpleMoney, DebtGoal, Credit Karma, Mint, Syhpr, and SimpliFi (link)
Prosper Lending Review: Jessica Ward posted a dozen pre- and post-conference reviews of participating startups (link).
San Francisco Chronicle: Tom Agate primarily discusses Prosper’s reopening at the show (link)
The Bankwatch: Colin Henderson writes about the demos from Lending Club, Tempo Payments and Wesabe (link)
Wall Street Journal (Wallet): Mary Pilon handicaps the field in her Wallet blog (link).
Wall Street Journal (VentureWire): Tomio Geron writes about bringing fun into personal finance tasks and looks at the new offerings from iThryv, Mint and Cooler Inc. (link)
And for those elsewhere in the world:
Note:
1. See our Twitter updates consolidated into one post here. For everyone’s tagged tweets, reference these search results.