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Aaron Forth, VP of product for personal finance and budgeting service at Mint. com, talked at SXSW this week about the challenges the company faced when going mobile. As a service whose business model depends on people visiting the Mint.com website, the decision to launch a mobile application was not one the company took lightly, Forth said.

But Mint did decide go mobile, launching first on iPhone, then on Android, after studying the actions of its mobile user base. And now, Mint is planning to launch a brand-new iPad application in just a few months - a prospect that has the company again rethinking its product for the tablet's multitouch interface.

Personal finance site and mobile app Mint updated its iPhone app today and, among the update details, noted that it is dropping support for iOS 3. That means that all those iPhone 3G models, which reportedly run like dinosaurs on iOS 4 and higher, are left in the dark.

What do the numbers say about this update? Is it a bold move to leave behind iOS 3, a blunder, or is it simply time?

I never know what to think when I see a rating next to a business on something like Yelp or Google that ranks a business as "$" or "$$" - how much is "$$" exactly and do I want to spend it? Well now, if you know you have exactly $12 on hand and you're looking for dinner, you can look at Mint Data and find out exactly what the average bill at that new restaurant might be.

Mint Data launched today and is the product of Mint.com, the personal-finance management site. Mint Data aggregates anonymous spending data from Mint's more than 4 million users "to deliver an unprecedented real-time economic index".

Failure. All startups fear it. Many, at one point or another, encounter it. There's no denying that failure is a big part of startup culture. Some of the best and brightest preach the "fail fast" methodology, wherein quickly launching and fixing small failures can help avoid "the big one."

Whether you subscribe to this practice or not, the reality is that startups fail all the time, and luckily many entrepreneurs share their experiences "post-mortem" with the community. We've covered a handful of these posts from startups, but now ChubbyBrain has put together a hefty collection of these essays for your education.

There is a lot of competition out there in startup land, and often times similar companies launch around the same time and are pitted against one another in head-to-head competition. This was the case in 2007 when personal finance startup Mint launched less than a year after competitor Wesabe. Over time, it would be Mint that would win over the hearts and minds of the Web, leading to a hefty acquisition by Intuit, and the shuttering of Wesabe. So what was it that helped Mint emerge victorious?

Mint.com, the personal finance management system, already includes bank accounts, credit cards, student loans, car loans and more when providing you with a picture of your financial standing and today it will add one more to the list - your home valuation.

Mint has partnered up with Zillow to help determine home value and include this as part of the broader personal finance landscape.

Mint, the popular personal finance service that aggregates data from all your online banking and investment accounts, just announced the launch of its Android app. The application offers roughly the same features as the company's popular iPhone app, but it also features a number of Android-specific features, including integrated search, a Mint.com widget and support for Android notifications. The new app is compatible with phones running versions 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 of the Android OS.

If you've been following our Weekend Reading series on Fridays for the last few weeks, you've noticed that we've been discussing the importance of personal branding for entrepreneurs. But branding is not only an important facet for individuals; for startups, branding is an essential step toward building a successful business. Mint founder Aaron Patzer, who speaks Tuesday at the Future of Web Apps Conference in Miami, Florida, recently discussed with CNET's Caroline McCarthy how he believes Mint's branding helped it become a breakout success.

If you asked startup founders whether they would rather give away 5% equity in the company or one of their toes, many would choose the toe. CEOs like Zynga's Mark Pincus have always argued for startup founders to "own their destiny" and maintain control and ownership of their company. That's why it was surprising to read VC Deal Lawyer Chris McDemus' recent article entitled If You Provide a Strategic Technology or Outsourced Service, Consider Taking Some Equity in Your Fee Structure.

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. Today we'll take a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2) Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3) Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4) ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

That segmentation makes sense to us, to let's look now at how the online finance market is shaping up.