Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com, a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint’s data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer’s eyes.

(Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ).

At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts.

As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything”, lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents?

Australian start-up VisualPin allows users to “geocode” their videos by adding a Google Map to each different location in a video, with the map appearing to the side of the video. Here’s one of the best examples on the site.

To be honest, I find the map somewhat distracting from watching the video but I think it could be useful when it comes to documenting travel, news or current events. The technology creates a virtual location table of contents, allowing the user to click on a marked location to find the corresponding video content.

Play Hard Sports has spent the last 9 months developing a rich new Flash-based football game that puts generic Flash games to shame, featuring detailed graphics, intricate gameplay, and persistent stats. Today the company announced that it has signed Bill Cowher, a famed NFL coach best known for coaching the Steelers to a Super Bowl win, to provide color commentary for the game. To mark the occasion, the company has also decided to swap names (probably a wise decision) and will henceforth be known as “Quick Hit“.

While the game has yet to launch to the public, it is apparently impressing investors: earlier this month the company closed an $8 million Series B funding round, and has raised $13 million to date. In terms of quality, the game seems comparable to World Golf Tour, another rich Flash game that goes far beyond the basic casual games that get discarded after a few minutes.

Meebo’s Community IM, which effectively offers websites a Facebook Chat-like messaging platform “in a box”, looks like it’s finally ready for the masses. The product was first unveiled last July, and has announced partnerships with over a dozen sites including Sugar Publishing, AddictingGames, and myYearbook. But until now it has been rolled out slowly, and is currently live on only three sites: Flixster, Wadja, and Zorpia. While some of the wait can be attributed to the partner sites themselves, Meebo has also been taking its time to ensure that its service could handle the traffic load.

Now it sounds like Meebo is ready to swing into full gear. Today the product went live on Piczo, a social site with a large following among teenagers. And beginning next month, the company will roll out on 5-6 more partner sites and plans to continue that pace for the following months (Meebo won’t comment on which sites will be launching, but we can expect the largest ones to drag their feet the longest).

Some companies go out with a whisper, others with a bang. In the case of online animation community MyToons, we’d call it the latter.

Not only do we know the startup has laid off its entire staff except for the founders (which equals 20 to 27 people depending on who you ask) because the lead investor refused to pony up more cash, but we’re also hearing stories from multiple sources who claim that the company’s management has all but thrown VC money out the windows, leading to the current unfortunate situation.

Among the allegations put forward by former employees who wish to remain anonymous: grave mismanagement, a complete disinterest from the company’s co-founders to turn MyToons into a revenue-generating business along with more serious accusations that the executives have been misrepresenting the company’s financial and operational status to their investors and moreover wasting VC money on personal purchases like trips to Hawaii, fancy dinners with relatives, home electronics for personal use and so on. We realize this could be simply a case of disgruntled ex-employees looking to discredit their former employers, but we currently consider the tips to be as reliable as they are detailed.

Mobile game ad network Greystripe has hit 140 million ad-supported game downloads thanks to iPhone users. In the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, it supported 30 million downloads. All of these ad-supported and Greystripe says that over 50 percent of ad impressions are from iPhone games. The ads themselves have game-like characteristics designed to increase teh chances of consumers clicking on them and playing with them, hence “advergames.”

Last summer, TechCrunch reported that Greystripe turned its attention to the iPhone, and is subsequently seeing an increase in downloads and ad impressions. In fact, Greystripe’s Top 10 Total Games (by ad impression) are all iPhone games. In December, the company created its own version of Adobe Flash for the iPhone, which Apple currently prohibits on the iPhone, that would allow advertisers to use rich media flash ads. The company is making the iPhone market a “priority for the foreseeable future,” finding that the device is a much more successful ad platform for gaming than Java devices.

Music streaming startup Spotify is getting lots of plaudits from users lately for its ease of use and vast catalogue. But it seems the record labels don’t like it that way. In a blog post the startup outlines how it will be removing a number of songs from its catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for many users. The changes are being made because record labels have slapped restrictions on Spotify’s service.

The issue is to do with the publishing rights associated with compilatoins. A user in one country might be able to listen to a track on one compilation in their country jurisdiction, but to share that track on a playlist with a user in another country could affect the publishing rights. It’s a bizarre situation to think that in 2009, then the out-dated DRM walls are already crumbling, that music streaming remains hobbled in this way. As the Sweden-based startups says: “…our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good”. See after the jump for the post.

FyreTV is a set top box that streams on-demand video (perhaps not the kind of video you’re thinking of) for $9.95 per month. The box itself is free and the monthly fee gets you 100 credits good for between 50 and 100 minutes of video (the kind of video only grown-ups should watch).

For better or for worse, YouTube has just made it easier to add annotations to your videos. Annotations, which were introduced to the site last June, consist of little grey popups that can include standard text boxes or speech bubbles, or offer interactive links to other clips. They’re useful when they’re used sparingly, but can also be more than a little annoying.

To insert the annotations, users previously had to use an editor tucked under the ‘edit video’ menu. Starting this week, you’ll be able to add annotations directly using a targeting crosshair that appears whenever you view a video that you’ve uploaded. Clicking on the video will bring up a menu asking which annotation you’d like to insert, and you can use a sliding bar on the video’s timeline to determine how long each one appears. A pair of arrows appear at the bottom of the video, allowing you to jump between each annotation so you don’t have to manually watch through the video to find them all.

Today, Google and Plaxo released a hybrid protocol that combines OpenID, the open online identity standard, with OAuth, the secure data portability standard. Too often, when a Website wants to import your contacts from another Web service, it asks for your login and pasowrd credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time transfer of data. It is much more secure. And now it works with OpenID.

So far, this is just a test between Plaxo and Google, where a Plaxo member can invite someone via Gmail. Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea argues that this approach is:

Anyone who has turned digital photos into a printed photo book via Apple iPhoto or any of a variety of competitors knows how great they are. They make a perfect gift, if you can afford the $20 – $30 they generally cost to create, plus shipping.

Enter UK-based HotPrints, which I was introduced to at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. The company is using new printing technology from an undisclosed partner to create high quality photo books on the cheap – just $2.99 plus shipping to the U.S. of $0.75. That’s significantly less than any of the competing products.

And they’re focusing on Facebook, which has a rich collection of already-tagged photos just waiting to be turned into printed books. A quiet beta test of the application has shown that users love it, the company says, and once a user tries it once they average more than three purchases for themselves or as gifts.

Here’s what you get: a printed 25cm x 20 cm color photo book with 8 sheets and 16 total printed pages. You can comfortable fit six photos on a page, although some of the example books they’ve given me has as many as eight photos on a page. The paper is thick, high quality glossy stock.

The online advertising business is in for a rough patch, especially for display advertising. The signs are everywhere. Yahoo, the biggest publisher of display ads on the Web, reported a 2 percent decline in display ad revenues in the fourth quarter, and the New York Times is seeing even steeper declines.

There is just way too much advertising inventory out there, and Websites are actually trying to show less ads per page to reduce ad clutter and keep advertising rates from cratering. The chart above from comScore’s 2008 Digital Year in Review shows that the number of display ads served in the U.S. is actually slightly down from a year ago. Even so, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion ads were served to U.S. consumers last year. That comes to 2,000 ads per month per person.

As a consequence of the declining display ad revenues and the over-saturation of ads, there is simply no need for the 300-plus ad networks out there. And what we are seeing now is the stronger ad networks are picking up funding to shore up their positions and the weaker ones are getting bought.

Social networking advertiser SocialMedia raised $6 million from IDG Ventures. Existing investor Charles River Ventures also participated. The company was shopping around for a larger investment of around $20 million with the investment bank Savian, but decided to take a smaller amount. At least, that is the story the company is going with.

The company claims that it had $16 million in revenues last year and says it was profitable for three consecutive months thanks to the launch of a new advertising product called Word of Mouth. These are opt-in display ads that asks people on social networks to answer a question or take a poll. The point of these ads are to find people who have an affinity for a brands and then rebroadcasting that affinity to their friends.

Atlas Venture has closed its eighth fund, which comes in at $283 million. The bad news is Fund VIII is smaller than Fund VII ($385 million) and comes in well below their original target of $400 million. But if there is a silver lining, it is that there are still VC houses out there raising any funds at all in this car crash of an economy. Plus the leaner, meaner fund will necessarily have to look at at early stage startups as a result.

The company is spinning the reduced fund as a positive thing, of course. “The new fund is the right size for our early-stage focus and organisational structure,” said Jean-Francois Formela, partner.

Amongst VCs themselves some will snipe about the “size” of each-other’s fund, but frankly if a startup secures backing, who cares. One of the go-to guy for tech startups in particular will therefore be the same guy as before: Fred Destin, a VC who also doesn’t mind firing off a few opinions on his blog now and again.

Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.

Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up.

While this could have been anything from Kid A, this is actually a version of “Creep” reworked by Microsoft Songsmith and the peppy beats could potentially completely cure the melancholy infused into countless proto-Goths by this moody yet charming band over the years.

The strange thing is this: SongSmith actually brings out some of the original music here but the quality here is nill. It reminds me of chiptunes. I once heard “Closing Time” done on a Gameboy’s audio processor and the song, which is a bit schmaltzy in the first place, sounded like one of the songs the Music Department would would generate for Hate Week in 1984.

“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”

Thus begins this video of a 1981 KRON report predicting the rise of news reporting on the internet.

You need to see this, it’s pure gold.

My favorite quotes:

David Cole (S.F. Examiner): “This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”

KRON reporter: “This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.”

When twitter recently added a “Suggested Friends” feature, I was more than a little disappointed. Unlike Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, no explanation is provided for why these people were suggested.

In an enterprise setting, the most valuable people are the connectors: “The people who know which people know what”, according to Alan Lepofsky.

The larger the organization, the more likely someone else is working on the same problem. And the less likely you’ll find them.

While touring IBM’s Innovation lab at Lotusphere last week, I was surprised to see IBM is also tackling this problem with their “Social Networks & Discovery” project (SaND for short). And it looked FAR better than anything I’ve seen previously.

(Screenshots after the jump.)

Adobe has announced that they’ve recorded 100 million successful installations of Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, at the same time boasting that the newest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) was installed on over half of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.

The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.

Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder.